Chords for Joe Brown - Interview (The Mike Neville Show, 29.06.1999)

Ladies and gentlemen, [G] please welcome Joe Brown!
_ [F] _ _
_ _ [G] _ _ [C] _ [F] Hello!
Hello!
Hello!
[G] Hello!
[Am] Hello!
[F] _ _
_ _ [G] _ _ I [F] didn't know you were hiding behind there.
You've got a bound on it.
That's why people think you're still young.
Well, he said, when I came on, he said,
you made an entrance, but you made an entrance, didn't you?
Oh yeah, but I meant on the tube, when he did the coming out.
Oh, I thought you meant the [Bm] entrance when I made him, and then.
No, well that as well, it was very pretty.
I didn't know [N] what he was talking about, terribly sorry, I do apologize.
I just think, I'm just looking at your tour list,
it seems you've got about two weeks off and a gruelling schedule.
Yeah, I love it, I'm a ham.
_ Does it take you back to the old days of touring?
Well, it's much better, it's much better these days,
because we get paid. _ _
It's true.
It's lovely, because I just do mainly small theatres now.
I don't really like to do the nightclubs too much, you know,
[Bb] being furled on the bill to the [Ab] booze and the birds,
you know what I mean?
But when you go to a theatre, [C] they come along to see you,
and it's wonderful.
[A] You finish up talking to them as opposed to at them,
like you're doing a nightclub.
There's a lot of small theatres now that have opened up around the [E] country.
Every little [G] town's got its own theatre, you know,
five, six hundred seat of theatre. _
Occasionally I do the big tour,
I do these big tours with my old mate Marty, Marty Wilde.
I've got one [B] starting in September this year,
with _ 73 consecutive nights.
_ Which is quite a lot, but it's a happy tour,
and [G] there are great people on the show, so we have a [Eb] good time.
Well, you [Bb] obviously love it.
Who were your great influences when you were starting out?
Well, I started as a guitar player,
and I used to listen to people like Arthur Guitar Boogie Smith,
who did Guitar Boogie before my old mate Bert got his [E] hands on it.
And of course [Db] I loved Django Reinhardt.
But the rock and roll [E] guitar players, guys like Eddie Cochran,
he was a good player, Eddie Cochran.
Well, he and Gene Vincent were great friends of yours, weren't they?
Well, yeah, you see what happened,
I was on this pop show called Boy Meets Girls,
which was the follow-up to the Old Boy Show,
which was a big pop show of the time.
And when the Americans came over here to promote their stuff,
they weren't allowed to bring their own musicians
because of the union rules.
So we got to play with them on the TV show,
and as we were the only guys they came into contact with,
I also got to go on tour with them, and that was a [Eb] laugh, you know.
I'm very [F] well.
It was great.
But Joe's one of the survivors in show business.
So many people, you mentioned Ames Night,
they've fallen by the wayside, and there are few people who survive,
and he's one of the great survivors.
He's still doing [Ab] similar stuff,
but you've adapted it to suit a different audience.
Yeah, the thing is about that is that I've always honestly believed
that when you get an audience that comes to see you,
you've got to be enjoying yourself.
It's really [F] important for you to enjoy yourself
because _ you hear some people say,
oh, you don't go out there tonight, they're thick,
they're not laughing at any of your jokes, they're stupid.
Just get your money and go home.
And I've never had that attitude because I don't believe it
because I believe when [G] you see guys like Bud Flanagan who work,
and he was a great hero of mine,
Bud walked from the wings to the mic,
and he was in love with a guy before he'd even opened his mouth
because that feeling came off of him.
And with me, the reason I've done so many different things in my career
is because I've got fed up with something
and I'm not enjoying doing it any more.
And that is the time to quit and do something else.
Were you [Ab] fed up with music?
Never.
What seemed suddenly you moved to the [A] stage and the screen?
Well, you know, I did_
I've been very lucky.
I've had some good opportunities and I've worked with some wonderful people.
The important thing is to try and learn something off of them, you know?
But I've never been fed up with music, not at all.
I love my guitar and I love my music and I [N] always come back to it.
I think I'm happier now doing what I'm doing than I've ever been.
Did you find it easier doing stage work?
Yeah.
Acting work?
Well, acting, actually, as Nicholas will tell you, the basis of acting,
it's the same as the basis of doing a show, is to get everything right.
When I go to do my show, I've got a great sound system,
I've got a great band, we get there at five o'clock,
we do our sound check religiously, and we go on to the stage,
we make sure all our wires are working and we go on the stage.
And anybody can do that.
It's a professional attitude to get there, set yourself up.
If you've got a modicum of talent, then that is the cream on the cake.
And it's the same with acting.
Learn the words.
You speak to any actor.
Learn your job.
Learn the words.
Go along and learn the words.
Anything else that happens is bunt.
But one of your big things was appearing in Charlie Girl with Anna Neagle.
Yeah.
Was that rather daunting, appearing and starring in the West End?
It was and it wasn't.
