His song “Fire” was a worldwide hit back in 1968. Now in his 80s, he’s burning as bright as ever. Will Hodgkinson meets the God of Hellfire, Arthur Brown. Photos by Marvin Stang

When the Idler’s editor Tom and I were children, there was one record in our parents’ meagre collection that really did it for us. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown had a psychedelic cover of a painted face, devilish but cartoonish, lost in screaming madness. That was a suitable introduction to the song suite within; a hallucinogenic story of a man who is lying in the grass by a river before descending into the pits of hell, facing all manner of gods and devils and being forced to question the meaning of life along the way, all of it set to groovy organ and the odd medieval trumpet fanfare. “There was smoke in my lungs,” Brown informs us, with relative calm, before screaming, “and fire in my brain!”

We couldn’t have known back then that The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, released in 1968 on The Who’s Track label, arrived at the height of druggy hippie mayhem and generational questioning of the post-war old order. To us it was simply a brilliant version of the adult world, a world of mayhem and excitement, sinister but captivating.

“God Brother, you lie,” begins Brown on the eerie “Come and Buy”, while “Spontaneous Apple Creation”, a fairground organ-driven version of the creation myth, was considered wholesome enough by our Christian hippie music teacher for us to perform it at an end-of-term pageant. Given that I believed for years that Arthur Brown had blown himself up on stage some time in the early seventies, it was a pleasure to discover he is alive, healthy, and, at 81, still dancing about on the world’s stages with flames curling up from his head. A vision of a charismatic hippie elder in a woolly hat and long grey hair, surrounded by shelves of books, plants and metallic fire helmets behind him, Arthur Brown agreed to let me into his Crazy World.

Will Hodgkinson Were you aware that The Crazy World of Arthur Brown was a big hit among the kids, and by the kids I mean the under-tens?

Arthur Brown When we first started, no. I did classical vocal training, we were into the blues, jazz, and “Fire” wasn’t my favourite tune, but people kept coming up and saying they loved it. As for “Spontaneous Apple Creation” becoming an educational aid, I’m pleased to have been of service.

WH Growing up in Whitby, did being a God of Hellfire seem like a realistic career path?

AB I went to London University, supposedly to study law. After the first year they said, “Mr Brown, you obviously have not the slightest interest in law,” which was true. Somebody had left behind a blues album in my room and that led me to learn to play the banjo and go to trad jazz dances instead. I was asked to discontinue my studies so I went to Reading University, where I bought a bass guitar and presented myself at the rehearsal of a jazz band as their new bass player. From there I took singing lessons and became the head of a Charles Mingus-playing band.

WH Then you moved to Paris.

AB I joined a soul and R&B group from Putney called Southwest Five, which is when I first heard James Brown and it was mind-opening. We didn’t have that gospel tradition in England. This was a time when a lot of young people were trying to find new ways to live without the church, and I’d never heard anyone interact with the audience like James Brown did. After university I was working for Anello & Davide, who made ballet shoes and also the classic Beatle boot, and they were threatening to send me off to study the human foot. Meanwhile, with a nose like mine, no management wanted to take me up as a musical act. I was about to give up when I went to a disco one night and ordered a drink from a hole in the wall. This hand popped out and grabbed me, and a voice said: “I know you. How would you like to star in a rock show in Paris?” So I went and became all the rage, even getting cast in a Roger Vadim movie. And because we were performing every night with no time to rehearse new material you had to think of ways to make it theatrical. A mop became the Statue of Liberty. We dressed up as the Pope cutting Charles De Gaulle’s hair, because De Gaulle said he didn’t like long-haired men. That’s where it all started.

WH The Crazy World of Arthur Brown album contains an entire story about the descent into Hell. How did that come about?

