Jim E Brown is from Manchester. Didsbury to be precise. That’s what he says. He also says he’s a 19-year-old alcoholic. Which is a claim that’s, at least partly, slightly harder to believe.
Beyond that, most of the musician’s history is shrouded in mystery – only to be pieced together via a rapidly-growing 10-album back catalogue.
Chances are, if you live in Manchester you may have stumbled across Brown on the reels of social media, where his audience has been rapidly growing. On Instagram alone, for example, he has amassed almost a quarter of a million followers.
Click here to get the biggest stories straight to your inbox in our Daily Newsletter
A pouty, blazer-clad internet personality, footage shows crowds of people raving to his off-kilter pop songs about dead foxes in Fallowfield, feeding rats in Fog Lane Park, or having nervous breakdowns in the Salford Asda express.
Characterising himself simply as a ’19-year-old alcoholic from Didsbury,’ it’s tough to assign a label to this irony-shrouded character. A walking parody of Mancunians? A troll? An unfiltered cry for help?
Perhaps he may be, whisper it, the voice of a generation of like-minded teenagers?
The Manchester Evening News spoke to Jim E. Brown(Image: Julien Gester)
On a personal note, his regionally-focused ditties drove me to a breaking point while I was out reviewing Greggs chicken rolls for the Manchester Evening News. Jim E. Brown’s agonised lyrics ‘the queue at Greggs, I’d rather break my legs, than wait at the queue at Greggs” haunted me through the whole ordeal.
But what also bothered me was how little I actually knew about this fellow south-Manchester inhabitant. And so, I pledged, it was time to fix the fact that Jim E. Brown had never spoken to his ‘local paper’ before.
As he dropped Dirt, his tenth album in five years, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to catch up with the cultural oddity tied so bizarrely to our dear Didsbury.
Performing a back catalogue of such intimate songs to adoring fans across the globe might make a songwriter feel homesick, but after asking Jim E. Brown if he felt this way, the assumption was shot down: “Uh, no, not really. I despise Didsbury. I despise Manchester and I despise the entire United Kingdom as it is filled with ne’er-do-wells, and people who have hurt me a great deal.”
“Many people drink to forget. I drink to remember but then I forget how to remember”(Image: Julien Gester)
In fact, speaking over the phone mid-world tour, Brown singled out just the Olde Cock as the only Didsbury pub he misses.
“A vodka Red Bull is my favourite tipple besides beer of course, and it is the only establishment that really knows how to prepare it correctly.”
He then went on to deny touring is a means for him to escape Manchester, citing concerts as simply a scheme to fund his drinking habits. After being prodded more about his hometown’s pub scene, Jim E. Brown added hat he is ‘biologically opposed’ to the existence of the Didsbury Dozen: “A pub’s a pub, there’s no point in identifying a dozen or 11 or 13 of them. It’s just ridiculous really.”
Our conversation pivoted to the release of his latest album, Dirt. Having previously dethroned the Smiths as the artist to have name-dropped the most Manchester locations, I asked if the absence of the usual references on this project might be a new artistic direction.
Perhaps, after so long away, he has run out of Manchester stories to tell.
“I thought about that as well, and I feel a bit weird about it” he said. “I’ve been on tour so much that the locations referenced are more like places I’ve been on tour, like Glasgow, where someone threw a sausage roll in my face while I was performing, and the song I had a psychotic episode in a Brighton Travel Lodge after meeting Grian from Fontaines D.C.”
Didsbury lies at the heart of Jim E. Brown’s ironic musical identity(Image: Julien Gester)
Despite the traumatic experience of a Glaswegian striking him with a sausage roll while performing, Jim E. Brown added that has not taken further security measures.
He said “Someone may lob a sausage roll in my face, and if they throw it hard enough, I do believe it could kill me. So, I have just accepted that my fate may be to die that way.”
A scroll through Brown’s social media appears to make it clear most of his time nowadays is spent away from Didsbury, mostly on tour or in the USA. I asked him how he manages to stay in touch with his routes, and whether our headlines in the M.E.N. inspire the songwriting process.
“Yes! I take inspiration from the news, but global matters don’t really concern me. I’m very focused on the here and now,” he agreed, citing songs such as ‘Someone Left 4 Chicken Fillets in Marie Louise Gardens,’ and ‘People Need to Stop Feeding The Rats in Fog Lane Park’ as local news issues that impacted him enough to create his art.
“They’re mostly from Facebook groups as well.” he added. “I don’t believe in mainstream media. I’m a Joe Rogan listener. But yes, some of the Facebook groups reveal the truth. The horrible story about the duck with a plastic ring around its bill was in the Chorlton M21 group.”
Jim E. Brown, signing off(Image: Julien Gester)
So far, little in our conversation had lifted the lid on exactly who the real Jim E Brown is, and how he appeared so fully-formed on the reels of social media. Is he actually a Manchester native flying headlong into world superstardom, or is he, as some suggest, an American musician with a soft spot for the north west?
It is question that has inspired a Reddit page titled: “Okay, who actually is Jim E. Brown?”
While there are brief attempts in the thread to shed light on a backstory shrouded in mystery, the majority of responses helpfully point out Brown is what he says he is: A 19-year-old alcoholic from Didsbury.
Despite claiming to have been raised in Manchester, during our chat I couldn’t help but notice Brown’s unplaceable accent, differing to that of other Mancunians I’ve come to know. Having guessed that he uses news headlines for musical inspiration, I asked whether maybe his parents took him to dialect classes in childhood.
The story was apparently quite different.
“I don’t really know how to explain it,” he said. “It’s possible that it’s influenced by my time that I spent at age five in Heidelberg, Germany, where Dr. Gunther administered a leg lengthening surgery, so I could meet the height requirement to ride the Avalanche Bobsleigh at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.”
Jim E. Brown then claimed that this ‘very harsh man’ became his mentor and philosophical advisor: “He spoke in a weird German accent. Maybe that’s why my voice is so weird.”
Fair enough. It’s an elaborate back story, but one which is told with the utmost confidence. So I press on. What’s is his opinion of the food scene in his native Manchester?
He singles out Chorlton’s Sedge Lynn Wetherspoons, praising the ‘stodge’ and ‘reasonably priced pints,’ but feeling the chain’s ‘early’ closing time to be ‘discriminatory’ to people that hope to drink as late into the night as himself.
Brown added: “I quite like a battered sausage at the Atlantic Fish Bar in Chorlton. Do you ever go there? A fish and chips, mushy peas, a bit of curry.”
Regardless of who he is, or where he’s from, it’s clear Brown knows his onions. And if he has changed such a young boy from Didsbury, it’s probably understandable. The attention, he says, began “like five minutes after” the release of his first album, Jim E. Brown Sings His Love Songs, and hasn’t stopped since.
As we spoke about his musical influences, such as Kraftwerk, I ask Brown about the Pennsylvanian band Shy Boyz, in which one of the vocalists bears a striking resemblance to the 19-year-old Didsbury songwriter. I inquired whether this is a cousin, or perhaps some other long-lost relative of his.
“Uh, no, I’m not familiar with it,” he said. “You know, there’s a lot of fat musicians in the history of music. I think people just see one and they don’t differentiate between them really. But I don’t think it’s you, it’s just society. And I think it’s a fair assessment. I don’t see the difference.”
Before I let Mr Jim E. Brown continue on his quest to soundtrack our city escapades, I asked if there’s anything else he wishes to share with the Manchester Evening News, on his least favourite platform of mainstream media:
“Well, yes. I mean, it’s a great honour for me to appear,” he said. “I think it’s an absolutely class publication, with reports on very important matters.”