Give Me Take You by Duncan Browne.

Another dark and rainy afternoon. Storm Dudley (Silly name for a storm) is set to slam into Britain tomorrow, followed by Storm Eunice on Friday, so I don’t think I will be venturing out for a few days. Not to worry, Spring will be here before you know it. In the meantime, I’m quite content to stay in, read, and listen to my music. I just thought I would tell you about a CD which arrived yesterday. It is called Give Me Take You by Duncan Browne. The album was originally released in 1968 and I think this is the first CD version from 2000 with five bonus tracks. Previous to buying this album I ever only knew one Duncan Browne song which was called Journey, and reached number 23 in the UK charts in 1972. I liked that song when it came out but had forgotten all about it until last week when it was played on BBC6 Music by Ezra Furman. I have shared Journey below if you want to hear it. It made me wonder what ever happened to Duncan Browne, so I did a bit of internet research.

Duncan was born in 1947 and studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Dramatic Art,. In 1967 he met Andrew Loog Oldham who was the manager of The Rolling Stones and after Duncan provided the choral arrangements for Hang On To A Dream by The Nice he signed Duncan Browne to his ill-fated label Immediate Records. Duncan wrote the music for his first album with a friend David Bretton who worked on the lyrics. The album was called Give Me Take You and I read that it was a lost cult classic and a minor masterpiece of the psychedelic era. One critic described it as Pre-Raphaelite rock. Other words used to describe it were baroque and neo-classical. I knew I had to see if I could find a copy, and there was one in an auction on eBay. I put in a bid for £3.50 and it was mine.

I must say after two listens that I think it is a most enjoyable album. The title track Give Me Take You opens the album with a choral introduction and harp and woodwind accompanying Duncan’s acoustic guitar and vocal. Duncan had quite a posh educated singing voice which suits the literate poetic lyrics. Ninepence Worth Of Walking gets it’s title from walking home rather than pay the bus fare. I can recognise doing that because when we were kids my mum used to give us the bus fare to school, and we used to walk instead, and spend the bus money on sweets. The Ghost Walks is a very elegiac song about a great actor. I think Duncan and David Bretton both had ambitions to become actors. Duncan Browne has been compared to Nick Drake. Nearly every singer with a folk-rock sound gets compared to Nick Drake, but I think with the song Gabilan you can definitely hear a similarity. 

Alfred Bell is a great song about the lonely life of an ageing schoolteacher. To bring the song to life Andrew Oldham despatched them to a local school to record the kids singing disparaging songs about Alfred Bell. On The Bombsite is on a similar theme and is a nostalgic memory of the games kids played on London’s bomb sites after the war. It was released as a single without success. Some of the songs remind me of an album by The Zombies that I wrote about a few months ago. In fact, I did discover that Duncan shared a flat with Colin Blunstone of The Zombies at one time, so maybe they did influence each other.

Due to Andrew Loog Oldham’s lack of business sense Immediate Records went bankrupt and Duncan Browne was presented with a bill of £2,000 recording costs. That was an enormous amount of money in those days. The album flopped because it got no promotion. Duncan later signed with RAK Records where he had his solitary hit record. He later formed a group called Metro without success. One of his songs called Criminal World was recorded by David Bowie on his Let’s Dance album. Duncan also provided the theme music to a popular UK TV series called Travelling Man which you may remember. Sadly, Duncan was diagnosed with cancer in 1990 and died in 1993 aged only 46. He never achieved the success that his talent deserved, but hopefully interest in his music will continue to grow. If you want to hear this album in full you can find it on Youtube. Cheers.