He’s an alcoholic with several degenerative conditions. And he will make you dance and cry

Jim E. Brown’s gone AWOL, nowhere to be found. “Damn it, Jim,” his beleaguered tour promoter, Andy Burns, on hand to connect our Zoom interview, says after several unsuccessful attempts to track Brown down on his phone. “I mean, this is very on-brand,” he adds with a resigned laugh.

Look, it wasn’t unexpected. As his songs – anthems such as I’m An Obese Alcoholic, I’m Naked in My Room Huffing Nitrous Balloons, and I Know I’m Going to Die of a Stroke – suggest, Jim E. Brown is battling demons. As his Bandcamp bio helpfully explains, “Jim E. Brown is an alcoholic and has several degenerative conditions.”

The same time a day later, Brown’s found. He’s backstage at a venue in Milwaukee, about 30 minutes from a headline slot, with an Old Fashioned in one hand and a Miller High Life in the other. “There’s also an entire refrigerator filled with beers, which I’ll show you right now because you’re a journalist and you need to see these things,” he says, swinging his laptop across the room to reveal a hefty stash. “I’ll need all of it before the end of the night.”

Dressed in a mustard turtleneck and a grey blazer, he looks as dejected as he does on the cover of his 2021 debut, Jim E. Brown Sings His Songs. “I’m so sorry about yesterday,” says Brown. “I’m just deeply suspicious of the news media and I feared you were going to slander me. But Andy convinced me that it would be good to do this interview.”

Burns first brought Brown to Australia last year, when the pair toured the country together for three weeks. “My memory is a bit shoddy from alcohol abuse, but I remember the incessant squawking of the birds in Katoomba, which was very disturbing to me. I didn’t really like that,” says Brown.

Beyond a “pie floater” he had in Adelaide, he didn’t like much about Australia. “I can’t say I really like Australian people, they’re a bit weird,” he says. “But people all over the world are weird and I don’t really like anyone, so it was alright.”

If, by this point, this all sounds like some sort of Kaufman-ian shtick, that’s because it is. Jim E. Brown comes from the same grand tradition as Mojo Nixon, Weird Al Yankovic, The Darkness or Jimothy Lacoste, musical acts who straddle the line between silly joke and sonic transcendence.

According to his own lore, Brown was born and raised in East Didsbury in Manchester, the day before 9/11. It should be noted, there’s a lot of Brown lore: three volumes of his autobiography Brown On Brown, and three subsequent memoirs (Holiday with Mrs. Higgins, Shattered, and Brittany’s Burden, which tells the story of his relationship with a sober woman he met on Loosid, the sober dating app).

“And I’m working on my new book, which is as yet untitled,” adds Brown. “It’s a memoir about the time I spent living in the cage in Greg’s basement.”

What does that mean? “Some bloke called Greg locked me in a cage in his basement and I wrote a book about it,” he says.

Music was an unexpected career for Brown. “As an alcoholic with several degenerative conditions and as an obese person who eats excessively, I’d been using alcohol and food to ease the pain in my life for so long, and I still do that,” he says. “But then I discovered that music and poetry and the written word could also ease some of the pain, provide a bit of catharsis, so I started doing music for that reason.”

Brown was 19 when he started releasing music. How old is he now?

“19,” says Brown.

“Still 19?” I ask.

“Yes,” says Brown, stifling a chuckle with his hand. It’s one of the few times I’ll get a peek at the ridiculously dedicated man behind the act.

In the internet age, mystery seems impossible, but whoever’s behind Jim E. Brown is committed. Reddit seems to agree he’s some guy from Philadelphia, a 40-something ex-animation filmmaker named Max Margulies. “People have said that to me at shows, but I don’t understand it,” says Brown. “It’s a bit weird. I don’t go up to people saying, ‘I heard you’re from this place that you said you’re not.’ I take it at face value what people say.

“The mistrust galls me,” he adds. “But it’s alright, because they’ll usually buy some merch, give me money, and then they say I heard you’re actually this or that, and I say, ‘Oh right, I don’t know’, and I move on. And then I take the money to the pub and I get pissed.”

How does Brown account for the fact that, in the real world, Margulies is credited as the sole composer and writer on all his songs? “I don’t know who that is. I’ve not heard of him,” he says. “I don’t handle the publishing or anything like that, so I don’t know the names. Also, you really can’t trust what you read on the internet, you know?”

Who am I to poke any further at the facade? Especially when the music is this good, songs that make you wanna dance, cry and possibly even get a medical check-up (see My Urine is Foamy, Do I Have Kidney Damage?).

As a born and bred Mancunian (falsely, but still), Brown’s sound understandably draws from Manchester’s post-punk and baggy tradition. Drum machines and synths shimmer like a crap New Order. He wails like the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, if Smith was a shame-ridden depressive. He rhapsodises like John Cooper Clarke, if Clarke was raised on YouTube brain rot.

“Never heard of them,” says Brown. “People ask me about that all the time. They say, do you like Mark E. Mark or whatever his name is or the Smiths, and then I get confused, like which Smith is it? I’ve not listened to any of that music. My favourite artists are Coldplay, Kraftwerk and Phish. I’m also quite keen on Owl City. You know that song, Fireflies?”

It was Brown’s album Shame – released last Christmas, and featuring the singalong I’m Quitting Prozac to Continue Drinking – that became an unlikely online breakout. Last year, Burns toured the US with Brown, where he noticed a sort of “Jim E. mania” taking hold. “People were stopping him in the streets,” he says. “He just hit the luck of the algorithm.”

Brown – or is that Margulies? – can’t believe his music allows him to tour the globe. “I mean, if I were to listen to something, the very last thing would be a Jim E. Brown album, that’s 100 per cent sure,” he says. “So I’m surprised, because it’s all a bit shit to me.”

It’s all a bit shit to me: sounds like the makings of another Jim E. Brown classic.

Jim E. Brown’s national tour includes gigs at The Curtin in Melbourne on May 30 and Lazy Thinking in Sydney on June 13 and 15.

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