Arthur Brown, after announcing to the world, in 1969, “I am the god of hellfire…,” climbed the charts worldwide for the proverbial fifteen minutes. After his band, officially known as the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, he formed Kingdom Come, one of the earliest of what would be called prog-rock bands—progressive, yes, but decidedly an acquired taste. A recent 5-CD reissue of Kingdom Come’s albums, demos, BBC recordings and bonus tracks, has, surprisingly, raised Arthur Brown’s profile once again. Richie Unterberger spoke with the enigmatic master of darkness himself for PKM.
“It’s on the indie-breaking charts, #18 with a bullet,” enthuses Arthur Brown when I call him in July. No, he’s not talking about a newly recorded Arthur Brown album, though he has some of those in the pipeline too. This new release is a five-CD box set of Kingdom Come (Cherry Red), including not only all three of their early-‘70s albums, but also pre-debut LP recordings and an entire disc of BBC broadcasts, along with other extras.
It’s rather extraordinary a five-disc box of Kingdom Come exists at all, let alone as a new chart entry. When he formed the group after the Crazy World of Arthur Brown sputtered out at the end of the 1960s, no doubt many expected something along “Fire Part 2” from the guy who’d introduced his sole hit with the unforgettable announcement, “I am the god of hellfire and I give you—FIRE!”
“Fire”-The Crazy World of Arthur Brown-A performance for Top of the Pops, 1968:
Instead, listeners got dark, oft-gothic, and sometimes downright inscrutable prog rock that sometimes seemed as willfully different from the Crazy World as possible. And though the Crazy World of Arthur Brown weren’t exactly (“Fire” excepted) Top of the Pops material, Kingdom Come could make his previous outfit sound positively commercial. Sometimes they’ve been pegged as significant for being one of the first rock acts (if not the very first) to use a drum machine. But there was more to the group than a gimmick, and the instrument was only used for a time near the end of their brief run.
As brief as that run was, they managed to shift personnel a lot over the course of their trio of albums, the constants being guitarist Andy Dalby and, more audibly, Brown’s astonishing operatic voice. None of their LPs charted and they never made it to the U.S. Yet, if a five-CD box makes any chart at all, it’s a sign that Kingdom Come’s time might have come, nearly half a century after they broke up.
Arthur Brown and Kingdom Come-Live performance at Glastonbury Fayre, 1971:
Although Arthur’s happy to go over any part of his history, our conversation focused on the Kingdom Come years, as the box came out just a couple weeks before we talked. The pandemic wiped out some scheduled touring for Brown over the last year-plus, but he remains eager to keep his music before an audience even as he approaches his eightieth birthday. As he sings to me over the phone after picking up a guitar, “It’s not too late when you’re 78. We’re #18 in the independent charts.”
Kingdom Come Arrives
While the Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s sole and fine LP had some wacko moments, particularly on “Spontaneous Apple Creation,” on the whole it was fairly catchy psychedelic rock with a lot of blues, soul, and jazz in the mix. How did he move from a Top Ten US album to the far more dissonant, sprawling excursions of Kingdom Come so quickly?
There were a couple of transitional recordings—not released until many years later—that give us a hint of how Arthur Brown evolved.
“When Giorgio Gomelsky”—most known for managing and co-producing the Yardbirds in the mid-1960s, though he had his hands in developing numerous cutting-edge British cult artists throughout the decade—“wanted me to do a tour, I hadn’t got a sort of current band at that time,” Brown remembers, the Crazy World having reached the end of their rope. So, Arthur “got some musicians together in the studio, and then just gave them kind of instructions, like ‘what’s happening in the city,’ and ‘we’re going into the country.’ One or two things like that. Then the whole thing was improvised.”
Released in the late 1980s as Strangelands, these recordings were loosely grouped into a suite journeying through “The Country,” “The City,” “The Cosmos,” and “The Afterlife.” Sometimes verging on the atonal, this was more like free jazz with vocals than the relatively concise songs of the Crazy World, Brown’s vibrato vocals gaining an even more histrionic flavor.
