Gig - Arthur Brown

Arthur Brown will for ever be associated with his one hit single, ‘Fire’, which was written in 1967, released in 1968, and made number 1 in the UK, and number 2 in the US Billboard charts. It’s very much a song of its time, a psychedelic anthem, dominated by the manic sound of Vincent Price’s Hammond organ and Brown’s demented voice. The song starts off with the unforgettable growled legend ‘I am the god of hellfire and Damnation, and I bring you… fire!’
“‘Fire’ was part of what might now be termed a ‘mini opera’,” says Arthur, sitting across from me in the Casbah café at the Bottleneck, a stone’s throw from the Con Club, where he’s playing a gig this Friday. “We wrote a number of songs in which a confused person doing an inner journey meets various divine entities, of which one is the God of Hellfire.” Arthur is quietly spoken, even mild-mannered, a million miles from the manic face-painted figure who shocked millions of Top of the Pops viewers, and spent three weeks in a Sicilian prison for insisting on performing naked.
“I was viewed as the underground’s clown at the time, because we injected humour into our performances. Pete Townshend produced the album, and released the single when we were on tour [Carl Palmer, of Emerson, Lake and Palmer fame, was on drums for the tour]. Suddenly everybody was equating me with Satan.” Arthur and his band became the focus for the conservative right’s outrage at the lifestyle and philosophy of the burgeoning hippy movement. “The News of the World ran an outraged piece after sending a reporter to one of our gigs, in which some of the audience were dancing naked,” he says. “They started calling me ‘the king of the hippies’, though I never professed to being a hippy.”