Pete Brown obituary

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The poet and musician Pete Brown, who has died aged 82, made a unique contribution to the world of British rock and blues when he began working alongside Jack Bruce, the singer of Cream, to write lyrics for the supergroup in the mid-1960s. He co-wrote some of their greatest hits, including White Room, I Feel Free, Politician and Sunshine of Your Love.

Despite being an established poet on the London beat and jazz circuit at the time, Pete himself was somewhat bemused by Cream’s reliance on his work. “I used to wonder, ‘Why on earth do they need me?’” However, he conceded, “I suppose I did have that chemistry with Jack. I was always on the spot and most songs, like Sunshine of Your Love, were written very quickly.”

Before working with the band, Pete had a weekly residency at the Marquee Club in London with his group the First Real Poetry Band, which involved him reciting his poetry to the backing of a jazz quartet, which included the guitarist John McLaughlin.

He also collaborated with the poet Michael Horovitz, culminating in a recital together at a 1965 event at the Royal Albert Hall. Pete confessed that during this period he became heavily involved in drink and drugs.

Pete Brown playing with his band Piblokto! in Copenhagen, 1970. Photograph: Jorgen Angel/Redferns

When I interviewed him for my book Cream, the Legendary Sixties Supergroup (2000), Pete told me: “During the early 60s I was busy being a beatnik and living in a slum. That’s when I met Ginger Baker, Graham Bond [organist and bandleader of the British R&B group the Graham Bond Organisation] and Jack.

“One day I got a phone call from Ginger asking me to a recording studio in Chalk Farm. Cream had written a song and needed some lyrics. It was as simple as that.”

However, it was Bruce who asked Pete if he could write lyrics for a song they were recording called Wrapping Paper. It was their debut single, released in 1966, but proved a disappointment. “It was filled with too many conflicting images.”

But, as he eschewed the drug-taking lifestyle, Pete’s lyrics for I Feel Free (1966) summed up his return to normality. The single, Cream’s second, was the band’s first Top 20 hit, reaching No 11 on the UK chart in early 1967.

White Room, from the band’s third album, Wheels of Fire (1968), was based on an “awful time in a small white painted room in Baker Street, next to a fire station where the alarms kept going off just when I was having a nasty trip and started talking to the furniture. The song began as an eight-page poem and was about going through serious changes and starting life again.” The track opens:

In the white room with black curtains near the station

Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings

Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes

Dave “Clem” Clempson, a guitarist with Colosseum and Humble Pie who in recent years played in a band with Pete, said: “Pete’s lyrics were a big part of the reason I loved [Cream’s] music so much. Sunshine of Your Love is one of the great rock riffs of all time. But it was Pete’s lyric that elevated it to something really special.”

Based on a Jimi Hendrix riff, and from the bestselling second album Disraeli Gears (1967), Sunshine of Your Love reached No 5 on the US Billboard chart.

“He was really the fourth member of Cream who didn’t always get the recognition that he deserved,” said Clempson.

Born in Ashtead, Surrey, Pete was the son of Nathan Leibowitz, a shoe salesman, and Kitty (nee Cohen), a secretary. Originally from Hendon, north-west London, they had changed their surname to Brown to avoid antisemitism and moved to Surrey to escape the blitz, but returned to Hendon in 1951.

Pete attended the Orthodox Jewish Hasmonean grammar school, which he hated because of its strict discipline. He was expelled aged 14, allegedly for burning down the art room, which he always denied.

In 1958 he spent nine months studying journalism at Regent Street Polytechnic (now part of the University of Westminster), but began writing poetry, partly because, Pete told me: “I couldn’t do anything else. I’d been writing since I was 14 and had my first stuff published at 18. Inspired by the American beat poets, I went out doing poetry readings to earn 20 quid a week.”

The original lyrics, written by Pete Brown, to White Room, 1968, by Cream. Photograph: Ray Tang/Shutterstock

In 1960 he met Horovitz, and they began the travelling arts group New Departures that comprised poets and jazz musicians. He also jammed with members of the Graham Bond Organisation before becoming involved with Cream.

Pete never went on the road with the supergroup, because his previously heavy drug use led to him having anxiety and panic attacks – “the loud music used to frighten me”.

Eric Clapton had joined Cream in 1966, but Brown worked primarily with Bruce, and continued to work with him after the band broke up in 1968, writing lyrics for his solo work up until his 2014 album Silver Rails. His relations with Baker were more fractious. According to Pete: “Ginger Baker was unhappy about the split [of the royalties]. He was always bitter and thought there was a conspiracy between me and Jack, but that was absolutely untrue.”

Pete went on to form his own band, the Battered Ornaments; he was fired by his fellow members just before they were about to play on the bill with the Rolling Stones at their 1969 free concert in Hyde Park, in front of 250,000 people, because of his “terrible singing”, according to Pete.

Undeterred, he formed a new band, Piblokto!, which released two albums before it broke up in 1971. He began a new project with Bond, producing the album Two Heads Are Better Than One, but Bond left in 1973 to form Magus.

With the arrival of punk, Pete quit the rock scene and took singing lessons. “Before that I relied on arrogance and fear.” He also wrote a film script and scores for the BBC with his fellow Piblokto! band member, the keyboardist Phil Ryan. The pair continued to make music together, touring and releasing three albums, the last, Road of Cobras, in 2010.

That year Pete published an autobiography, White Rooms & Imaginary Westerns, and in 2016, his first book of poetry in decades, Mundane Tuesday and Freudian Saturday.

Just days before he died, he finished recording tracks for his final album, Shadow Club, with a band including Clempson and Malcolm Bruce (Jack’s son). There is also a guest appearance by Clapton on the record, due for release in September this year.

Pete is survived by his wife, Sheridan MacDonald, an actor, whom he married in 2007, a daughter, Jessica, from a previous relationship, a stepson, Tad, and a grandson, Roko.