You see, the thing about Charlie Girl was that_
It's funny how the press never really picked up on it in a big way,
but I'd done pantomimes before, and Charlie Girl was Cinderella.
_ Even down to the names.
I mean, my character's name, and it was Jo Studholm,
which was Studs, which was Buttons, right?
The love interest was a man_
His name was Jack Prince, right?
He was the prince.
Then you had the two pretty sisters with the ugly minds.
You had Charlie Girl, who was Cinderella,
and Anna Neagle, dear Anna's part, was Lady Hadwell,
which of course is Baron Arnott, you know?
So really it was a posh panto.
You were in Charlie Girl.
I was in Charlie Girl.
Were you in it at the same time?
He was in Charlie Girl on a roller skate.
I know.
[G] _ _
_ You said [Am] earlier on I'd like to do something different, have a gimmick,
and I remember saying to the producer, I said, [N] I played_
I first put on the roller skates when I was playing Dame in Pantomime.
I became a skating Dame.
They're the worst.
_ _ _ It worked so [F] well, I said it to Harold Fielding for Indian.
Well, it wasn't to him, it was the producer.
I said, would you like me to do that scene on roller skates?
He said, it would be a great gimmick.
It was a scene where they were all doing the waltz at a big party,
and I was [Bb] pretending to be the butler
because I wanted to get familiar with one of the girls.
So I came on with a tray of champagne on my roller skates,
and I skated in between the dancers saying,
champagne, anyone for champagne?
_ It was damn difficult because you do this,
and half of them didn't realise, it's quite difficult to do a turn.
And [D] a stage is rigged, so if I face the audience,
I'm automatically going like that, and [N] then you had to skate upstage.
The wonderful thing about that Charlie Girl show
was that they asked me, Paul Nicholas did it,
they rehashed it 25 years after I did it,
and Paul Nicholas did it, and he had some previous TV commitments
that he couldn't get out of, so the Harold Fielding office
asked me if I would do it.
It's a very professional office, Harold Fielding's office,
and when I went to see the show, this is 25 years after I did it,
I noticed that all the extra lines that I put in there,
_ Paul Nicholas was doing these lines, and a lot of it was gobbledygook,
and he didn't understand what it was all about.
So he was speaking these lines and not getting laughs on them.
There was a thing in it, one of my pantomimes,
I worked with a wonderful Dane called George Bolton,
and we do _ our little scene at the front mic,
and then as we start walking off together, he starts talking to me,
and he's going,
_ _ _ He's talking and gibbering away like that,
and I got to the side of the stage and I said to him,
What's all that about, George?
That's not in the script.
He said, My boy, keep talking.
Whatever you do, keep talking.
I said, Why is it?
Because they think they're getting their [E] money. _
So he had this line in there, Paul Nicholas,
when Lady Hadwell says something to him,
and an eagle said something to him, or in this case it was Sid Sherice,
and I put this [Gm] thing in, which is a load of gobbledygook,
which went, [A] She said, Joe, would you go and do so and so?
And I said, No sooner asked than granted,
Up goes the brush, down comes the soot,
Six night and above, All jelly takes [B] the wriggles out your arty nutty.
What can't speak can't lie. _
[Gb] And they all laughed, and she just went, Oh dear.
But now when I saw it, he said, No sooner asked than granted,
Up goes the brush, down comes the soot,
Six night and above, All jelly takes the wriggles out your arty nutty.
He didn't know [B] why he was saying that.
_ [D] When I did it, it caught a big laugh.
[B] He hasn't lost the cockney chirping.
I [G] know, but one of my great pleasures, which is a personal one,
in [Gb] taking over that part, when it was revived,
with Sid Sherice and Deodora Bryan and Paul Nicholas,
who was playing [A] the part.
And don't forget [G] Mark Winter.
Mark Winter, he was great as a prince.
But I actually played the role that Derek Nimmo played 20 years previously,
and he made these jokes about my age on Just a Minute,
and now I was playing the role 20 years later
because I was young [Ab] enough to play the part, because he wasn't.
[Bb] _ [G] And I used to say that to him regularly, but it was great fun.
It was wonderful when Joe [Eb] came in, because we had such [E] fun.
We're old mates.
[G] It's wonderful to see your family, [B] your son and daughter in the business.
Oh, my girl Sam, she's a cracker.
She's a great singer too.
She's a good singer, my girl.
[N] _ And I've got two grandchildren as well.
And Pete is _ producing records.
Pete produces records.
It's all in the family.
_ Do you know, people say to me,
are you worried about your kids going into show business?
And I say, not a bit of it, really.
You take a bloke like me, I left school at 15,
I've come from the east end of London, I've never seen anything,
and probably never would.
And here I am, I'm sitting here on your show,
right next to him in a proper suit.
_ And as a result of this business, I've seen the world,
and I'm very happy.
Joe, Nicholas, thank you both very much indeed.
Time again.
He's well deserved.
_ _ _ _ _ [N] _ _