Select February 1998 Issue



Ian Brown
Unfinished Monkey Business review



Polydor


The stories surrounding Ian Brown's recent history are already legion. He followed his 1996 Reading debacle with "40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness". He stuffed £100,000 of The Stone Roses' Geffen advance into a holdall and wandered around Manchester giving it all to tramps. However, one legend that seems unlikely to develop is that this album took five years to record. At time comically primitive, Brown's solo debut is, in many ways, the most astonishing album to have appeared on a major label in years.

It starts well. 'Intro: Under The Paving Stones' is a deranged collage of church bells, drums and Ian's eldest son reciting the title. It's followed by the 'My Star' single. With its coherent lyrical theme (the imminent exploitation of space; "Astronaunts/The new conquistadors") and captivating feel - midway between The Beatles' 'Dear Prudence' and the glorious, glowering self-absorption of the Roses' 'I Wanna Be Adored' - it's a quietly victorious return.

However, it's with the following 'Can't See Me' that the album's unhinged character begins to become clear. The tune is an old Roses piece that John Squire never wanted to record. And here, with drums played by Reni and a bassline written by Mani, it emerges as a perfectly fine, loping Roses-flavoured groove. It also sounds deeply demo-esque, a tendency that becomes increasingly untenable as the album progresses.

Lo-fi, minimal production aesthetics may be the current flavour du jour, but, even allowing for this, there's no hiding the fact that much of 'Unfinished Monkey Business' is insanely unrealised rather than craftily understated. 'Ice Cold Cube' is hobbled by a perfunctory drum machine. 'Lions' is beyond belief - seven minutes of Denise Johnson gamely trying to soul it up over seemingly random drum machine spasms.

Yet even among the madness there are hints of greatness. 'Corpses In Their Mouth' floats appealingly between the Roses and the ersatz Latin spy-theme moods of Space. And 'What Happened To Ya' parts one and two both work well - first as sparse acoustic take, then as extended blues-funk groove. Even 'Nah Nah' (with a chorus seemingly derived from an Israeli Eurovision entrant) is daftly insidious enough to make it a potential single. But the closing title track is simply incredible - the sound of John Shuttleworth listlessly jamming while his home-entertainment system lurches from bossa nova to swing.

For all its evident potential 'Unfinished Monkey Business' is a failure. But it's an eccentric, even heroic failure - and one that suggests that, even now, after Reading, after this there's still life in Ian Brown. As utterly derranged as 'Unfinished Monkey Business' is, time may well show it to be preferable to the pedestrian trad rock produced by his key former associate. Even when lost, it seems Brown remains closer to the quixotic, madly defiant spirit of The Roses.

2 (out of 5)
Roy Wilkinson





Q&A

"IT'S ME LEARNING TO PLAY MUSIC"
Ian Brown on the simple origins of his solo debut.

The album track 'Can't See Me' dates back to The Stone Roses. Of the others, which is the oldest song?
"'Lions' was the first new song I wrote. I get up every day, have my breakfast, go for a walk and then just work in my studio, learning to play an instrument, whether it's the bass guitar or the harmonica. This album is about me learning to play music. That's why I wanted to get it out - it's not perfect, but I like the way it is. I'm already working on the next one."

What exactly is 'Lions' about?
"It goes back to this programme they used to have on TV where each week you'd get a religious leader in to defend his beliefs. I remember the time they had a Rastafarian leader in. He ended up just standing there, banging a stick and shouting, 'There are no lions in England...' What the song is saying is that the lions in Trafalgar Square, the lions on the football shirts - they all come from the British Empire when those images were robbed from Africa, along with everything else."

Wasn't 'Ice Cold Cube' (one of the tracks on the album), also a nickname for John Squire?
"Yeah, Reni used to call him that sometimes. But the song's not really about that. The one song that's really about The Roses is 'What Happened To Ya'. It's just about how someone goes weird on you. I was in The Stone Roses for however many years and then got one five-minute phone call telling me the guitarist was leaving."

The album's quite rudimentart in terms of production...
"Yeah, it is. A song like 'Sunshine' is very lo-fi, but it maked sense to me. I recorded the album and took it to two record companies - Island and Polydor. Polydor were the one record company who didn't want to change the record, so I went with them."


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