Sadness is still something to value, something I very much value at least. It’s a beautiful, living, aching sensation that counts on meaning and feeling, things that are too often lacking in this world…
Johny Brown Interviewed
Sadness and Style together, that’s a killer combination. I’m a fool for sadness, always have been, always will be.
Ged Babey talks to Band Of Holy Joy singer, songwriter and now author about the bands latest album, Scorched Jerusalem and his book Corpse Flower
Johny Brown should be, not exactly ‘a household name’, but recognized far and wide as a talented, charismatic, heroic and singular figure in music and art. Like a Lou Reed, a Nick Cave, even a Robert Smith… I say this objectively as-far-as-possible because I am, that much-derided thing, ‘a fan-boy’.
I wasn’t always one though. In common with thousands of others I bought the NME CND ‘Carry on Disarming’ VHS tape in 1989 so knew the song Tactless, – which introduced Vic Reeves to popular culture – as well as the Band Of Holy Joy and 40-odd others (Morrissey, The Pogues and Jesus & Mary Chain being the best known) to the NME readership.
I failed to follow Band of Holy Joy thereafter and only when they reformed and started releasing new material on Tiny Global in 2017 did I reacquaint myself with them. The song A Beautiful Cat being absolutely pivotal.
Like the Fall they’ve gone through dozens of members since they first formed in the early 1980’s. The line-up has stabilized over recent years to include, as well as Brown on vocals, James Stephen Finn on guitars, Peter Smith on keyboards and Brown’s partner Inga Tillere on visuals and art work. The rhythm section are currently Conor Fensom (bass) and Jpey Sergi (drums).
Their back catalogue is huge and the starting point for anyone keen to investigate the whole story from the start is The Clouds That Break the Sky 3-CD boxed set of early works.
In common with Billy Childish, Vic Godard and Robert Lloyd, Johny is one of those great English artists originally inspired by Punk Rock but who quickly moved away from generic/stylistic restrictions imposed on it. Like them, he operates pretty much outside of the Music Biz and has found a label that believes in the art in the form of John Hendersons Tiny Global Productions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxsz9PCscZM
The latest Band Of Holy Joy album Scorched Jerusalem is released on Tiny Global Productions (CD/DL/Vinyl) on 17 January 2025 and is “somewhat divorced from the general romanticism of the last four albums” say the label. Recorded just before Johny Browns spell in hospital and as the world descended into chaos, “Scorched Jerusalem confronts the historic-political issues” and contains “Browns starkest, urgent lyrics in over forty years of recording“. but the “band’s instinctive grace and beauty power past the pain and brutality”. (Buy from Bandcamp)
It is the Band Of Holy Joys darkest, bleakest album for a long, long time, if not ever… and yet it still inspires and is a brilliant work of impressionistic yet expressive art.
Even the press release gets emotional, angry and finally resigned to the fact that it won’t match the sales and acclaim of (for example) The Cure or Nick Cave, artists who are, in a way, contemporaries, or the same age, roughly, as Johny Brown.
We can’t overstate the importance and brilliance of this album… We like to think we release a lot of great (if unheralded by the general public) records that mean something, at least to certain people. Scorched Jerusalem is a strange outlier in that it needs to be heard by more people than will likely hear it. It’s rather late in their career for Band Of Holy Joy to have come up with something so utterly transformative as this album . . . but here we are.
If you know the bands back catalogue the album is still a surprise as there are programmed drums instead of a drummer. Drum’n’bass beats and bleeps as well as guitar and strings. An airy production with vocals at the forefront. It’s a different kind of Holy Joy. An angry and despairing one to begin with. 1.Born To Sin 2.Stay Toxic 3.Nihilistic Ends 4.Existential Kills… the titles are obvious clues to what is contained herein. It’s bleak with uncharacteristic negativity and despondency… sadness even.
Browns lyricism and evangelical-preacher style vocal is central, but the music is sublime and frames it beautifully.
Johny and the band offer no solutions beyond “simple faith in people” says the PR sheet.
Rather than attempting a review I decided to speak to Brown about the album. Johny was in hospital last year for an urgent prostrate operation and had to cancel solo shows to promote his brilliant Gut Feels album. Hence the first question.
(GB for LTW) How is your health? Are you well now? Or still having check-ups?
(JB) Getting stronger every day Ged. Totally back at work, Did a reading of Corpse Flower at Noel Young’s famous wine shop in Cambridge and I couldn’t resist a nice bottle of wine so that’s another boundary successfully negotiated. Due a check up soon, fingers crossed!
The subject matter of Scorched Jerusalem has been called ‘beyond grim’. Why is it so bleak JB? You’ve always found light in the darkness before, beauty amongst the ugliness of life?
