Page 42 - 358264 LP231909 A Love Supreme 48pp A5 (Issue 257)

FAMOUS ON THE FULWELL: MARTIN BRAMMER
“I had the typical north east background... my dad was a miner, his dad was a miner etc. He played the accordion, but I hated it, perhaps hate is the wrong word, but I didn’t take to the songs”.
It may be a typical north east ancestry, but it’s atypical of many who fall into the music industry whose lineage is littered with musicians and stories of family gatherings round the piano. Martin Brammer’s relationship with music was far more organic but would see him nominated for an Ivor Novello award and be a vital part of selling over 20 million records worldwide.
“I can’t really play that well to be honest. I started off with a cheap guitar that I got from Chester
Rd when I was about 14/15. I’ve got expensive guitars now but only because I like them, not because I can play them. I hang them on the wall because they’re nice to look at, or someone will come round, get them down and play them.”
“It all started with my best friend David Brewis, he lived in Whitburn at the time and we would get together and try and write songs. At some point I stopped going out to play football at school dinnertime and we would head into the music room. The stuff we were writing changed all the time. For like six months we would sit
down and try and write something like The Jam, then we would switch. I’ve had a long-held love for Steely Dan and we started listening to a lot of that intellectual song writing.”
Great writers always have a way
of finding wonderful expressions to describe seminal moments. Martin doesn’t disappoint. “We were trying to sound like the people we admired, but
in failing we landed in the gap which became our music, music that fitted us and who we were. You look around at that time and I think it was the same
for a lot of them; Edwyn Collins, Aztec Camera, Danny Wilson, Prefab Sprout. Their sound was created by their inability to copy their inspirations and it worked”
Martin and David joined up with Paul Woods and The Kane Gang were born. Their debut album would see them break the top 20 with “Closest Thing to
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