“Purple Airport of Love”-Crazy World of Arthur Brown, from the Strangelands album:
“It was possibly the first freestyle rock,” Brown told me when I first interviewed him more than twenty years ago, “because it was totally improvised lyrics.” Even the song that could have just about fit with the Crazy World’s album, “Planets of the Universe” (later to evolve into “Space Plucks” on the first Kingdom Come LP), was interrupted by an unexpected busk on “Dem Bones.”
It seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that Strangelands could land Brown a record deal. It seemed even less likely that a subsequent even more experimental, improvisational set could land a contract with one of the biggest labels in the world. Yet that’s kind of what happened.
“There was this sort of period of time when things changed,” resumes Arthur in our 2021 interview. He decided “yes, we’ll form a new band and call it Kingdom Come. So we need to get together some musicians and see who’s interested in a kind of theatrical music band. And that gave rise to the Jam tapes,” recorded in 1970, which comprise an entire CD on the new box set. At times the 45-minute batch comes off more as improvised poems set to music than standard compositions, though Brown’s more accessible muscular jazzy chops come to the fore on “The Finger,” as if a lounge band’s determined to move from cruise ship to spaceship. His vocals still had the acrobatic leaps he’d taken in the Crazy World, but with more accent on the angst-laden near-rants that dotted his older material.
Brown’s more accessible muscular jazzy chops come to the fore on “The Finger,” as if a lounge band’s determined to move from cruise ship to spaceship.
“There was a loose theme on that,” observes Arthur. “Not city to the country, which was my movement from New York to the countryside in England. That was Strangelands. But for Jam, it was being in the country. Things like rivers are amazing—the sounds they give, the way they move, everything. So in the Jam, that was the things right throughout. I saw what came out as a piece,” with nature honored, if not in the pastoral fashion heard in some other prog rock, in song titles like an ode to a “Waterfall” with soaring Brown vocals, “Water Is My Friend,” “Elementally,” and “Jungle Dreams.”
“Waterfall”-from the Jam album:
“So it led to the early formation of the Kingdom Come. One of the people was Goodge Harris, who became the keyboard player for Kingdom Come. Then there was Dave Ambrose, at that time with Brian Auger; he was on bass. And various other people who either didn’t quite jell together, or were not interested in the idea of doing [this] particular kind of music, or theatrical music. Slowly we sort of shifted about.”
Although “Fire” was just a couple of years in the past, Brown had trouble finding a recording contract. “We had already tried to get a deal from English Polydor at the time,” says Brown. “They were not interested.” So he and manager Mark Radcliffe went to Polydor’s German parent company, where “one of the leading German figures at that time was in there with the rest of his team. They were all dressed in black leather with briefcases and short hair.”
After Brown played them the Jam tape, “I said, ‘Well, that’s not really what we’re gonna sound like. It’s not the music we’re going to play.’” After which the head Polydor man “said to me, ‘Oh Arthur, you have done it once. We know that you can do it again. So here’s the deal,’” Arthur laughs.
“So we were lucky to get [a deal] from the German Polydor people. It did lead eventually to some difficulties. When we wanted things done in England, the English Polydor were not always totally cooperative. But in the end, it worked,” though as he concedes, “it was largely on the strength of ‘Fire’ and the stage act and all of that. But they felt, well, this can go somewhere.”
As happenstance as both the Jam tape and the path to a record deal might have appeared, he put some good old hard work into finalizing the lineup and sonics of the band evolving into Kingdom Come. “We had a studio in [London’s] Covent Garden. It was a warehouse. So we treated it basically like a day job. You go in, start at ten o’clock, work through till six or eight. Then that’s it for the day.
“We had nothing. And then, ideas forming for an album. We’d play various games round the musicians, which kind of got them flexibly interacting with each other, musical games of course.” Such as: “Okay, if you’re a bluesy player, I’m thinking that there’s somebody kind of trapped in Battersea power station, but inside the chimney, and going round the wall, trying to find a way out. That was like a symbol for the way somebody might be trapped in their own mind, or visions of life.” With “that concept, one did the music to reflect the round walls of it, rather than just playing a blues structure or something.”
Choosing who’d be in Kingdom Come “also depended on who was interested in doing that,” he laughs. “You might play the music for a couple weeks, and then decide, ‘Oh, I’ve had enough of this.’ Eventually, we sorted out the people who made up the first Kingdom Come.
