“When I was 9, I was into T. Rex, Gary Glitter, and Alice Cooper. I knew The Beatles because my nan introduced me to them, but T. Rex was the first band I got into myself. I got ‘Metal Guru’ a few months after hearing ‘Children of the Revolution’ in Pwllheli in North Wales at a market.”
― Ian Brown
“’Psychedelic’ means mind-expanding.”
― Ian Brown
“When you live in Manchester and it’s raining every day, you’ve got to imagine the sun sometimes. When you’re brought up in concrete, you aim for the green leaves. And when you get to the green leaves, you yearn again for concrete.”
― Ian Brown
“I’ve never chatted up a girl in me life. I’ve always let girls come to me. I’ve never approached a girl to chat her up.”
― Ian Brown
“I don’t like to play anywhere with a banner for Carlsberg or vodka or whatever. I’m not a drinker myself, and I don’t like feeling like I’m working for the liquor companies.”
― Ian Brown
“If you want to call me a Karaoke King, I’ll take it.”
― Ian Brown
“One person might perceive me as godlike, and the next might think I’m a northern thug. I don’t think I’ve done myself any favours… but I swear I’ve not had a proper fight since I was 14.”
― Ian Brown
“Belief outweighs talent. Self-belief’s got me everything, self-belief.”
― Ian Brown
“Getting a grey beard’s not cool.”
― Ian Brown
“I’d love to see the world without liquor for a week.”
― Ian Brown
“We should be growing carrots up the side of the Empire State Building or Big Ben.”
― Ian Brown
“People tend to settle for the fiver rather than going for the pot of gold.”
― Ian Brown
“Hell is being stuck in a lift with Elton John and the Queen Mother.”
― Ian Brown
“Everybody is a star. It’s true. And if you’ve got a light, don’t let it go out. ‘Cos some people sink under.”
― Ian Brown
“I feel like the Ryan Giggs of music.”
― Ian Brown
“We’re all anti-royalist, anti-patriarch. Cos it’s 1989. Time to get real.”
― Ian Brown
“When the ravens leave the Tower, England shall fall, they say. We want to be there shooting the ravens.”
― Ian Brown
“When The Stone Roses first came out, the early reviews called me ‘simian.’ I had to look that up at the time.”
― Ian Brown
“I am gentle. I think nearly everyone who makes music is sensitive – I don’t care how hard they pretend they are.”
― Ian Brown
“I thought it would be more interesting to make a musical autobiography than an actual autobiography.”
― Ian Brown
“Just because I’m a successful singer who’s loved and has been loved for years doesn’t mean I’m sitting behind electric gates in my own fantasy land.”
― Ian Brown
“I’m solo, and I love being solo. I believe I went through the Roses so I could become a solo music-maker. That’s what I believe.”
― Ian Brown
“I don’t actually personally get off on guitar music.”
― Ian Brown
“I like a lot of that Chicago stuff, house music.”
― Ian Brown
“It’s a horrible name, Coldplay. It doesn’t conjure up any positive thoughts.”
― Ian Brown
“I love karaoke – I usually do Blondie’s ‘Heart Of Glass,’ or ‘Try A Little Tenderness.’”
― Ian Brown
“I went to a friend’s 40th in Manchester, and there was a karaoke machine, and no one was having a go. My mate said, ‘No one’s singing because you’re in the room.’ I said, ‘Who am I, Frank Sinatra?’ They made me sing flipping ‘My Star’ to a backing track that sounded like ’80s Roxy Music. It was pretty embarrassing, but I did it.”
― Ian Brown
“I’d like to write songs for other people, see things from a different perspective. I’d like to watch things from the dugout instead of the pitch.”
― Ian Brown
“Putting another human being above yourself isn’t healthy. I think it’s capitalistic.”
― Ian Brown
“Stardom’s transitory. Nothing really changes except people’s attitudes.”
― Ian Brown
“The Beatles were great; we know that. But we were trying to do a new thing. Why do we need to recreate the Sixties?”
― Ian Brown
“I love people, me, I believe in people. I love people too much.”
― Ian Brown
“My biggest fault is that I give people too much credit. Then they let you down. I’m 99.9 per cent perfect – that’s how I look at myself and, therefore, everybody else too.”
― Ian Brown
“I used to be one of those kids who couldn’t keep my mouth shut.”
