Brandy Row

If Ronnie Wood had joined The Clash he might have sounded something like Essex rebel-rouser Brandy Row. We join this tattooed neo-troubadour,who’s a veteran of Denmark Street’s Tin Pan Alley, to discuss taking on the world with a fistful of battered old guitars...

- Jamie Dickson

Brandy Row is musing on the spirit of rock ’n’ roll that drives his music. “It’s just a raw intensity and a passion,” he reflects. “And I guess that every decade you see it in different forms – but it all comes from the same kind of wildness.”

We’ve joined the Essex guitarist at Park Studios JQ in Birmingham. It’s the kind of place that might have been called ‘happening’ back in the 60s. At the top of some concrete stairs, in an old industrial building, a fashion shoot is taking place amid the battered amps and oriental rugs that fill the live room. When not being used as a set, the studio is a recording complex and it’s where Brandy cut his new album, Crazy World. Like all music that comes from an honest, original place, Brandy’s music is hard to pin down. Sometimes he channels Jam-era Weller, at other times he’s akin to an anglicised Johnny Cash – but mostly he sounds like who he is: the son of punk parents who grew up on Stones, Dylan and Robert Johnson records.

“I don’t know. It’s a mixture between alternative, folk, psychedelic blues, rock ’n’ roll and poetry. I don’t know what it is,” Brandy admits, laughing. “But that’s the beauty about being a solo artist: you can get away with changing styles completely. If you’re a band, it’s harder.

“The main thing that I do is perform as a solo artist with an acoustic guitar,” he continues. “But I have a lot of pedals and there’s lots of ambient sound. And then sometimes I perform with a cello player, a violin player and a synth player… I’ve also got a band in Berlin, which is my backing band, and they’re called The Nightshades. Plus I have an 11-piece band that’s based in Birmingham and London, called The Coalition Of Sound.”