Biography
Duncan Browne grew up aiming to mirror the path of his father, an Air Commodore whose rank matched that of a one-star Air Force general, by joining the Royal Air Force, yet chronic frailty from childhood closed off that route. Acting therefore became his chosen direction; although he already played clarinet and absorbed music theory, nothing pointed toward a professional life in song until, at seventeen, he witnessed Bob Dylan performing on the BBC drama The Madhouse on Castle Street during the American folk-rock artist’s debut British tour. It was Dylan’s guitar work, rather than his vocals, that ignited Browne’s interest in rock. “Most people find that odd,” he noted during a 1991 conversation from his London residence, “but I was interested in the way he tuned and played his guitar, especially on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” He promptly acquired a Yamaha acoustic guitar and schooled himself in a method shaped by classical technique.
After busking in London he borrowed thirty pounds from his father and journeyed through Europe, eventually enrolling at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. While completing the three-year drama course he continued refining his guitar skills and expanded his earlier teenage study of music theory, eventually forming the folk-rock trio Lorel. The group secured a contract with Andrew Oldham’s Immediate Records and recorded a lone single—an original piece that happened to draw on the same Bach-derived melody Procol Harum had used for “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” The label declined to issue it, and the trio disbanded. Browne nevertheless extracted a personal opportunity from the setback: Oldham had observed his arrangements for other Immediate acts, found them impressive, and requested a solo album. Browne recruited former classmate David Bretton as lyricist; together they wrote twelve songs. The finished record, Give Me Take You, stands among the finest releases in the Immediate catalog, a subtly radiant fusion of folk, rock, pop, and classical elements anchored by polished verse and Browne’s remarkable voice. Across the years it has drawn comparisons to peak efforts by Paul McCartney and the Moody Blues as well as to albums such as Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, while Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein characterized it as an instance of “Pre-Raphaelite Rock,” invoking the mid-nineteenth-century English art movement that revived Renaissance aesthetics.
Commercial failure followed despite those strengths, largely because the album appeared just as Immediate’s finances began to unravel. Browne and Give Me Take You nevertheless attracted attention in Britain, especially among fellow musicians. “Keith Emerson [of the Nice] heard my work on Give Me Take You,” Browne remembered in 1991, “and rang me up to ask if I would arrange [the choir and accompaniment on] ‘Hang on to a Dream.’ I enjoyed working with the Nice—we would support each other when we toured together, and Keith asked me at one point if I was interested in replacing their guitarist, Davy O’List, as the fourth member of the band. I think by the time that happened though, he was in the process of putting together the group that eventually became Emerson, Lake & Palmer.”
Listeners who encountered Give Me Take You generally responded with enthusiasm, and Browne might have secured live engagements from the release, yet confusion about his identity—stemming from Immediate’s haphazard promotion and the album’s cover art—intervened. The triple-exposure photograph of Browne, combined with his multiple vocal overdubs, led some promoters to assume Duncan Browne was a trio. When Immediate finally collapsed in 1969–1970, with Oldham soliciting funds from every quarter and even presenting Browne a two-thousand-pound bill (roughly six thousand dollars) for the album’s recording costs, Give Me Take You vanished beneath the label’s wreckage. It surfaced briefly in the mid-seventies on Canada’s Daffodil imprint, then vanished again until the early nineties; for years the master tapes, like much of the Immediate archive, remained missing in some forgotten storage vault.
Browne next cut a single for the British division of Bell Records—an unusual roster that also housed the stylistically comparable Amazing Blondel at the time—followed by a brief but more fruitful association with Mickie Most’s RAK label in 1972. There he released the single “Journey” and a self-titled solo album that continued the musical direction of his Immediate effort. Neither achieved sufficient sales to warrant further sessions, so Browne turned to session work, contributing to two albums by Colin Blunstone and one by Tom Yates. In the mid-seventies he embraced a fully electric rock approach alongside Peter Godwin, ultimately co-founding the power-pop band Metro, whose output appeared on Sire Records in the United States. Suddenly Browne found himself near the forefront of contemporary music once more; in addition to Metro he issued two solo albums, The Wild Places and Streets of Fire, also released by Sire in the early eighties. This period brought him closest to rock prominence, with his recordings sought in places such as New York’s East Village and aired on American college radio. Creem critic Janis Schact identified him as the voice poised to “launch [a thousand romances] into the 1980s.”
