Norwich Evening News 15th July 2005



'King Monkey' Ian Brown swings to forest


Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s the Stone Roses were one of the coolest bands in Britain - notching up a string of guitar pop hits such as Fool's Gold, Elephant Stone and One Love.

Their debut album The Stone Roses established them as heroes of a generation, but they then took five long years to come up with the follow-up album and cracks within the band had started to show.

An infamously bad performance at the Reading festival later and in 1996 it was all over for the Roses.

With John Squires widely perceived as the musical brains behind the band, few expected Ian Brown, former singer with the group to launch a successful solo career.

But he has proved the doubters wrong, learning to play various instruments and capturing the spirit, if not the sound, of his former band.

His first single "My Star" debuted at UK number 5 in January 1998, and Unfinished Monkey Business entered the UK album chart at number 4 that February.

Brown's resurrection suffered a setback when he was charged with a public order offence at Manchester airport, following an air rage incident on a flight from Paris.

With a court case hanging over him, Brown released the follow-up singles "Corpses" and "Can't See Me". He was then sent down for four months after his conviction. But back he came, with the acclaimed albums Golden Greats, Music Of The Spheres and last year's Solarized.

In 2004, Brown filmed a brief cameo in Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History Of Time in The Leaky Cauldron at the start of the movie).

In July, shortly before the release of Solarized, Brown surprised an audience at an outdoor show in Claremont, Esher, by playing almost an hour's worth of Stone Roses material - the first time the singer had played any of his former band's songs in entirety since per-forming an acoustic version of "Sally Cinnamon" in Japan in 1997.

With a greatest hits album due for release soon, expect a mix of solo songs and a few Stone Roses classics at his Thetford Forest gig.



Ian Brown, Thetford Forest, Saturday, July 16, 6pm, £22 call the box office on (01842) 814612


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