― Ian Brown
“Oasis are okay, but they’re like The Sun: base.”
― Ian Brown
“I started managing myself in October 2004, and since then, it’s gone up and up.”
― Ian Brown
“My sister bought me the Koran in 1990. I always thought the stories in it were magical.”
― Ian Brown
“I’ve always said prayers.”
― Ian Brown
“I see The Stone Roses in ’89 as Technicolor: we were all about joy and possibilities of life.”
― Ian Brown
“They’ve had a hard life, the Oasis brothers. They’ve done really well to be semi-normal. It’s always sad when your dirty linen is brought out in public.”
― Ian Brown
“You’ll never find a Manchester band slagging off another Manchester band, but within each Manchester band, people will rip each other apart: Mondays, Smiths, New Order, Roses, Oasis.”
― Ian Brown
“I was skint, and I had to move back to my mum and dad’s house, back into the room I shared with my brother when I was a kid. I kept getting people on the streets telling me that they loved me; it didn’t mean anything to me because I was still borrowing tenners off my pensioner father to go and get some chicken.”
― Ian Brown
“Some of the kids who discovered me from my ‘F.E.A.R.’ record or one of the U.N.K.L.E. tunes have said, ‘I don’t even like the Roses; I love your solo stuff.’ I buzz off that.”
― Ian Brown
“People in Russia learned English off the Beatles. People in Japan learned English off the Stone Roses. Noel Gallagher says music can’t change the world, but the Roses made him want to start a group, so it changed his world.”
― Ian Brown
“I can’t think of anyone who’s reformed for art’s sake. That’s why the Roses will never reform.”
― Ian Brown
“In March 1977, I taped the single ‘Career Opportunities’ off Piccadilly Radio, which was the ’70s equivalent of downloading, and then the album came out in April 1977.”
― Ian Brown
“I was really into punk when I was about 14.”
― Ian Brown
“The Roses should have made it as the biggest band since The Beatles, but we didn’t.”
― Ian Brown
“I wasn’t on stage to be worshipped or for people to look up to me. I was with the crowd.”
― Ian Brown
“We started out to finish groups like U2 – that was what it was all about.”
― Ian Brown
“Even me mum can’t tell me what to do.”
― Ian Brown
“I spent the summer of ’88 indoors, writing ‘Shoot You Down,’ ‘Bye Bye Badman,’ and ‘Don’t Stop.’”
― Ian Brown
“You’re never alone on the dole in Manchester.”
― Ian Brown
“The jails are full of kids from kids’ homes. You’re 16 years old, and you’re out on the street. How you going to fend for yourself at 16 if you’ve not had an education? You’re going to turn to crime.”
― Ian Brown
“People want to adulate people.”
― Ian Brown
“I was jailed for using words that I still dispute. Anyone who’s ever met me will tell you that I’m not a violent person.”
― Ian Brown
“I’m lucky enough to be one of them music makers who can do a dance festie or a rock festie.”
― Ian Brown
“I liked him, that Jarvis Cocker. I like the fact he was androgynous, he could appeal to everybody. He wasn’t just a lad pretending to be a thug.”
― Ian Brown
“I started doing karate when I was 11.”
― Ian Brown
“I gave it up three weeks before my black belt, foolishly. I got to my third brown belt and must have trained for 18 months but never went for it. I was nearly 18 and got this thing in my head about, ‘ Who are they to grade me?’ Trying to be a rebel when I should have done it. It’s my only regret, not going for a black belt.”
― Ian Brown
“At primary school, I thought I was George Best. Then I got to secondary school, and it was more serious.”
― Ian Brown
“We need to ban all air-freighted food. Carrots from Holland. Potatoes from Egypt. It’s got to stop.”
― Ian Brown
“Permacultures – where you use the immediate environment to grow food – should be mandatory.”
― Ian Brown
“People have to realise you don’t help African children singing along to 60-year-old men playing their tunes from 40 years ago.”
― Ian Brown
“I’m only really good at making music. I wasn’t convinced when I started out, but then I heard the first Stone Roses’ LP.”
― Ian Brown
“I’d like to change the world. Eradicate poverty, racism, and sexism… all the usual things.”
― Ian Brown
“I give thanks for everything that’s ever happened to me and for everything I’ve got.”
― Ian Brown
“Everything I’ve ever achieved, I’ve done on my terms.”