“When we first went out, they were expecting something like ‘Fire.’ When we didn’t play any of that material, we had to re-create an audience from the bottom up. It was like we were just starting. Because the ticket, obviously, had been ‘Fire’ and a few other things from the Crazy World. But no, we wanted to do a whole thing based around this new perspective—a new vision, if you like.
“One of the reasons I did the thing in Kingdom Come with not doing any of the ‘Fire’ material was that I felt by the end of it, I got kind of trapped in that stage act. It was a really good stage act. By that time, Carl Palmer was playing it” in the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, before Emerson, Lake & Palmer formed. “But I couldn’t see a way beyond that. So a good thing is to drop it altogether and see what comes out.”
Because the ticket, obviously, had been ‘Fire’ and a few other things from the Crazy World. But no, we wanted to do a whole thing based around this new perspective—a new vision, if you like.
Galactic Zoo Dossier
Released in late 1971, their debut Galactic Zoo Dossier had some attributes of space rock, embedded in both the album’s name and some track titles, a la “Internal Messenger,” Space Plucks,” and “Creation.” It was a trip of a decidedly gloomy sort, however, as if an epic ride through the galaxy was constantly getting disrupted by static and unwanted intruders. This has led some critics to interpret it as a statement on the darkness of the times as the idealism of the ‘60s crumbled into the debris of the new decade. Some of that’s at play, but there are also shards of hope and light, most vividly in “Sunrise.” Graced by cathedral-like organ and one of Brown’s most emotion-wracked vocals, it’s a hint of a new, grand dawn at the end of the tunnel.
Kingdom Come-“Sunrise”-from Galactic Zoo Dossier:
Brown doesn’t see the record as a voyage into the heart of darkness, but as “more or less entertaining different possibilities, if you like. And particularly seeing what was going down, where it would might likely lead, and what would one want in that situation. We took acid together and all of that, and got to know each other in a lot of different ways. So the ideas permeated everybody, and then the music arose from that.”
As for how it shifted gears into more troubled waters than the more exuberant Crazy World days, he muses, “It was a time of great rapid change in how people felt about the music, how it was received, and what they were looking for. ’68, ’69 was a different world to what had been before, the sort of hippie music. It had come up against the political power being wielded against that attempt to change society radically. And also, against the powers of the state being used to accomplish that.
“And then, the people who musically were involved encountering vast sums of money coming in. To me, it was like, ‘Okay, that’s all happening. What is there real in all of that?’ It encompassed politics, religion, all of those things. It was kind of a transitional period as to what came out.”
We took acid together and all of that, and got to know each other in a lot of different ways. So the ideas permeated everybody, and then the music arose from that.
The philosophizing was grounded by some solid musicianship, stretched into unfamiliar vistas by Brown’s vision. “I think the great thing in that band was that Andy came in with a lot of melody, a lot of song, and a bluesy approach. Goodge, the keyboard player, was able to stride over that. But his main love, really, was more classical and jazz. So the two of those got together, and they learned how to interact in such a way as to be able to play parts where there was interlocking. They were able to do that on the spur of the moment, because we’d spent time playing in the studio, and doing all those things to be able to do them live.”
For all the strangeness of Galactic Zoo Dossier and its dissimilarity to the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Kingdom Come and Polydor didn’t entirely neglect singles. It’s still hard to picture the non-LP 45 “Eternal Messenger”—a different recording than the album’s “Internal Messenger,” and among the box set’s bonus tracks—getting much airplay in the early 1970s, though it’s more in tune with the day’s grinding, ominous hard rock than most of what the band were cutting for their albums. Judging from the title of the B-side (also making its CD debut on this package), “I.D. Side to B Side the C Side,” Kingdom Come weren’t taking the task of filling out the flipside entirely seriously. Was this shambling ramble—more of a meandering joke rehearsal than a proper tune—a parody of the necessary chore of devising a B-side, I ask, feeling like it’s the first time he’s ever been asked?
Kingdom Come-“I.D. Side to B Side the C Side”:
“Yeah, and have some fun,” he cheerfully responds. “So the main lyrics, I just improvised what I sang. Then we sat down and thought, ‘Well, this isn’t the normal piece. We’re not gonna give it a normal name.’”