Even so, the elegant yet surprisingly forceful new-wave-inflected material failed to generate sustained momentum. By the middle of the decade Browne had shifted into film and television scoring, contributing to Jonathan Miller’s series Madness and other projects. The early-nineties CD resurgence unexpectedly revived interest in his sixties and seventies recordings; he was especially gratified that Sony Music Special Products planned an American CD reissue of Give Me Take You. Cancer struck in the early nineties, however, and he died in the spring of 1993. In subsequent years most of his catalog, including the early-eighties solo albums, has been reissued, and Browne’s music may now reach a wider audience in the twenty-first century than it did during the sixties and seventies.
After busking in London he borrowed thirty pounds from his father and journeyed through Europe, eventually enrolling at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. While completing the three-year drama course he continued refining his guitar skills and expanded his earlier teenage study of music theory, eventually forming the folk-rock trio Lorel. The group secured a contract with Andrew Oldham’s Immediate Records and recorded a lone single—an original piece that happened to draw on the same Bach-derived melody Procol Harum had used for “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” The label declined to issue it, and the trio disbanded. Browne nevertheless extracted a personal opportunity from the setback: Oldham had observed his arrangements for other Immediate acts, found them impressive, and requested a solo album. Browne recruited former classmate David Bretton as lyricist; together they wrote twelve songs. The finished record, Give Me Take You, stands among the finest releases in the Immediate catalog, a subtly radiant fusion of folk, rock, pop, and classical elements anchored by polished verse and Browne’s remarkable voice. Across the years it has drawn comparisons to peak efforts by Paul McCartney and the Moody Blues as well as to albums such as Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, while Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein characterized it as an instance of “Pre-Raphaelite Rock,” invoking the mid-nineteenth-century English art movement that revived Renaissance aesthetics.
Commercial failure followed despite those strengths, largely because the album appeared just as Immediate’s finances began to unravel. Browne and Give Me Take You nevertheless attracted attention in Britain, especially among fellow musicians. “Keith Emerson [of the Nice] heard my work on Give Me Take You,” Browne remembered in 1991, “and rang me up to ask if I would arrange [the choir and accompaniment on] ‘Hang on to a Dream.’ I enjoyed working with the Nice—we would support each other when we toured together, and Keith asked me at one point if I was interested in replacing their guitarist, Davy O’List, as the fourth member of the band. I think by the time that happened though, he was in the process of putting together the group that eventually became Emerson, Lake & Palmer.”
Listeners who encountered Give Me Take You generally responded with enthusiasm, and Browne might have secured live engagements from the release, yet confusion about his identity—stemming from Immediate’s haphazard promotion and the album’s cover art—intervened. The triple-exposure photograph of Browne, combined with his multiple vocal overdubs, led some promoters to assume Duncan Browne was a trio. When Immediate finally collapsed in 1969–1970, with Oldham soliciting funds from every quarter and even presenting Browne a two-thousand-pound bill (roughly six thousand dollars) for the album’s recording costs, Give Me Take You vanished beneath the label’s wreckage. It surfaced briefly in the mid-seventies on Canada’s Daffodil imprint, then vanished again until the early nineties; for years the master tapes, like much of the Immediate archive, remained missing in some forgotten storage vault.
Browne next cut a single for the British division of Bell Records—an unusual roster that also housed the stylistically comparable Amazing Blondel at the time—followed by a brief but more fruitful association with Mickie Most’s RAK label in 1972. There he released the single “Journey” and a self-titled solo album that continued the musical direction of his Immediate effort. Neither achieved sufficient sales to warrant further sessions, so Browne turned to session work, contributing to two albums by Colin Blunstone and one by Tom Yates. In the mid-seventies he embraced a fully electric rock approach alongside Peter Godwin, ultimately co-founding the power-pop band Metro, whose output appeared on Sire Records in the United States. Suddenly Browne found himself near the forefront of contemporary music once more; in addition to Metro he issued two solo albums, The Wild Places and Streets of Fire, also released by Sire in the early eighties. This period brought him closest to rock prominence, with his recordings sought in places such as New York’s East Village and aired on American college radio. Creem critic Janis Schact identified him as the voice poised to “launch [a thousand romances] into the 1980s.”
Even so, the elegant yet surprisingly forceful new-wave-inflected material failed to generate sustained momentum. By the middle of the decade Browne had shifted into film and television scoring, contributing to Jonathan Miller’s series Madness and other projects. The early-nineties CD resurgence unexpectedly revived interest in his sixties and seventies recordings; he was especially gratified that Sony Music Special Products planned an American CD reissue of Give Me Take You. Cancer struck in the early nineties, however, and he died in the spring of 1993. In subsequent years most of his catalog, including the early-eighties solo albums, has been reissued, and Browne’s music may now reach a wider audience in the twenty-first century than it did during the sixties and seventies.
Albums
