For a handful of evenings in my 20s I had the very great privilege of being Billy Brown. Back in the late 1970s, I worked for a time as a stand-in roadie for the Freshmen, who had for more than a decade been Ireland's most "progressive" (we used the word advisedly then) showband, and were now in something of a second flowering on the ballroom circuit. For time to time, the band's pianist, saxophonist and lead singer would go AWOL for the evening, and I would be required to tog out to make up the numbers on stage. (At that time, if a band's numbers fell below five, it was categorised as a "group" and paid accordingly.)
The fact that I couldn't play the piano was not regarded as a major impediment. Tiger Taylor would crank up his guitar, I would sign the odd doo-wop and bang the piano unplugged for the evening. It was, perhaps, a sign that the time had come to draw a veil over the showband era that not only was nobody the wiser, but the band even got the odd extra booking on the promise that this strange, energetic piano player might double up with Billy for the return.
In fairness, there was no attempt to defraud the public by passing me off as Billy Brown. I was, in fact, a Turkish refugee called Eetchymar who had been engaged to fill in for the maestro, who was indisposed. Unfortunately, the audience would be informed, I did not speak a word of English. This latter strategem was a precaution to prevent suspicious promoters from inquiring too deeply into my musical technique. But in truth, Billy Brown, who died last week, at 56, was not a man whose shoes could be filled by mere mortals. I have met three people in my life whom I would describe with the word "genius", and Bill was one of them. He was not "just" a most brilliant musician and singer, a gifted, though extremely lazy, songwriter and composer - he was also an accomplished landscape and wildlife painter and a fine writer to boot.
I found his passing all the more sad because of the almost total absence of mention in the national media. There was a time, less than 30 years ago, when Billy Brown was as well-known throughout Ireland as, say, Christy Moore is today. Anyone who ever stood in an Irish dancehall in the 1960s or 1970s will know who Billy Brown was and have a sense that something great is lost but unacknowledged this week.
It is a strange fact that the ballrooms have a place in popular cultural memory not unlike that of the Civil War in that of our political life. Though patently central to our cultural development, they have become unmentionable by virtue of being incompatible with our modern aspirations. This, of course, is not merely unpardonable snobbery, it also self-deceiving and antipathetic to accurate cultural understanding. To seek to trace the genealogy of today's generation of Irish pop superstars, and not factor in the showband phenomenon, is to prohibit comprehension.
The standard notion, that the U2-Cranberries generation has roots going back only to Thin Lizzy and Skid Row is a bit like leaving Jack Charlton out of the story of Irish soccer. We forget, you see, what it was really like back then. Recently, I came across an Irish TV guide for the week of Live Aid, in July 1985, boldly promising "15 hours of non-stop pop!" Today, that exclamation mark would strike most youngsters as extremely odd. It is easy to sneer at the notion of showband copyism from the high ground of cultural saturation in the good, bad and ugly of pop, forgetting that, before the advent of RTE Radio 2, there was an average of three or four hours of pop and rock 'n' roll on national radio per week. The only way most people got to hear pop music, let alone live pop music, was in dancehalls.
To compare showbands unfavourably with anything in the present, therefore, is - apart from the obvious undertones of present-centred hubris - utterly to miss the point. Until 20 years ago, Irish pop culture was showband culture, and the existence of the ballroom circuit, for all its dubious aspects, resulted in a generation of Irish youth being exposed to an experience which, for all its mediocrity and imitativeness, would not otherwise have been available for another 20 years. Billy Brown, for example, was the first showband musician in the country to wear jeans on stage. Forget your bishop and his nightie - that was something.
A lot of showbands were rubbish, it is true, but many were not, and the Freshmen were as far from rubbish as you could imagine. One time, when I was interviewing the late, great blues guitarist Rory Gallagher (who also started out in a showband), he told me about going to a Beach Boys concert in Belfast as a teenager, at which the Freshmen played support. The Freshmen, led by Billy Brown and Derek Dean, played first and featured a medley of Beach Boys songs. They were astonishing, Gallagher recalled, singing multiple harmony parts in perfect pitch. When the Beach Boys came on later and sang the same songs, they sounded, by comparison, well . . . rubbish.
For all his sense of frustration at not having transcended the Irish scene, Billy Brown never regretted his showband days. He always said that the Freshmen were as good a band as any in the world. The reasons he gave for their failure to break big international were (a) nobody ever thought of trying, and (b) they were doing too well at home.
Brown's tragedy was that he was too great a talent for the era into which he was thrust, the era just before it became possible to have great fame without much talent. "When I was a boy," he wrote one time, "if you wanted to be in a band you had to be a musician." In that same article, written for In Dublin on the occasion of the release of U2's now classic album The Joshua Tree, he wrote about his own memories of the band his father and uncles played in, back in his native Larne. He recalled going with them in the taxi to their "engagements" (this was some time before gigs). He wrote beautifully about the big bass fiddle and the drums with their oil-painted scenes of Alabama moons and Hawaiian sunsets, and the fold-up plywood music stands on which he had helped his father paint the big G-clef in real gold leaf, all tied to the roof-rack as they bumped along: "In the body of the vehicle I'd sit with the horns piled on and around me, listening to the conversations of these sensitive men. I can still hear the leather and cardboard cases creak and smell the stale saliva from the saxes and the anguished shrieks of `Hell roast ya, Tommy', when the driver went over a bump and threatened to damage the delicate system of levers a saxophone depends on."