Kingdom Come Goes Multimedia
The band tilted toward a relatively normal, and certainly calmer, sound on 1972’s Kingdom Come with an altered lineup, though Harris and Dalby remained aboard. The beatific opener “Water” put Jam’s meditations on nature in a more serene setting, and the almost David Bowie-like melody of the closing “The Hymn”—as pop-friendly as they got, relatively speaking—could have nearly been a candidate for FM rotation. “By the time Kingdom came, we had moved back into the country,” Brown reflects. “So you get to know each other better, you’re relaxing, you see each other’s kind of potential and their difficulties. And it comes out in the music, as a kind of interaction.”
Insertions of faint garbled speech, yelps, a classical choir, a ticking clock, weird subterranean noises, and the recitation opening “Hymn” never let you forget this was a strange prog band as much as a could-be pop one. Glimmers of glam rock could be heard from time to time, though Brown himself might have influenced some glam-rockers with the theatricality of both his singing and concerts. In Kingdom Come he sometimes actually dressed up as a ship onstage, and Dalby as a telephone.
“It was very much trying to get a multimedia simultaneous value that was for all the instruments, including the lighting,” he explains, in the calm reasoned manner he brings to discussing all his ideas that many might have found as fanciful as futuristic. “We’ve managed to get much closer to that vision with the multimedia setup we’ve got now. We’ve got a show called ‘A Human Perspective,’ and the interaction between the lights, the music, the movement, and costume, is very much one of the relevance of everything to everything else in that act.
“By the time we got to the Journey phase,” referring to their third album, “we had an amazing visual projection as well, with layers of light. A sort of gauze screen, so you could project onto it and the band could either be in the picture or not there at all. Just a picture appearing, depending on whether you turned the lights on behind the screen as well as have the projection on the front.”
In Kingdom Come he sometimes actually dressed up as a ship onstage, and Dalby as a telephone.
Reaching back beyond the Kingdom Come years for a few minutes, he sees it as an outgrowth of the adventurousness that took root in the heyday of British psychedelia. When the Crazy World played London’s UFO club—the scene’s most celebrated venue, also incubating acts like Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine, and Tomorrow—in 1967, “You could feel the audience wanted something that wasn’t going on yet. So they almost urged you to go beyond what you might otherwise have done. It was a very creative thing, both for the bands and the audiences.
“That was a very good time for creative music. It became the pop music of the day, very surprisingly. In the beginning in UFO, there was very little money in it. I had just left, in order to stay there, the Foundations, who three months later got”—and he breaks off to sing a snatch of that British pop-soul group’s smash “Baby Now That I Found You.” “But the atmosphere in that club was just…if you were at all experimentally minded, that was brilliant. And the Kingdom Come was an experimental form. The form of the presentation, and the costumes, they were all sort of experimental things.”
As hard as it was for Kingdom Come to build an audience separate from the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, in some ways it got harder as time went on. For Kingdom Come not only weren’t repeating what Brown had done before the 1970s—they weren’t even repeating what they’d done in their short lifetime. After a fairly short period, Arthur says, “We weren’t doing material from the first Kingdom Come set. You had to re-create the audience again. Then suddenly, no drums—a drum machine. Totally different kind of music, and you had to build the music again.”
Journey and Kingdom Come’s Collapse
Arthur’s talking about their third album, 1973’s Journey, where he played a Bentley Rhythm Ace drum machine, and the band dispensed with a human drummer altogether. “It was so new at the time,” he remarks. “Nobody else had done it, a band based around a drum machine. I know that Sly & the Family Stone were, around at the same time, experimenting [with one] in the studio, along with the band. But [it] wasn’t like, ‘Let’s make a band based around it.’”
Intriguingly, he emphasizes that allowing the musicians to hear each other better was a factor in the decision—though by the 1980s, it often seemed like the function of a drum machine was to drown everyone else out. “Partly the reason for doing it was, we’re doing these comparatively simple things, playing with the music, the interaction between the musicians. And if you can’t hear, then it limits what you can do. So we get the drum machine, where you can just control the sound. It’s not like a drummer’s suddenly got excited and you have to rise with them and whatever. No. The drum machine is gonna sit where it’s set.
