Joe Brown: “It’s a very forgiving instrument, the Ukulele.”
Joe Brown was one of the UK’s original rock and roll stars, alongside such early icons as Cliff Richard, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Johnny Gentle, Vince Eager, Dickie Pride and Adam Faith. In an amusing and touching interview on Neil McCormick’s Needle Time on Vintage TV, Brown tells the story of how, unlike his contemporaries, he kept his own rather ordinary name.
As a top young session guitarist in the 1950s, he was spotted whilst backing singers auditioning for TV Producer Jack Good. According to Brown, all the vocalists were covering Hound Dog but Good decided “We’ve got three Elvis Presleys already. We’ve got Marty Wilde, Cliff and Billy Fury, we don’t want any Elvis Presleys anymore.” He preferred the hyperactive guitarist and made him the star of a new show, Boy Meets Girl. Impresario Larry Parnes added him to his stable of artists telling him “If you are going to be in showbusiness, you can’t walk around with a name like Joe Brown.” To which Brown claims to have replied, “Well, why not? Thousands of other people do.”
"He had no sense of humour, Larry,” recalls Brown. Because he was quite a nervous character, Parnes decided to rename him Elmer Twitch. “He must have seen the disappointment in my face, cause he said ‘course, you’ll have your own group. We’ll call them The Fidgets.” Perhaps mercifully for rock history, Brown resolutely refused, and the world never got to see Elmer Twitch & The Fidgets.
At 72 years old, Brown still performs around 100 concerts a year. He is currently on a forty date UK tour that runs until December. On October 21st Universal release an expanded Deluxe edition of Brown’s The Ukulele Album, featuring his versions of old pre-war standards alongside rock songs like Ace Of Spades and Pinball Wizard arranged for four strings. “It’s a wonderful instrument and very forgiving,” says Brown. “You can pick a ukulele up and anybody can learn to play a couple of tunes in a day or even a few hours. And if you want to get good at it, there’s no end to what you can do on a ukulele.”
Brown’s enthusiasm for the small, four stringed instrument was shared by his old friend George Harrison. They first met when The Beatles supported Brown on tour in 1962. The Fab Four even recorded Brown’s hit A Picture Of You during BBC sessions. Later, Brown and Harrison became neighbours in Henley-on-Thames, where Brown reports there would be regular jamming sessions with such fellow musicians as Alvin Lee and Dave Edmunds. “He loved music, not just rock and roll,” recalls Brown of Harrison. “He’d go crackers, he’d phone me up and say ‘I’ve got this great record!’ and it would be Hoagy Charmichael and all this Hawaiian stuff he used to like. George was not a musical snob. Music was music, and if it came from the heart, it was good.” In 2002, Brown closed the George Harrison tribute concert at the Albert Hall with a beautiful ukulele rendition of I’ll See You In My Dreams.
He occasionally sits in on performances by Ukulele Orchestras formed by his daughter, Sam Brown, a pop star in her own right in the 80s and 90s and a top session singer until her career was cut short by illness. “A very sad thing with Sam,” reports Brown. “About six years ago she had an operation on her throat and lost her voice. She was touring with Pink Floyd and did all George Harrison’s vocal stuff. Sam was a great performer, it’s a real tragedy, but she’s still involving herself in music cause she’s got these ukulele clubs.” Brown says it’s a joy to play with enthusiastic amateurs. “You can have sixty people all strumming away on ukes, all playing the wrong chords, all different ages, colours, creeds, old ladies, old men, little kids. The fact that they’re all amateurs, its quite amazing the feel that comes off these people. You can hear the bum notes but it doesn’t matter, its music and it comes from the heart.”
This article was first published in The Daily Telegraph and is reproduced with their permission.