― Ian Brown
“Honestly, going solo is the second best thing that’s ever happened to me after my kids.”
― Ian Brown
“You’re never going to improve on a Michael Jackson song if you cover it.”
― Ian Brown
“It is a fact that everyone’s got a limited run in music – but who’s to say how long that run lasts? I used to think that there would be no way I’d still be in music when I was 40. I used to think anyone who was 40 was an old man, and they probably shouldn’t be doing it anymore.”
― Ian Brown
“I feel like I’ve established myself as a music maker in my own right.”
― Ian Brown
“Maybe if you see me begging on the streets, you might find me doing The Stone Roses the next day.”
― Ian Brown
“I’d never been paid for the first Roses LP – it was 2002 before we received any royalties.”
― Ian Brown
“My wife is Mexican, and she’s really influenced me: She’s got an impressive collection of Mexican music.”
― Ian Brown
“Every time I do interviews, they ask me about the same things – poverty, war, and the power of the church.”
― Ian Brown
“Northern soul was huge in Manchester in the ’70s and ’80s; I went to a lot of all-nighters.”
― Ian Brown
“I love harmonicas – old blues players like Sonny Boy Williamson.”
― Ian Brown
“We wrote ‘Stellify’ for Rihanna, but as we got to the end of writing it, I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna keep this for myself. We’ll give her another one.’ She’d have probably sung it better, but it is too good for me not to do it.”
― Ian Brown
“I’ve not thought about the Stone Roses since we quit. How many LPs do I have to make to stop people talking about it?”
― Ian Brown
“With the Stone Roses, I always thought we’d be successful because we had some great songs.”
― Ian Brown
“I always loved Oasis because when they came out, they did express that they loved us, and they saw that we did it, and they thought they could do it, too.”
― Ian Brown
“I actually was able to give up shopping in February ’99.”
― Ian Brown
“One thing I’ve always loved and rated me dad for is that, because of him, I’ve never seen the Queen’s Christmas speech.”
― Ian Brown
“By 1993, the Stone Roses had become this huge, beautiful cruise ship just floating about in the middle of nowhere with no captain.”
― Ian Brown
“We’re the most important group in the world.”
― Ian Brown
“Even on songs we’ve got that are about a girl, there’s always something there that’s a call to insurrection.”
― Ian Brown
“We’re against hypocrisy, lies, bigotry, show business, insincerity, phonies, and fakers.”
― Ian Brown
“We feel we’re the only British group worth exporting since the Sex Pistols, definitely.”
― Ian Brown
“I never wanted to be a pop singer, but I always watched pop programs and knew I could do better than the people I was seeing.”
― Ian Brown
“I like the fact that a group can become successful, and by way of what you are, you can show up all the other people who are around you.”
― Ian Brown
“We believe that anyone can do anything, and everyone’s a star. And that’s evident from the shows we do. It just feels like a whole bunch of people in a room celebrating something – maybe just being alive.”
― Ian Brown
“With the Roses, I knew we were great; I felt that we would achieve something. On my own, I had no idea.”
― Ian Brown
“I wrote a lot of lyrics in prison, but they’d all be like, ‘Crawls upon the shoulders, hatred in the eyes.’ I wrote about 50 songs in there that were all about jail. I’ve come out and thought, ‘I’ve only served eight weeks; I can’t really write a concept album about jail.’”
― Ian Brown
“If I was in the gutter, and my kids lived on the kerb, I’d go and get a job in B&Q before I’d reform the Roses. I gave everything I had to the Stone Roses and ended up hitting a brick wall. I’m never going to give anyone a foothold on that wall again.”
― Ian Brown
“Since we were kids, we grow up believing that astronauts are heroes – that to go up in a rocket is a heroic thing. These guys are bigger than movie stars. To me, it’s… all a well-dressed-up lie, basically. There’s billions spent on rockets up there, and there’s millions starving down here. It don’t make sense to me.”
― Ian Brown
“I feel like the Roses were a great group, but I never wanted to try to do it again. I knew I couldn’t get a band that would compare to the Roses, that would have an impact like the Roses.”
― Ian Brown
“I’ve got six solo albums. I’ve been round the world three times. I don’t even think about the Roses.”
― Ian Brown
“I went into jail with absolutely no respect whatsoever for authority, and I came out with even less.”
― Ian Brown
“England’s a small nation, and the pop music industry is built on fashion.”
― Ian Brown
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