“So I played the drum machine, and it was a comparatively simple one. It was all prefixed sounds and rhythms. But you could make changes in the snare drum, the speed. We’d be in the middle of a rock piece, and bring in the rhythm section. So you’d have the equivalent of what would normally take three drummers in a very little small box. We were very conscious of it when we started out, and it was part of the design of the thing for it to be more balanced, and allow interaction between the sound and the light in a much more complete way.”
The new approach was announced by the first beats of the first track on Journey, “Time Captives,” where the Bentley Rhythm Ace plays unaccompanied for a while before other instruments join the proceedings. In keeping with Kingdom Come’s premise, the drum machine’s doesn’t override the band, instead functioning as one element of a record that uses eerie synthesizer (by new addition Victor Peraino) more than the previous two LPs.
Kingdom Come-“Time Captives”:
“Time Captives” itself has the feel of a mini-journey to a new dimension, highlighting a record that’s been interpreted as a signpost to a more electronic form of progressive rock, although it wasn’t often hailed as such at the time. To the surprise of some fans, Dave Edmunds played an important role in the album’s production. How does a guy known as a roots rocker get involved with ethereal prog rock with a drum machine?
As Brown points out, it was recorded in Rockfield Studios in Wales, which “kind of developed around Dave. We were well aware of his music, ‘cause he was very popular. But the other side to Dave is that when you actually observe how he does his own pieces of music, there’s a lot of dedication to the sound itself being perfect. So he was not averse.”
For a different record than Journey, “I remember he flew a guy in from Canada. He had the guy down to the front of the studio playing the cymbal. He played that cymbal note for many, many, many hours. Dave said, ‘No, it’s not the right one. He’s not hitting it how I hear it must be hit.’ Eventually, he went round the full kit and got to know how that sounded in the studio, how his recording equipment would be able to capture that. Then he sent the guy home to Canada, and did the drumming himself. So you can see that he has an absolute electronic vision of what sound the electronics will allow him to have, and what he wanted from it.
“So when he heard us experimenting with structures…There’s one song, ‘Triangles,’ that was on the album. We took a triangle and slid it up and down the guitar fretboard, and played only the notes that came in the triangle, and not normal scales. He saw all that and said, ‘I’d really like to be involved.’ So he was, because he knew all the equipment; he could hear some of the things we were reaching towards. Then he would bring the sound to us, and say, ‘You can move it like this.’”
To the surprise of some fans, Dave Edmunds played an important role in the album’s production. How does a guy known as a roots rocker get involved with ethereal prog rock with a drum machine?
Nearly half a century later, Journey could be Kingdom Come’s most accessible album, as the electronic rhythms and textures bear some similarities to approaches adopted by numerous subsequent acts. It also has its share of haunting melodic passages and spooky vocals, and less of the jarring detours and transitions of their previous work. It didn’t help them get on the charts, and although they were getting regular work in Europe, they never did cross the Atlantic.
“The Journey album was very popular in Japan, and in America {where it was billed to Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come], they put it out on Passport with Seymour Stein and Richard Gottehrer,” says Arthur. “It did fine as an import. But we spent most of our time in Europe. It was not an easy thing to get to America in that part of history. We were kept pretty busy across the territories we did play. It would have been quite a large chunk to take out of an active schedule, and keep yourselves alive in the audiences that we were doing, to go off suddenly to America.”
They were reaching some influential ears in their home country, as well as considering yet more changes to their multimedia stage act. “We had champions like John Peel. John Peel thought ‘Time Captives’ was a better song than ‘Fire.’ He said he was very happy it came out. I don’t think we ever put it out as a single, but it certainly got radio play.”
Twelve tracks Kingdom Come broadcast on shows by Peel and other BBC Radio One presenters in 1971 and 1972 fill up disc five of the box set; the earliest of these, March 1971 versions of “Sunrise” and “No Time,” predate the release of their first LP by seven months. Far from being extraneous, these might be a good introduction to Kingdom for some listeners, as the somewhat more straight-ahead rock arrangements can make for more inviting listening than jumping into their albums cold.
