Pete Brown: Superstar poet and Cream of the crop

British lyricist who worked with huge power trio

BACK IN 2010, in the heart of the most bitter January I can recall, I visited the home of Pete Brown with a BBC radio producer. We were there to make a broadcast piece on the 75th birthday of his great friend Michael Horovitz.

Brown, who has died aged 82, lived in a leafy street in a comfortable part of north London, a fine Edwardian home on several storeys. His elegant, spacious cum bohemian accommodation was in such striking contrast to Horovitz, whose Notting Hill flat was chaotically filled from floor-to-ceiling by every example of printed media.

One of the first things that caught my eye in Brown’s abode were his framed certificates for one million plays on US radio for ‘I Feel Free’ or, maybe, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’. It was a true sign that this writer of verse turned rock lyricist for the world’s biggest post-Beatles band had, at the height of his powers, become a superstar poet himself.

For it was, yes, with legendary power trio Cream, perhaps the music’s first supergroup with Clapton, Bruce and Baker the compelling, if tetchy, triangle, that Brown stepped up from the role of outsider creative who read in pubs and art centres to a weighty wordsmith of transatlantic reputation.

In fact, setting aside Ginsberg and his occasional dalliances with Bob Dylan, it’s hard to think of a performing poet who did better for himself – if commercial success is our measure – than Brown during his fertile Cream period.

Add the stunning ‘White Room’ to his list of writing credits and we could even make a case that he contributed the words to the trio’s three greatest songs. During this extraordinary period between 1966 and 1968, Brown must’ve felt that the arts gods had picked him from a beatnik identity parade after quite a period of noble poverty, the frequent fate of the stanza specialist.

Brown, like Horovitz who met him at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1960, was quite content to represent himself as an Anglo extension of Beat, that radical writing community which Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and others had forged on both American coasts at the end of the 1950s.

A happy hitchhiker like Horovitz, Brown lived the peripatetic On the Road life for some time, trekking between the café poetry hotspots of London and Oxford, Liverpool, Newcastle and Edinburgh.

Together these two men, both sharing a Jewish heritage, forged a personal and professional alliance that would see the launch of New Departures, an adventurous journal of the new countercultural art scene. That would then become a touring show with jazz musicians, poets and artists in tow, a kind of mobile happening which would delight, confuse and surprise in equal measure. Brown and Horovitz conceived a long joint poem entitled ‘Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead’, a surreal summary of their early 1960s allegiance.

Brown then formed the First Real Poetry Band, another example of a poetic-musical collaboration with jazz giant-to-be John McLaughlin on guitar. It was during this time that the poet was identified as a potential writing collaborator for drummer Ginger Baker but, in the end, it was with bassist Jack Bruce that the most productive connection was raised.

At a similar time, Brown – and Horovitz and Adrian Mitchell – had contributed to the extraordinary International Poetry Incarnation at the capital’s Albert Hall in June 1965. The reading, which attracted an audience of 7,000, was a cosmopolitan affair with poets from Europe and South America also involved. But the headline acts were the American Beats: Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and a disembodied William Burroughs.

With the Swinging Sixties erupting in full flow, the prestigious poetry bash was seen as a critical factor in unearthing and uniting the emerging London underground and musicians like McCartney and the Stones, Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, not to mention Cream, thrived alongside fashion designers, photographers, filmmakers and even writer-lyricists such as Brown, all riding the crest of a thrilling wave.

After Cream, Brown attempted to sustain a poetry and rock career – His Battered Ornaments and Piblokto!, named after a Ferlinghetti reference, were among his follow-up outfits who won recording contracts and gigged, but the hit rate was mixed to say the least. The heady heights of the experience with that globally celebrated hard rock three-piece would never be reached again.

The last time I saw Pete Brown, he was sitting next to me at a European Beat Studies Network conference panel commemorating Beat’s links with the cities of Manchester and Liverpool in 2016.

My final contact with him was in late 2021 by email when I was asking some questions about his own contribution to the Albert Hall event and the presence of musicians of the day. He was kind enough to write back:

‘Good to hear from you. Re the Albert Hall I can say with some certainty that Jimmy Page was there. He had mostly gone to hear Davy Graham, the only musician on the bill. Strangely enough, when we did the 50th anniversary of the AH at the Roundhouse in 2015, Page turned up in the company of  the usually grudging Van Morrison, saying how much they had enjoyed my set.

‘I don't have much memory of what I performed on that '65 night – certainly ‘Few’, the title poem of my first book which came out in '66. Ginsberg didn't like the Brit poets then. I was a mere fledgling of course. But the best performer was Adrian Mitchell by a long way. Hope this is helpful! It might jog memories a bit more if you gave me a call some time.’

See also: R&BG’s 2021 Michael Horovitz obituary – ‘Farewell child of Albion’, July 8th, 2021