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Vice Blog

INTERVIEW – FINDLAY BROWN

Findlay Brown is a 27-year-old singer-songwritery guy whose debut album, Separated by the Sea, is out this week on Peacefrog. If you like Love, Nick Drake, Captain Beefheart and that whole psychedelic folky acoustic thing, it's basically your new favourite record. Normally this kind of wimpy bedroom music is made by timid speccy nerds, but Findlay's actually a strapping, handsome guy who's taken a lot of acid, worked in a chocolate factory and used to do bare-knuckle fighting with gypsies when he was growing up in York. Even better, his next single "Losing the Will to Survive" has been remixed into a tripped-out krautrock orgy by Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve AKA Erol Alkan and Richard Norris.

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VICE: Wow, you used to work in a chocolate factory. That's every five-year-old's dream job.
FINDLAY: Yeah, I used to work in the Rowntree factory and the Terry's one, where they make Chocolate Oranges. To keep myself amused, I'd do things like put 30 Lion Bars in a kiddie's Christmas selection box. There's only supposed to be one Lion Bar in there. Some kid out there, if he liked Lion Bars, was going to be fucking well-chuffed.
I don't miss working there one bit. I miss wearing a hair net, though.

You sound like a really sensitive guy on your record. Are you?
I wrote these songs just to express myself to my girlfriend 'cos I found that was the easiest way to tell her how I cared and she was quite upset with me at the time. I'd been getting pissed all the time, getting so drunk that I was wetting the bed.

How drunk do you have to be to do that?
Very fucking drunk, three-day benders.

And she'd be in the same bed as you?
Yes. Then she moved back to Copenhagen. So I wrote these songs to try to patch things up. Thing is, I never planned to do anything with the songs, they were just for her. I'd split up with a band and wasn't sure what I was going to do musically and before I knew it I had an album of stuff, so I started recording it.

One of your songs, "Come Home", was on a Mastercard ad over Christmas. Nice earner?
Yeah, I did all right out of that. I got loads of attention 'cos of that ad. I went on YouTube and there's some teenage kid in his bedroom playing that song. Fucking hilarious.

Do you take much acid now?
Not really. I used to be able to chomp the stuff day and night and I was just loving it, never got any comedowns or paranoia, nothing. But I think you get to the point where you just can't go any further with it, you've been to all fucking four corners of the brain. I've been with people when they've had really bad trips and been out camping and run into barbed wire fences, and they're off their nuts thinking they're dead, running into trees. I had a mate who was an acid dealer and he got caught by the police and so he necked all his acid and he had about 100 microdots on him.

Is he okay?
No, he's completely mental. I mean, he wasn't a mate mate, he was the guy I used to get acid off, kind of a pal. He's been in and out of mental hospitals, been sectioned, he has mirrors on his walls facing the wrong way, shit like that. Totally mad.

* Separated by the Sea is out now on Peacefrog. Findlay's playing South by Southwest and every festival going this summer.