AB My father was a bomber in the war and also a psychic, so the experience really upset his mentality and led to awkward times in the family. One day he brought home this man and said: “This fellow will empty your mind.” That’s where I learned about meditation. At the same time I’d fallen in love with fire, so I would spend hours staring at the fire in the hearth, watching the flickering green, blue and yellow flames as a form of meditation. Eventually I would arrive at the centre of the fire, which is peaceful and calm while all the chaos goes on around it. From there I wanted to portray the experience of moving out into the world as an adolescent and the shock it brings, and decided the best way to do this was in a tale of Greek deities. In Greek mythology anger and fear are beings of themselves, with an identity separate to your own. What kind of thinking do we do, how do we move beyond dualities of good and evil? All that was in there too.

WH Did anyone mistake you for a Satanist?

AB We had Satanic panic, comic insanity… the Guardian called me a modern Don Quixote and elsewhere I was the devil’s disciple. “Come And Buy” comes from the God Brother, the twin of the God of Fire, which reminds me of the Viking gods Thor and Loki. I was using mythology to talk about the things we’d been through as a generation.

WH For a period in the eighties I thought you really had blown yourself up on stage as the ultimate finale, until the Internet told me otherwise. What actually happened in your stage show?

AB We set fire to entire clubs. And my clothes, my hair… I had a suit made once and the whole thing went up in flames. The security people came on and threw a fire blanket over me, but I didn’t stop dancing. For some it was real good fun, for some it was terrifying, and a lot of people saw it on Top of the Pops when they were eight or nine and loved it. It was the parents who were scared, not the children.

WH In Ken Russell’s Tommy, another childhood favourite, you pop up as The Priest, a leader in a Marilyn Monroe-worshipping cult.

AB Pete Townshend, who produced the “Fire” album with [The Who’s then-manager] Kit Lambert, wanted a theatrical singer for a project he was doing, and by the time Ken Russell was on board he said to me: “I won’t give you any direction. Just do ‘Eyesight to the Blind’ and dance about.” So I did, and he kept shouting, “No!” Then, 23 takes later, he went, “That’s it!” It was a four-minute section and we’d filmed all day.

WH Weren’t you living on a spiritual retreat at the time?

AB Yes, I lived there from about ’74 to ’78, following a guy called John G Bennett who had studied under Gurdjieff. Bennett understood that a human being is a machine, and it’s only through doing a lot of interior work that you free yourself from the machine and become useful to the universe. He wanted to understand the younger generation so he stole his son’s ticket to see the Rolling Stones, went to the first Glastonbury festival, and decided that the best way to connect with young people was through dance and music. That’s how I met him.

WH Did you feel set apart from the straight world?

AB Not exactly, because it’s through normal life that we enter other dimensions. I was always working, whether it was cooking, planting potatoes, or performing, but that didn’t mean I was following what the majority of people seem to adopt as reality. We all do the same things, but what do they mean? Am I ruled by my desires? These thoughts happen in daily life. Having said that, I did live in a yurt for seven years.

WH That’s unquestionably different from living in a house in the suburbs.

AB When you’re in a yurt, all of the natural things in your environment are immediate. Birdsong is around you in the morning. Rain doesn’t hit as a tightly packaged drum rhythm; you hear 82 rhythms at the same time and eventually you surrender to it. When a fire burns, when the sticks crack and the gases explode, it has its own complex and unique rhythms. I’ve just made a new album about the rhythms that come out in nature. I stuck a microphone into the soil to get the sounds around it: the wind, the rain, the animals. It’s expansive I suppose, and in order to deal with all this we simplify it and apply rules. But nature doesn’t necessarily obey those rules. All of these things have become relevant for my music today.

WH It sounds like you’re as inspired as ever, 55 years after The Crazy World of Arthur Brown blew the minds of hippies and children the world over.

AB Claire [Arthur’s partner/manager] and I spent a lovely year making this new album. Last year we made a Halloween album called Monster’s Ball; Cherry Red Records have just put out an album called Dance, which was about dance styles around the world; and now we’re doing a tour. At 81, I’m busier than ever.

See thegodofhellfire.com for details and dates for The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.

This article was first published in issue #96 of the Idler, January-February 2024.

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