Dec 14

Pete Brown

PETE BROWN

 
Pete Brown  (born 25 December 1940) is an English performance poet and lyricist.  Best known for his collaborations with Jack Bruce, Brown also worked with The Battered Ornaments, formed his own group Pete Brown & Piblokto!, and worked with Graham Bond and Phil Ryan.  Brown also writes film scores and formed a film production company.  Comedian and actor Marty Feldman was Brown’s cousin.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Chris Spedding has played with a lot of the English heavy hitters, including early work with a band called Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments.  They played at a famous Hyde Park concert in July 1969 that also included the Rolling Stones, Blind Faith and, at the very beginning of their career, King Crimson.  When Pete Brown was later pushed out by basically everyone else in the band, Spedding became the front man in the Battered Ornaments; and his fame began to grow. 
 
(November 2011)
 
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The band’s debut album, the fittingly titled Fresh Cream featured a mixture of traditional blues songs as well as band originals.  For a band that became renowned for their instrumental solos, the two opening tracks (both written or co-written by Jack Bruce), “I Feel Free” and “N.S.U.” were less than 3 minutes each.  “I Feel Free” was co-written with Pete Brown, who became an important songwriting partner with the Cream bandmembers; he and Bruce were the songwriters on their hit “White Room” plus four songs on Disraeli Gears that included “Sunshine of Your Love” (which was co-written with Eric Clapton).  

 

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After Mountain, the solo album by Leslie West was released, the group then went on the road using the band name Mountain, bringing along Steve Knight on keyboards after Norman Landsberg and Ken Janick left to start the band Hammer.  Their fourth concert as a working band was at the 1969 Woodstock festival; though they were not included on the first album or the concert film, their performances of “Blood of the Sun” (from the Leslie West solo album, Mountain) and “Theme for an Imaginary Western” (written by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown) were included on the double album Woodstock 2 that came out in 1971. 

 

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The other member of Cream, Jack Bruce released his debut solo album, Songs for a Tailor in the U.K. at almost the same moment that Mountain was performing one of the songs on the album, “Theme for an Imaginary Western” at Woodstock.  All of the songs on the album had music by Jack Bruce and lyrics by Pete Brown; they had co-written several of the Cream songs previously. 

 

Jack Bruce has released many albums since then; the one that I have is an anthology album called At His Best.   

 

(May 2014)

  

Last edited: March 22, 2021