(JB) It’s just how we are feeling and have felt for the past few years of recording. Instinctive reaction and reporting.
Thankfully the lightness of touch of the music and airy production mean that it doesn’t ‘sound’ as soul-crushingly bleak as it could…
It’s definitely not all Bleak House, there is some Toxic Disco in there too
I am tempted to compare and contrast it with that recent THE CURE album…. Which is soul-crushingly bleak (but) musically as well as lyrically (in my opinion)
I haven’t heard it, James loves it, I love the blunt advertising hoardings for the Cure album. Saying exactly what is been done in the collective tin on a dark and bare and bleak as a bastard winter morning.
The older I get, the sicker modern commercial advertising seems to come across as, and the more sense street graffiti seems to make. On Xmas day we went for a walk and ended up having a coffee on the first floor of the Art Hotel in Hoxton. We truly felt like intruders, that we had penetrated inside the Elite Citadel of Sick Luxuries and Banal Lifestyle choices looking out at the pure porn of urban deprivation that surrounded it. Especially knowing the ruins of cultural riches, The Foundry, this sick sleek moneyed empty citadel was built upon.
Anyway the Cure hoardings stand out in this area and I should stop being a bad neglectful cunt and listen to the album.
I wanted to ask you about the individual songs on Scorched Jerusalem:
(Key) SONG TITLE Sample lyric Question Johnys Answer
BORN TO SIN
You were born to sin / You know you never win / This life has been a lie / All vanity and pride
Who are you addressing?
Myself, and kind of flipping it world wearily, with benefit of hindsight and lived experience, fired by a sudden stupidly new redemptive zeal, halfway through this mad song.
STAY TOXIC
How do you heal /A mind so broken / That doesn’t want to be healed … How do you heal / A wound wide open / That loves the beauty of its injury / I haven’t the skills / You haven’t the Intention.
I suppose Trump and Musk could be being addressed here – or is it about the fact some people are just irredeemably bad – and you have no choice but to give-up on them?
Trump, Musk, Johnson, Nethanyu, all politicians, Farage, Tate, Incels, Femincels, countless social media influencers, mainstream media, all bastard TV grandchildren of Eastenders, bigots, bullies ignorati’s and idiots
NIHILISTIC ENDS
Western civilisation ha ha ha / I am a streetlight wanderer /The original gone lost soul / I am still the leaf that falls in spring / I will never amount to a thing –
That last line is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard you sing
Good, this was recorded and sung on the spot the day before going into hospital for operation, very much thinking it’s the last thing I’d sing. Sadness is still something to value, something I very much value at least, it’s a beautiful living aching sensation that counts on meaning and feeling, things that are too often lacking in this world, like style, and sadness and style together, that’s a killer achingly beautiful combination. I’m a fool for sadness, always have been, always will be.
EXISTENTIALIST KILLS
Inside I scream and scream and scream
BOHJ songs are like a hug in song-form usually – this is why this album is so-diferent – they are songs that need-a-hug!
These songs are saying, no, we don’t need a hug, we are angry and pissed, and we’re standing up for ourselves and telling you now how we FEEL it is. Maybe, a bit of a hug, later…
SCORCHED JERUSALEM
Gather our gods around / And all our goddesses too / Let’s show them that we are more than just dead circuit / That we still have a flame burning inside
Finally, we get a glimmer of BOHJ trademark positivity. Have you been to Jerusalem, the short essay with the lyrics points to the fact you have in recent years?
No, haven’t been, very much want to go. The essay notes allude to the great Celtic London poet Niall MacDevitt, who sadly passed last year. Niall has a great short collection of poems that were written in the bus station there one cold bare night of waiting and suffering a few years ago. Niall was a really good friend, I just wanted to pay homage. Scorched Jerusalem, also, is not about the current situation there per se, rather a more Blakean thing, the hope of humanity versus the fear of the encroaching invisible machine, ah we have rats in the walls, scratching at the surface. The current situation by the way, I fucking abhor.
DEAD ROMANTICS
Is that a play on words: Dead (as in dead-good) and deceased? … Some lovely Bowie Blackstar type drum ‘n’bass as well ?
It absolutely is… as in ‘Eeh that’s Dead Romantic, that is’. Blackstar is very much a cornerstone and reference point for James and myself on this album
BREIVIK ISLAND
But as long as there are stars above to lead / There are other steps in this life to take / To set out on another road / Get off this ultra-nihilist path…
Is this about your/our sheer incomprehension of evil? Why do people end up like that?
Yes, absolutely, and how ignorance and bad education is the root thing here, and imploring them to please take the higher / better / harder more understanding and loving road.
