The Irish Times obituarist suggested that Billy Brown s perfect piece of punk-pop, I ve Never Heard Anything Like It was the NME s single of the week within a fortnight of Billy writing (it) on the back of a cigarette packet . Not true. But it could have been true. Almost anything about Billy Brown could have been true.
Long before Therapy? was fashionable, Billy emerged well-adjusted from Larne. I met him more than 30 years ago when I got to ride in the bus to the odd Borderland dance (!) with the Freshmen because Skins McMenamin from our class at school (Derek Dean for showbiz purposes) was lead singer. You could tell even then that Billy was something else.
The Freshmen are remembered, when they are, for muscular, marvellously exact Beach Boys covers, but, unusually for those days, they had songs of their own too, that s to say Billy s, and a range of class material pillaged from hither and yon. I saw their name a few weeks back on a poster for a Showband Revival Night coyly entitled Do You Come Here Often? , lumped in with the Royal, the Cadets and so forth. Which was fair enough in a way. Nobody ever managed a definition of showband .
I ve Never Heard Anything Like It was based on a Sunday World advice-to-the-lovelorn column by Judith Elmes. The title was Billy s take on Judith s standard opener to distraught supplicants. He composed it over a World lunch in the Yellow House in Rathfarnham after an argument with Sam Smyth about whether the spirit of punk had to come from deep down within the alienated soul of the age or could be conjured by any competent opportunist. That he wrote a brilliant song like this to demonstrate that you didn t have to be brilliant to write a song like that was a sweeter act of cultural subversion than anything McLaren ever came up with.
On the strength of the NME s ecstatic endorsement, I wrote a profile of Billy for the paper s next issue, for which he told me to invent all the quotes but to make sure it s only things I would say . . . I don t like being misquoted .
I think Louis Walsh was the Freshmen s manager at the time, the same Louis who later fell on hard times and had to take a job with Boyzone.
Billy was a wonderful musician but acerbic and louche about the bullshit and the business and defiant of all categories, a drawback of sorts in a trade in which everything has to be pigeon-holeable. During the Abortion Referendum campaign in 1983, Terry O Neill and myself, heading up Anti-Amendment Music, devised A Night With Billy Brown, envisaged as a cocktail-lounge white-tie-and-tails affair, to feature Billy, a grand piano and the songs of Noel Coward, Brian Wilson and the Freshmen s back catalogue. Every venue we tried said, Wha ? It could have been mighty.
In later years, having given up a life-style based on Bounty bars and brandy, Billy retired to the countryside in Kildare, where he huddled close to the natural world. He gave radio talks of deft eloquence about peahens, stoats and salmon runs, and painted and wrote gently of skies and ferns and bright streams at night.
He wrote one of the best songs of all our lifetimes, Cinderella , maybe somewhat allegorically about himself, telling of a rock or showband singer who, on a whim, attends a touring opera company s small town performance of Rossini s opera La Cenerentola.
I fell in love with Cinderella/Magic princess really stole my heart/Well, maybe not exactly in love with Cinderella/But with the girl who sang the coloratura, mezzo-soprano part. . . .
Beautiful writer, musician of genius, lovely man. We are poorer for his going than we know.