Music Blog

Interview: Findlay Brown - The Yorkshire Lad in New York

Zaph Mann on April 30, 2010 at 11:29 PM, last updated March 10, 2011 at 01:20 PM

I had no inkling that Findlay Brown was a fellow Brit before going to cover his opener for Shelby Lynne at the Doug Fir in Portland. I often, deliberately, do my research after the fact, so as not to be swayed by hype or criticism.

Brown, now married and relocated to Brooklyn, has morphed into an outstanding talent mimicking sixties’ song structures, vocal style and Phil Spector type production. It’s an unlikely project, especially for a Yorkshireman, but it’s so well done that the illusion of a time-warp succeeds. His new album Love Will Find You sounds like a great remaster of some lost 1960’s act, and live he’s even more compelling (see for yourself as in this performance on Letterman).

For this tour, Brown is solo acoustic, and again easily, comfortably and convincingly carries all his self-written material. That’s a big plus too, he doesn’t fall back on the familiar, easy cover songs that send so many artists careering down the karaoke slope.

But how does this come to be? How does a person transform themselves from the very rural Yorkshire lad, to the trendy London ‘New Folk’ scene of ’06-’08 and then into this most American of personas. Marie, his truly charming spouse, told me “oh, he’s just crazy about all forms of music, one month it’s this, the next another...” but Findlay Brown sees this incarnation as the real him. We spoke for a quite a while after the show, the highlights of our friendly little chat are below. What came across - apart from the PR story-line - was a series of images, of an uncle who sang in the pub, of Brown the baby outside on a windy day in a clothes basket, of a smiling man who can’t quite believe he got his woman back and that it’s all happening the way he pictured it.

The ‘New Folk’ Fluke and The Love Story

Findlay Brown first came to prominence in the British scene playing ‘new folk’ in the hot joints of London with the likes Johnny Flynn a few years back and was lambasted along with Jose Gonzales as a ‘sell-out’ when a song from his first album Separated By The Sea was used in a credit card advertisement. Brown maintains that Separated By The Sea was a one-off that he made by chance: “I was lucky to arrive in that scene just at the right time. I had a bunch of what were essentially love-letters that I framed into that style and people liked it. I liked aspects of it too, I was heavily influenced by the finger-picking technique of Jackson C Frank, but what I’m doing now is what I’m really about.

Those letters were directed to Marie, who had returned, disillusioned to her native Denmark. They are now married and Marie is with Brown in full support of the tour.

Singing at the bar & ‘unplugged’ serenades.

While Brown was busy reiterating much of the press copy about being inspired almost entirely by 60’s artists: The Beatles, Roy Orbison, Scott Walker etc., he also mentioned British crooner Matt Munro and that immediately prompted a burst of song from him at the bar. It was a heartening experience, apparently unaffected, that led us to swap stories about our experiences of people singing in bars-- my Father did so just about every day, for Brown it was his uncle (his Father passed before he was a toddler).

He then shared a story of how he would often go unplugged and sing ‘off-mic’ whenever he could, sometimes approaching and serenading a noisy group in a room to get them listening. [Interesting given that Brown is being labeled as a ‘crooner,' crooning being a technique of projecting vocals softly that was rare until enabled and transformed by the microphone.]

A different kind of time-machine

Brown eulogized about Fleet Foxes for a while, I commented that their album drifted a tad for my tastes, but he wasn’t having it: “it takes you somewhere else, that’s what I’m trying for, music that’s like a time machine. I don’t mean taking you back to the 60’s or anything, I mean to a different place, to times when the mood was different: Say to a soldier in the civil war or to someone in a situation today, it could be anytime, but I want that sweeping cinematic feeling... to emphasize a romantic quality in music, not just in terms of love songs - more in the sense of where it puts you. Like old cinema, it’s optimistic but melancholy and sad too, but still optimistic, you feel better, you know what I mean?

So you want people to be moved somewhere by your songs?

Yes, “moved somewhere,” that’s what I love.

On James Brown (no relation)

“Now if we’re talking about James Brown, that’s something else; we’re talking soul, alcohol, life! That guttural sound, just turn it on, turn it up...” Findlay Brown waxed lyrically and so quickly about James Brown that I couldn’t keep up. “...without James Brown, there’s no dance... without James Brown, there’s no techno, no electronica.” Interesting thought, that.

Humble beginnings near York

Brown is forthcoming about his Yorkshire background: brought up in a very modest working-class council house with the toilet outside (even in the 70’s) in a small village near York, England. But he was positive about it, “In fact it was really nice, a solid red-brick house (semi-detached) out in the country, with a big garden.”

When I told him I was about to ask a tangental question he intercepted: “Like what’s my favourite dog? - A Jack Russell”. I asked if he was making a caricature. “No, really it is.” He insisted.
My question was, in fact: “How many swans would he recommend, per bathtub?” After a glance at Marie he went with one, then warmed to a theme, “One’s enough to get the Matey bubbling! Flapping it’s wings about and all that.” (Matey is, or was, a bubble bath soap liquid).

More interestingly, when I asked about his first memories of washing hanging on a line, he described an aversion to scrapings that set one’s teeth on edge and said he remembered laying in the washing basket, hearing the wooden clothes pegs rubbing against the sheets.
“It was always windy”.
It’s an unlikely memory, but single mothers would indeed lay their children in washing baskets while taking washing in from the line, or just leave them in a basket for a while out in the sun, so it’s quite plausible.
More pointedly, the story seemed indicative of the rich textural background Brown can draw from to write new songs that take people to those places he wants you to go. To be ‘moved somewhere,' where things feel a little bit different.

Love Will Find You is released on Verve Forecast in the USA.