FRENCH RIOTS
Galloping horses / A matter of life or death / Choke on their tear gas / Then light up a leisurely smoked cigarette
This seems oddly out of place, is it taking the piss out of our romanticism of ‘French Resistance’, Guy Debord and that gang?
Fuck no, well almost fuck no, it was written around the time of the last French Riots, in a Strummer kind of way of wishing we could have our own riot over here, but then the lyrics can’t help but, erm, derive, into situationism, existentialism, smoking, dreaming. Like the Blackstar album, the spirit of Paris 68 is a major stylistic influence / cultural turn-on for James and me.
PALACE COMMUNE
The evolution of form / This revolution of consciousness
Some wonderful lyricism but I have to mention the guitar-playing in the last two minutes of this. Really beautiful stuff. The playing/sound/tone/production really is fantastic.
James, on fire, my favourite bit of the album… thank you
WHEN THE TULIPS BLOOM THE WAR WILL END
A head is stuck on a metal pole / This is the first thing I see / On a ledge either side of the head / Two hands have been placed on rusting spikes
A song of hope for an end to hostilities?
Absolutely and utterly… and tonight we hear that the tulips are at least pushing through the frozen soil a bit.
PLAYING AT BEING SAD
They all had uncertain beauty, they all shared a certain rage
Really, really love this. One of your best lyrics. Totally encapsulates how us teenage post-punks felt like we had the weight of the world on our shoulders in the early 80’s – yet they were the Times Of Our Lives – when its now that life is grim, old age, ill-health…
Bang on. It’s really personal this one, for my good pal Max who started the band with me back in the Eighties, and the way we lived then, the rage we had, but also the absolute joy we pursued and always managed to capture, this is a vintage distillation of that rare fine spirit and absolute homage to the beauty of Beatrice Dalle and Christiane F.
It’s a great album Johny… but as bleak as…
A blast of raw untrammelled darkness every now and then is good for the soul, tonight is a full moon, I can feel that Scorched Jerusalem energy, last word actually LA is absolutely Scorched Jerusalem…
CORPSE FLOWER
Your book, Corpse Flower has been described as your poetic apex and “A powerful piece of modern magic realism, though it truly defies categorization. It’s kind of a novel, kind of not… it’s a diary and a dream”
I absolutely love it…. More than I thought I would.
I don’t read many books at all nowadays. It is a terrible admission. I skim-read loads of stuff online. I read about books and films but don’t watch very many of those either.
I think I burnt-out reading when my eyesight wasn’t so bad: JG Ballard, Will Self and Paul Morleys (Nothing, ‘Words and Music’ and the Bowie one). Nothing could match up to them. Who were your go-to authors?
Love Ballard, Kirsty Allison, Richard Cabut, Kerouac, Desmond Hogan, French 20’s surrealist / symbolist novels… I’m reading DH Lawrence at the moment and a book about the Snow Leopard in Tibet. I still love books Ged and often do the same just skim through them, it’s weird though I read more than listen
I only tend read music biographies now.
I love music biographies, picked up Glenn Hughes recently, I knew absolutely nothing about him, little about Deep Purple, but anyone related to music I will delve into, also got Vivian Goldman’s Revenge of the She Punks on the go. It’s great. Anything concerning New York 51 to 91 is also a must, ah and we have just had a band meeting, where Pete brought around the Dusty biography so that has gone on the book pile
But they are of course nothing like the ‘magic realism’ of yours.
I love the term ‘magic realism’ as so much of life is humdrum (when you have a job you don’t enjoy) so, tell me is it magic realism or do you just ensure your life is magical no matter what the circumstances?
Love this, and totally agree, I always strive for a sense of magic realism, an elevation of sense, style, circumstance, I invariably fail, Corpse Flower is definitely an attempt to pursue that path
The parts of Corpse Flower I can relate to are the surrealness of a extended stay in hospital and the excitement of a the punk rock teenage in 77-79. – which are where the book starts and ends. People who have lived thru both will ‘get’ the book totally I imagine.
Absolutely what I’m hoping. I was a bit reticent about putting the Pistols bit in at the end because I love the last four lines of the main book, but it added a bit of weight to the end so it stayed, the hospital stuff hopefully rings true for anyone who has spent weird isolated time in there
Are you still a punk Johny? You seem to still be rage, raging against the lying of the right and so on
Yes, always.
-Fin-
Den Browne reviewed Corpse Flower here for LTW and you can buy it from here.
Scorched Jerusalem is released tomorrow, Friday 17 January 2025
Band of Holy Joy website / Bandcamp / Instagram
Johnys own Website (Prose, poetry, art – outside of Band of Holy Joy)
Interview conducted by Ged Babey for LTW with many thanks to JB of course.
Photo taken from Facebook – Photographer will be credited on request.
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