Billy Brown was a true star. He was easily the most charismatic human being I ever met outside of a stretch limo. It is difficult to explain now, to a world so sick of celebrity, that people could once have existed who were as famous only in Ireland as Bono is now outside it, but I have never seen a room stop the way it would when Billy Brown would walk in. The Beatles may have been bigger than Jesus - but not in Ballyhaunis, they weren't. Billy Brown was.
Born even 10 years later, Billy would have become one of the most celebrated Irish musical artists of the century. Although doomed by fate to mostly play other people's material, he had an extraordinary talent for songwriting - both music and lyrics. He wasn't a great believer in spontaneous creativity, but held that the essence of any art form was in the understanding of its craft. "There was a time," he would remark dryly, "when songs were written by musicians rather than by housewives."
Just as he could hear a song and immediately write out the harmony parts for a five-man vocal, he could see beyond the hype of something new to its essential ingredients, and just as quickly deconstruct and reassemble the constituent components. Stuck for a song to fill a pre-booked recording slot in the early days of punk rock, I remember him writing a parody of a punk song on the back of a cigarette packet. A fortnight later I Never Heard Anything Like It was the NME Single of the Week.
Most people who know of him, if asked to name a song they associate with Billy Brown, would probably nominate a cover version like, perhaps, Papa Oom Mow Mow or Go Granny Go, or his show-stopping version of When God Created Woman; but his best work - his original songs - is mostly unknown: the beautiful, haunting, Cinderella, the ironic, prophetic Silicone Chip, the acid Dear Mums 'n' Dads, or his scintillating pastiche-tribute to Jerry Lee Lewis, Look What Jerry Lee Done to Me.
He was a wise, funny, deeply intelligent man. Born a Presbyterian, he never once, in nearly two decades of meeting on and off, gave me the slightest sense that the religion of either of us was in the slightest degree relevant. He was an agnostic with a spirit the size of the hole in the ozone layer. He had a bad stammer that went away when he sang. He was the best storyteller I ever heard, by which I mean the best fibber. No excuse for a missed rehearsal was replete without at least six ambulances, firemen with cutting gear and tea ladies on the dual carriageway handing out soup to those not in need of immediate hospitalisation. Even those whose patience were tried by his flexible approach to literal fact were enthralled by the breadth of his invention.
Bill wasn't a showband head. He loathed showband retrospectives, showbiz priests, country 'n' western, accordions and also, I suspect, though he was too polite to say so, guitars. He knew how good and how bad the showbands were. His modesty was never false, but he made no grandiose claims for what he did. "There's a difference," he would say, "between rock 'n' roll and music." It wasn't a judgment, just a statement of the facts of life as he saw them.
After the Freshmen's second coming, he retired to paint and read and fish and breed wildfowl and shoot the odd duck. He became known to a whole new generation as the voice on the nature slot on the Saturday morning children's show on the station formerly known as Radio 2. His postcards from the woods and fields were mesmeric, stammer and all. He gave up listening to rock 'n' roll and invested his creative energies in painting representations of the natural world where he was happier than anywhere else. Art, he told me one time, was just like the music biz: "You have to have a sort of a hit, and then you can do whatever you want." This "hit" eluded him. His landscape painting, he would say self-deprecatingly, was "very representational". I think he meant that he was still doing cover versions and still wanted to break free.
Since the showband days, he lived on "the splash": "There are animals who live in the sea, and there are animals who live on the edge of the sea, and there are other who manage to live on the land but are actually sea creatures. They survive for months on splashes up from the waves. That describes the operation succinctly." Always an eccentric, he had become something of a recluse. He refused to have a telephone and could be contacted only through his next-door neighbours, who would shout to him over the wall. Those who knew him knew he was not in the best of health, that the years of stardom had taken their toll, in predictable ways. He had been a diabetic for many years and was starting to develop other ailments, some of them rather ominous-sounding. He was not a man for looking after his health, and would perhaps have regarded his sudden exit as convenient.
His great friend and colleague, Derek Dean, once said that Billy Brown's epitaph should read as follows: "Here lies Billy Brown. He never took one bite out of life when two would do." I asked Billy once if he regretted living life at quite such a pace, given the toll it had taken on his health. "If I'd've gone easy," he replied with genuine incomprehension, "I wouldn't have enjoyed it so much. What's the point in that? I'm a great man for extremes. That would be like having a tenner and spending nine pounds."
When God created Billy Brown, he threw away the score. See you next time, Bill. Good night, God bless and safe home.