by Composer and lyricist Steve Brown, who has died of pulmonary fibrosis aged 69, had a career unlike any other. As a musical theater writer, he co-created Spend, Spend, Spend (1998) – about football pool winner Viv Nicholson – which inspired a fan post, which Brown admires, from Stephen Sondheim calling it “the first good British musical”. .
As a comedian, he worked closely with Rory Bremner, Harry Hill and Steve Coogan on television shows and tours, most notably as bandleader Glenn Ponder in Alan Partridge’s talk show Knowing Me, Knowing You (1994). Brown co-produced debut album with singer-songwriters Rumer and Laura Mvula. The final winners in 2013 were nominated for the Mercury prize, a series of music awards that you might think beyond the man who also wrote the Wonky Donkey jingle for SM:TV Ant and Dec.
But Brown did not distinguish between his work for stage and screen, comedy and music – or indeed children’s television. “He elevated all the songs we did together,” said Coogan, “to a level where they didn’t need to be on it to get the joke. He would say ‘Let’s make the music good too’. Why? Because we can. Because he could.”
Brown’s collaboration with Coogan went on for 30 years, after they met on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image, for which Brown wrote songs. He recalled a moment on Know Me, Know You, when Brown’s character was defeated live on air by a charming Patrick (“You’re in the job, I’m stalking you. In fact … it’s already happened, it’s a man in the post you”); as well as a duet between Coogan (as his Tony Ferrino character) and Björk for Comic Relief in 1997 about an affair between a sleaze bag and his au pair (“The memory still lingers / You’re cooking the children’s fish fingers”); and a song – performed on Coogan’s touring stage show – mocking the fame of the tabloid comic, Everyone’s a Bit of a Cunt Sometimes.
Brown – “a very kind man with very good values”, in Coogan’s words – was well-respected by most who worked with him, all the more so because he did not seek (or find) the limelight. own. “Comedy’s best kept secret,” Hill called it, although Brown has had some well-known brushes, winning an edition of Pointless Celebrities (with Barbara Dickson) in 2021, and appearing briefly as Noel Gallagher alongside Liam Jon Culshaw on the TV version of Dead Ringers.
Although he played second fiddle to Hill on TV shows and tours, Brown was an equal partner – and close friend – with the comedian in their theatrical endeavors. Their 2014 X Factor musical I Can’t Sing, produced by Simon Cowell, was a critical hit and a box office flop. In 2022, a show about Tony’s New Labor years! (The Tony Blair Rock Opera) serviceable business at the Park theater in north London and on tour.
Brown was born in south-east London, the third child of Margie (née Sewell) and Len Brown. Having taught himself to play guitar and piano as a child, Brown left Bromley grammar school for boys at the age of 16, playing in various bands on the same south London pub circuit from which he came. David Bowie, who is close to contemporary, out.
He got his break writing West End musicals and radio comedy, and when the alternative wave took off in the 1980s, Brown surfed it – in the award-winning sketch group Perrier Writer’s Inc, along with co-creator Smack the Pony Victoria Pile among others. , and on Radio 4’s late night comedy program In One Ear.
Work continued on Spitting Image – on which Brown went with his first wife, the impressionist Jan Ravens (to whom he was married from 1983 to 1993) – and he was alongside Coogan in the 1990s when the character Alan Partridge took flight. He was successful himself with Spend, Spend, Spend (co-written with Justin Greene), which – in its West End premiere, at the Piccadilly theatre, with Dickson on stage – won the 1999 Evening Standard award for best musical. “Blood Brothers fully deserves to be classed as a masterpiece of West End musicals,” wrote the Financial Times reviewer, calling it “the most glorious new musical I can ever remember seeing”. .
Brown struggled to replicate that early success. Due to propriety issues, the musical adaptation of the film It’s a Wonderful Life never made it past its first run at the New Wolsey theater in Ipswich. Brown’s two comedies with Hill were a source of joy for both, and of professional satisfaction – but not commercial success. “My wife,” said Hill, “refers to us as the Flop Twins.”
Before his death, Brown was making plans with Coogan for an Alan Partridge musical, and a stage adaptation of Coogan’s 2013 film Philomena. (A revival of Spend, Spend, Spend is in the works – as yet unannounced – for Christmas 2024.)
But Brown took pleasure in his television work – composing for Lenny Henry, the sitcom Not Going Out and Hill’s TV Burp, among many others – and took great pride in nurturing the careers of Mvula and Rumer, who wrote their debut album Seasons of My Soul. one critic, “every song is a standard”. He was also proud of the careers of his sons with Ravens, Alfie and Lenny, who followed their father in comedy and music respectively, benefiting from his encouragement and insight. Brown later married actress Deborah Cornelius in 2010. His family remembers a man who loved learning, but also mischief and play, who valued his achievements and believed that there was enough left for him to achieve.
“So what is life? / What does it mean, what about it?” Brown once asked, in a My Way-esque song written – tongue firmly in cheek – for Portuguese lounge singer Coogan’s alter ego Tony Ferrino. “Is God above? / Why is it there? What does it do? / Don’t ask me. I’m not sure.” According to Coogan: “Whenever I turned on stage and looked back at Steve, he was always smiling and laughing, even though he’d written a lot of it and heard it a thousand times. before this.”
He is survived by Deborah, Alfie and Lenny and his stepdaughter Manon, and his sisters Christopher and Susanne, Brown.
• Steven James Brown, composer and lyricist, born 25 October 1954; died 2 February 2024
