Ian Brown

Serving as lead vocalist for a British group widely admired throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ian Brown embodied the swaggering bravado that defined the Stone Roses. The band issued one of the decade’s three or four most pivotal albums with its 1989 debut before a gradual early-nineties dissolution left only a single additional release prior to the split. Guitarist and songwriter John Squire launched Seahorses, while bassist Mani, born Gary Mounfield, entered Primal Scream. Brown launched his solo career with the 1998 album Unfinished Monkey Business, recorded alongside former Stone Roses touring guitarist Aziz Ibrahim yet marked by an unexpectedly wide emotional range. Golden Greats reached American listeners in early 2000, with Music of the Spheres appearing the following year. In 2003 Brown supplied an entry for the Under the Influence compilation series and appeared briefly in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Solarized arrived in 2004 as his most stylistically wide-ranging and politically pointed album up to that point. He collaborated with hip-hop producer Emile plus an alternative supergroup that included Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Paul Ryder on 2007’s The World Is Yours. My Way, issued two years afterward, contained the track “Stellify,” originally written for Rihanna, together with a surprising rendition of Zager & Evans’ 1969 single “In the Year 2525.”