Those Friendly Browns

I've been listening a bit to my old band The Browns since Steve Brown managed to get a CD mastered and burnt for me. I expected it to be cringeworthy, but it actually turned out be surprisingly OK. Anybody who's interested can have a listen here to some selected tracks from the missing classic The Browns... Lay Rubber.

The song Crown is actually the story of the pivotal part that Crown Lager played in preventing the Apocalypse, and not surprisingly Foster's was somewhat uninterested when we tried to shop it to them as a new ad campaign for the beer. Something about being not quite the image they were trying to portray (although they did think it was funny). So it's a little bit sacrilegious - the image of God and the Devil sitting around drinking Crownies and trying to pick up chicks has to sell a lot of beers, surely ?

This was always the last song we played, and generated this exchange between Ian Brown and the decidedly unimpressed audience at the Hallam Hotel when we played with James Reyne:

Ian: And this is our last song
Crowd: Yay !
Ian: Unfortunately it's also our longest
Crowd: Boo !

They were somewhat more won over by the end of it (everybody loves songs about beer), but it's fair to say we didn't go over terribly well in deepest darkest suburbia.