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Pete Brown, British poet and songwriter behind Cream hits including White Room and Sunshine of Your Love – obituary

Brown in the recording studio, 1979 - Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images
Brown in the recording studio, 1979 - Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

Pete Brown, the performance poet and songwriter who has died aged 82, was one of the most arresting talents to emerge from the British jazz and blues scene of the early 1960s.

An unusually level-headed visionary, Brown had a surreal imagination balanced with a streetwise resistance to hallucinogens, hype and hypocrisy. His musical collaborations yielded mighty results both with the tortured keyboard wizard Graham Bond and, most fruitfully, with Jack Bruce, the bassist of Cream, penning the lyrics for some of that band’s most vivid works, including White Room (“yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes”) and Sunshine of Your Love.

Brown would say he was merely translating what was already in the music into lyrics, and the partnership lasted 48 years. During their writing sessions, Bruce approved or disapproved the words as they cascaded, with no interest in their meaning, only their mood.

The pair collaborated throughout Bruce’s solo career. It was a rocky road, owing to Bruce’s tempestuous personality and heroin addiction, but much of their work was superbly inventive and eccentric, particularly the 1975 album Out of the Storm.

In 1968 Brown formed his first band, the Battered Ornaments, but he suffered the indignity of being fired by them on the eve of their lucrative slot supporting the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park, due to misgivings about his singing.

Cream live in concert for the final time, at the Royal Albert Hall, London, November 26 1968: (l to r) Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton and drummer Ginger Baker - Estate Of Keith Morris/Redferns/Getty Images
Cream live in concert for the final time, at the Royal Albert Hall, London, November 26 1968: (l to r) Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton and drummer Ginger Baker - Estate Of Keith Morris/Redferns/Getty Images

Undeterred, he formed Piblokto, who conjured up two fabulous albums with crazy names and powerful moods. The breathless title track on Things May Come and Things May Go but the Art School Dance Goes on Forever (1970) was mystifying and blistering, heralding a strange new post-Beatles, post-psychedelic era, while the plaintive High Flying Electric Bird and the mellow hippy shuffle of Golden Country Kingdom captured perfectly the ennui of the age, relics of the Summer of Love’s gloomy hangover.

Though Piblokto were cherished in France and Germany, the band split after their second album, after which Brown recorded the album Two Heads Are Better Than One with Graham Bond. But Brown never lost his appreciation for performing and for life on the road, and continued to gig energetically until his final live appearance in November 2022.

Peter Ronald Brown was born at Ashtead, Surrey, on Christmas Day 1940. His father Nat Leibowitz was a shoe salesman who changed the family name to Brown; his mother Kitty was a secretary. Pete attended the Hasmonean Grammar School for Orthodox Jews; it was a teacher there who suggested writing poetry as a suitable avenue for the freakish tangents that his school essays were prone to. He had his first poem published at the age of 14.

After he was expelled for covering his religious-exam paper with irreverent drawings, Pete’s parents enrolled him on a journalism course at Regent Street Polytechnic. Although he only lasted for nine months, it was here that he learned the editing skills that would later help him trim his eight-page poem of hopelessness and heartache set in an empty apartment, White Room, into the 18-line rock song which Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker of Cream would begin recording in the summer of 1967.

Long before then, the 20-year-old Brown, fuelled by a passion for Kerouac and Ginsberg as well as for music, had declared himself a professional poet. Even his casual work was consistently bohemian, such as mucking in on the construction of the Indica Bookshop – partly funded by Paul McCartney, and where John Lennon would meet Yoko Ono. After performing at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965 alongside Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, he was recruited by Cream.

Initially he was dumbfounded by how much money song lyrics were earning him, but after a brief period keeping taxis waiting while “buying up half of Selfridges”, as he recalled, his common sense kicked in. From 1967 he rejected alcohol and drugs completely, aware of how many of his contemporaries were destroying themselves in a misguided quest for chemical inspiration. White Room was an ode to the room where that decision was made, the blank space that he was occupying at the time, both literally and psychologically.

Pete Brown and the Ginger Baker Tribute performing during Festival of Highlife... It's in the Drums at the Hackney Empire, London 2021 - Simone Joyner/Getty Images
Pete Brown and the Ginger Baker Tribute performing during Festival of Highlife... It's in the Drums at the Hackney Empire, London 2021 - Simone Joyner/Getty Images

In the mid-1970s, thanks to his skills as an identifier and assembler of fine musicians, Brown worked as an A&R man for Decca, but seeing the machinations of the music industry up-close depressed him, while punk drove him away in disgust.

He dabbled in screenwriting but was more fulfilled in later years as a producer and songwriter, and continued to tour to appreciative audiences, boasting the usual strong musical support but also, now, a good singing voice. His autobiography, White Rooms and Imaginary Westerns, is a jamboree of wild stories and a glorious record of a life of controlled, joyful chaos. Uncompromising and unique, Brown remains an icon of the counterculture.

He married his partner of 19 years, Sheridan, in 2007. She survives him , with a son, Tad, a musician and restaurateur, and a daughter, the singer and writer Jessica Walker.

Pete Brown, born December 25 1940, died May 19 2023