Photo: Tom Gilhespy
There’s one big question: who the hell is going to turn up? It’s not that Ian Brown is completely unknown in Australia – though his solo career hasn’t taken off in the Antipodes, you can find his albums, if you know where to look and have the patience – nor that The Gov is a huge venue. It’s just that Brown’s profile, such as it is, has been getting steadily lower ever since the glory days of The Stone Roses. And because it’s Festival season, Adelaide is frantic. If there’s an empty building or room anywhere in the city, there are probably three competing all-juggling avant garde comedy dance troupes trying to convert it into a Fringe venue – pause for breath – so they can perform a light-hearted deconstruction of the complete works of the Marquis de Sade while wearing nothing but home-made lampshades.
The answer comes outside the venue. It’s disguised as another question, and delivered in a cockney accent. “Anyone need tickets?” Of course! Suddenly it all clicks into place. There’s a bloke in a Celtic shirt in the queue, and there’s a Geordie geezer just behind him. The place is crawling with tourists and ex-pats.
The atmosphere inside – once the support band finishes, at any rate – is somewhere on the far side of scarcely credible and rapidly going ballistic to the nth. Yet another question is heavy on the air: “Can you believe it?” And no one can. The Aussies can’t believe that there’s this much fuss about an act they’re only mildly curious about, and the Brits can’t believe that they’re seeing Ian Brown in the back room of a pub. The girl from Shropshire puts it into context: “Last time I saw Ian Brown, it was in a venue that held 4,000.” They might have paid in full, but you’d think all the Brits have woken up and gone to A-list heaven, where you get invited to impossibly cool gigs that no one else gets to hear about until they’re in the music press, days or weeks later.
Bass player Tim Hutton appears with a trumpet, and plays some of the incidental music from The Godfather; once the band have assembled they launch straight into ‘I Wanna Be Adored’. At which point, of course, the atmosphere goes intercontinental ballistic to the nth squared and then some. People are excited. Really excited. So long as they’re British, that is. The Aussies are still a bit relaxed about it all, though the mood is fairly infectious.
Given the atmosphere, the gig doesn’t need to be much good at all. But it is. Brown’s singing is pretty much as every other report suggests – roll on the day when someone works out how to fit his microphone with an AutoTune plug-in – but as a frontman he takes some beating. He has charisma down pat, and he’s delighted to receive all the energy that the audience are throwing towards him. He channels the excitement perfectly, and does it without any of that namby pamby hand wringing that some artists affect. He’s forgiving, too. A particularly enthusiastic young Brit undoes Brown’s shoelaces (accidentally, it seems, while she’s worshipping at his feet). When she spends the next few songs fretting about her misbehaviour, he ends up giving her what’s left of his beer to cheer her up again. Grin, disappearing cat from a small county not too far from Manchester, do the rest yourself.
Brown’s solo material proves to be surprisingly good. It doesn’t really approach the lofty heights that his previous mob scaled, but it’s certainly good enough to fill out the hour-long stretch between Stone Roses songs. There are some genuine highlights, too: the melancholy 'Sweet Fantastic', from Solarized, and the more recent 'Sister Rose'. Sadly, though, he hasn’t brought Paul Cook and Steve Jones along to play it with him.
Things have calmed down just a little during the course of the evening, but the first two numbers of the encore, ‘Waterfall’ and ‘Made Of Stone’, soon bring the excitement back. The final number, ‘FEAR’, is something of a slow burn, and though Brown’s voice is ragged by now, the song itself is another highlight and easily good enough to close the set without dampening the mood.
All that’s needed to end the evening is a terrace-style sing-along from the Brits, who oblige. The Aussies might be a little bemused by that and the rest of the night’s events, but everyone goes home happy. You’ve probably received a text to that effect already.
