THE ROCK’N’ROLL GOSPEL OF SARAH BROWN, VIA STEVIE WONDER, ROXY MUSIC, PINK FLOYD AND SIMPLE MINDS
SINGING HAS been Sarah Brown’s day job since she was spotted in the late ’80s as part of London’s Inspirational Gospel Choir. Then a teenager from Aylesbury, Bucks, Brown found herself on a career trajectory to match her skywards voice. To the disapproval of the choir master, she answered a call from producer Richard Niles to sing backing vocals for Stevie Wonder. “I thought I was going to meet him,” she remembers, laughing. “But I did some ‘bah-bah, oo-ahs’ and that was it!”
Since that auspicious start,
Brown has lent her voice to musicians including Simply Red, Roxy Music, Pink Floyd and, for the last 16 years, as part of Simple Minds’ line-up. As her career took off, a long-term solo project, an album entitled Sarah Brown Sings Mahalia Jackson, would help keep Brown connected to her gospel roots.
First started in 2007 when she recorded two tracks with Roxy pianist Colin Good, Brown’s album revisits her childhood fondness for belting out Mahalia Jackson songs but from a fresh perspective: imagining Jackson outside of the confines of the church. “Mahalia had rock’n’roll in her,” Brown contends. “When you watch her perform some of those early hymns, she’s summoning this massive energy; there’s blues in there, she’s shaking her head, there’s rhythmic stomping of the feet. It’s very rock’n’roll.”
Like Jackson, Brown’s background was strictly gospel and often severe. “I identify with Mahalia,” she agrees. “I was born in a volatile home. There was a lot of fear, and it was very strict.” As such, Brown’s subsequent career success feels like an act of liberation; a sense of freedom that she brings to her album, setting the songs against a contemporaneous musical backdrop of 1920s glamour: “The ragtime, the jazz and the early blues of Mahalia’s teenage years,” Brown explains, “when she might have been fantasising about being a singer.”
The album stayed on the back burner until 2019, when the chance arose to spend two days recording at Abbey Road with Prince’s engineer Hans-Martin Buff. The depth and polish achieved in that time bears testimony to her skill and an intuitive connection to both the material and Jackson, the gospel sensation recently seen in Questlove’s film Summer Of Soul. The same film also featured a 19-year-old Stevie Wonder – the same age Sarah Brown was when her break came from Wonder.
Their paths finally crossed when Brown was with ’90s funk group Incognito in LA. Stevie Wonder came backstage. “I said to him, You don’t remember me, but I did BVs for you when I was really young.” She grins. “And he said, ‘You may not think I remember you, but I do.’
And he made a big deal of it and pretended that
I was the voice that made the track.”
“I identify with Mahalia Jackson.” SARAH BROWN