Johny Brown - Corpse Flower

  by John Clarkson

published: 1 / 2 / 2025

intro

John Clarkson reflects on Band of Holy Joy frontman Johny Brown's new book, 'Corpse Flower'.

Johny Brown is one of the more prolific figures in the British arts underground. He is best known for his work with The Band of Holy Joy, the group he has fronted since moving down to London from his native North Shields at the start of the 1980s. The Band of Holy Joy have released so many albums and ‘official bootlegs’ over the years that even Brown, who has been for a long time now the sole founding member, has trouble knowing exactly how many there are. Like his friend Sukie Smith (who Penny Black recently interviewed), Johny Brown is, however, essentially a multimedia artist, and has also written plays and experimented widely within the realms of radio, graphics and photography. ‘Corpse Flower’ is Brown’s third book, but his first to be published by a UK publisher, SKILL, an independent micro-publishing company, which is run by Andy Cowan in Cambridge. Part written in verse and part written in prose, it runs to 93 pages and is impossible to categorise. It might be seen to be a novella or an interlinked set of short stories. There are also though moments of autobiography, and other points when it forays off into wild magical realism. At the heart of it is the Corpse Flower, which extending often over ten feet tall can blossom into hundreds of beautiful flowers, but only for 48 hours and always with a ‘dead-rat’ signature smell, before it begins to close up and decay over the following weeks. Brown underwent surgery last year, forcing him to cancel a short tour including a Penny Black Music gig in London to promote his debut solo album, ‘Gut Feels’, and this experience seems to have provided him with much of the initial stimulus for ‘Corpse Flower’. His main character, an alter ego, who has recently also been through surgery and is poorly in health, discharges himself from hospital, and sets off by foot across an apocalyptic but recognisable Britain out of the city and towards the sanctuary and peace of the forest. On his journey he is pushed and shoved by over-exuberant festival goers who have taken over his old neighbourhood, beaten up a brutal gang of guards in an empty shopping centre and just as his weakened body seems set to give up on him completely is saved by a rough-looking but good-natured bunch of vagrants and misfits. He, however, collapses in a sewer and is taken back to hospital before he reaches the forest. In another later section, the narrator persuades a sympathetic doctor to let him out of hospital so that he can play a gig with his band in Cambridge that night. When he is on stage that evening, he, however, has what seems to be an out-of-body experience that plunges him into the forest. In another segment, clearly based on Brown’s own experiences who also fell similarly ill at the same point in his life, he reflects back to his late thirties when he suffered a brain tumour. Rather than recuperating in the cottage in the country his family had organised for him, he stayed in the city, and went on a lengthy hedonistic bender with booze and drugs. In one intense, strange scene, he has sex with the hostess of a down-at-heel party he is attending. She, however, seemingly dies, and then mutates into the Corpse Flower. In the final section, he meets with a punk-obsessed orderly he has befriended in the hospital, who was too young to experience it first-hand, and tells him of a memorable night in 1977 which as a sixteen-year old he travelled through from Newcastle to Middlesborough for a gig which was headlined by a group called Corpse Flower. Johny Brown makes pertinent comments in ‘Corpse Flower’ about once well-intentioned but now hideously corporate music festivals, regentrification, not taking things or people at face value, the influence of the past on the present and the loneliness and anonymity of hospitals. What ‘Corpse Flower’, with its odd, hallucinatory and dream-like scenes and flights into fantasy, like the films of the great, late David Lynch, is ultimately all about is left to the reader to make their own conclusion. For this writer, it is about never giving up on oneself and into darkness, and the dual nature of beauty and how it can be found – and also vice versa - in the most potentially ugly of things such as the corpse flower. Others will, however, their own interpretation. ‘Corpse Flower’ is a consistently inventive, absorbing and ultimately hypnotic read, which packs more ideas into its relatively short volume than do many books many times its length. The Band of Holy Joy are rightly receiving great acclaim for their just released new album ‘Scorched Jerusalem’, which many fans and critics see as the highlight of their long career, but this other side of Johny Brown’s talents is also very much investigating.

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