After a summer of international festival appearances, Ian Brown has announced a one off show at Nottingham Rock City as part of the venue’s 30th Anniversary celebrations. Ian Brown will be joined by guests Detroit Social Club on Thursday 16th December.
Ian Brown’s career is the story of a generation - from the initial teenage thrill of punk, the mish-mash of mid-Eighties culture, mods, scooter boys, skins and punks, Creation Records, paisley shirt psychedelia. Drifting in and out of bands, cheap drugs, wild nights, pretty girls, great records, and then finally a band that everyone would soon call their own and band that still means so much to so many people.
Moulded by punk, he’s carved his own swaggering path. A uniquely English presence existing on his own terms, a northern folk hero and national icon. He has created a series of great records in an idiosyncratic and ground breaking solo career, one which has made it easy to avoid the temptation and constant requests for the reformation of his legendary, generation-changing former band the Stone Roses.
The Roses story is part of legend now, but when the band fell apart Ian dropped out of sight from the “filthy business” and tended his garden, getting all biblical by returning to the simple life. Left with just a small terraced house from one of the great stories of the period - from a band that could have been as big as the Beatles - most ‘experts’ reckoned that it was all over for the singer. But they were forgetting that for a big chunk of a generation he was an iconic brooding presence with the generational aura of a Strummer or a Lydon, whose natural charisma was already being tapped into by Liam Gallagher and a whole host of new generation who were copping the walk, the style and the attitude of the loose limbed frontman
His latest album My Way released last year is his most autobiographical. The songs are informed by a turbulent few decades at the front line of British pop culture, and by one of the most controversial and wilful musical careers in history, swinging from the heights of inspiring a generation in 1989 to a thrilling solo comeback, equal parts controversy and jubilation.
And Brown just keeps coming, powered by that innate self-belief that fuelled a city and fires up fans, turning every gig into a celebration. The live atmosphere is unlike any other gig you will see in the UK. To see Ian Brown live:
Thursday 16th December Nottingham Rock City
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