Guitar man

Before you ask, Joe Brown will be ‘Bruvverless’ when his celebratory tour reaches the New Theatre next week but Brown is the main man and he uses the modern-day Bruvvers as he wishes. And he’s never really been off the road. Half the year, he does pop, often with his friend and co-teen idol Marty Wilde (plus Bruvvers); the other half, of which Tuesday’s concert is a part, he simply does the music he likes playing, so long as it involves some stringed instrument or other. His daughter, Sam Brown, a successful artist in her own right, will be with him on stage.

He’s still creating, not just living off memories. When I telephoned him when I’d been told to, on a morning set aside for him to do a number of tour interviews, he was not in the best of moods.

"I'm in the studio, mixing this new album that has to be out, and we’re still a week behind with it; and I’m sitting here waiting for the phone to ring and three of ’em haven’t phoned, so I feel a bit p....d off about it, actually!"

The 67-year-old Brown, who lives near Henley, then laughed and launched into a 20-minute blitz of reminiscences, overlaid by the Cockney accent he’s never lost.

"It’s always been the guitar for me; I still don’t consider myself a singer. But I do play a variety of stringed instruments — when you go on stage, you can’t just whang ’em with the guitar for two hours, can you? I was about 11 when I first saw this wonderful thing called a guitar hanging around this bloke’s neck in the pub where I lived in the East End."

A few years later, he had his own skiffle group, the Spacemen. But it was when Jack Good picked him out to appear on his TV show Boy Meet Girls that Joe Brown took off.

"I’d just left working on the railways and some fool had seen me on the telly and said to Jack, 'Why don’t you get this bloke to sing?' And we used to call each other 'Bruvver', some sort of union thing, I suppose. And someone then said 'We’re going to make a record, so what shall we call this lot?' And Jack Good said: 'Joe Brown with his Bruvvers, and spell it with two Vs'."

They were session musicians for that first record — People Gotta Talk — none of Brown’s friends. But when they started touring, he went back to his skiffle musicians and took on Peter and Tony Oakman .

What helped Brown’s profile hugely as the 1960s opened was the fact that American stars such as Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and Johnny Cash came over to appear on television for Good. "I was playing lead guitar in the band; because of the union rules then, these artistes weren’t allowed to bring their own groups over with them and people like me were the only sort of young rock ’n' roll people they came into contact with.

"So when they went on tour, I got to go and backed them. It was wonderful to meet the people who’d made such great records and knocked skiffle off its pedestal at the same time."

He signed to the Larry Parnes organisation, was on stage every night and earned £30 a week for the first year. "It was hard work, rotten digs up and down the country. But I loved it — much better than shovelling coal! I was never really that ambitious — I just wanted to play my music. But my old friend Marty Wilde once announced to me: 'I’ve decided that I want to be a pop singer and I’m going to do everything I can to attain that goal'. "With me it was, what’s the next gig, then?"

That said, of course, Joe himself became a pop star, with two huge hits, A Picture of You, written, incidentally, by his old skiffle pal Pete Oakman, in 1962 and That’s What Love Will Do a year later. In 1962, he was voted Top UK Performer by the NME. The following year, the Beatles opened shows for him. He became especially close to George Harrison and played the finale — on the ukulele — at the 2002 tribute concert after Harrison’s death; that was the same year that Brown scored a massive hit at the Glastonbury festival. Rather good guitarists such as Keith Richards and Mark Knopfler have always raved about Joe Brown, but he remains rock-solid about his art, not playing That’s What Love Will Do on stage any more because, he says, it’s a teenage love song and it wouldn’t be right coming from someone at the other end of the age range.

But when you talk to him, he really sounds 50 years younger.