“Towards the end of Kingdom Come, we were trying out a band with a drummer,” continues Brown. “That was Charlie Charles, who later was the Blockheads’ drummer with Ian Dury. He and I were working on a – for instance, if you’ve got someone [like] Nureyev dancing, what would happen if you could have sensors on all those muscles? What kind of rhythms would you be pulling out of that, so that you had all the components of the drum machine working, but what was operating them was this very elastic and gifted movement of the body that had a lot more interactions?
“If you look Nureyev doing a leap landing in a paradiddle or something, that amount of different interactions in that body as it’s flying through the air is quite amazing. If that was the basis of the rhythm…I think people have been experimenting a little with that now.”
But Kingdom Come never got to that point, breaking up soon after Journey’s April 1973 release. “I think it had come to a natural end,” he feels. “We did have things that we wanted to be able to do. There was not the technology. For instance, one of the things was that if you took the brain scan out of a machine from hospital and used it, our fantasy was we would have the pope put on our helmet and his thoughts would play music. But the equipment wasn’t subtle enough to do that.
“Since then, the development in lighting and visual image projection increased because it’s been more presented in light shows. There’s been much greater experimentation between all of those forms. Our current band is doing just that indeed. To some degree, if you saw us, this is what we always wanted to do when we were with Kingdom Come. It wasn’t that the musicians weren’t ready. It was just that we didn’t have the technology and the knowledge of how to do it.” Bassist Phil Shutt (who was on the second and third albums) and Andy Dalby would go on to play much different music, to bigger audiences, as part of Kiki Dee’s group.
Kingdom Come’s Influence
Aside from entering the charts almost fifty years later, what of Kingdom Come’s influence half a century on? Brown believes it outweighed the modest sales they enjoyed while they were active.
“I remember Robert Calvert of Hawkwind used to come down and watch. Peter Shelley said, ‘I was really influenced by all the work you did and allowed to be done by the synthesizer in your band.’” In the early Kingdom Come days, “We lived just round the corner from David Bowie, so we used to have some interaction with him. In a certain part of singing, we had a parallel vocal range. Of course, I did a lot more on the higher end.
“So it reached through different people hearing it, [and] seeing the possibilities of what you could put into a stage performance. And what would, because of its integrity, find an audience. It did influence people because of the concepts, because of the theatrical [nature] and the use of the lighting. Not so much to do with projections as actual physical bodies onstage in costumes. And of course, the drum machine and making it possible to have a commercial edge to something that was essentially prior to that for boffins”—the British slang for tech-nerds.
“I think it had an effect of freeing people to have a different vision of music. If you have the vision of music [that] every band has to have a drummer, every band has to have this, that—no, you don’t necessarily have to do that. There’s much greater acceptance. When we play material from Kingdom Come now, they’re able to hear what it’s aiming for. Because they’ve heard that kind of sound in different bands that became very famous.”
Like countless musicians, Brown had a lot of plans altered in the past year and a half, though he takes the suddenly emptied concert schedule in his philosophical way: “You can be oppressed by it, and you can sort of treat it like a retreat.” And like countless musicians half or less his age, he’s raring to go if conditions allow as things open up. “We had a tour booked with our new show and we were about three weeks off performing it, and that was when the lockdown came in. We certainly have the show. We’ve got a tour that’s booked for next year. This year, I’ve got a few concerts still booked in, but you don’t know.
In the early Kingdom Come days, We lived just round the corner from David Bowie, so we used to have some interaction with him. In a certain part of singing, we had a parallel vocal range.
And “I’ve got some new material coming out. In September, we’ve got a new album on Prophecy, which is way back to the kind of blues R&B roots. Then we’ve got a horror album with Cleopatra Records. The website, thegodofhellfire.com, is now up and running. Over the last six months of lockdown, we did two charity records to benefit Help Musicians. We’re exploring new ground, and hopefully we’ll be possibly out there towards the end of this year, and certainly one hopes next year. I think we will be able to go out. By that time I’ll be over eighty. Yeah, baby!” he jokes.
More seriously, he stresses, “I love making new things. I like exploring, and I like bringing together things that you might not think would work together. Or make it new. Actually, nothing’s new, but different configurations that hadn’t been seen. I like doing that.”
