Even in a year as star-blessed as 1966, the Left Banke’s Walk Away Renee stood out. There was a harpsichord, a string quartet, a keening vocal and a lyric of real teenage heartbreak – “Your name and mine inside a heart, upon a wall/ Still find a way to haunt me, though they’re so small.” There was also, apparently, a guitar in there but you wouldn’t have known it. This was baroque pop. Walk Away Renee had been written Michael Brown, who has died, aged 65. Back then, 15-year-old Brown worked as a part time engineer at his father Harry Lookofsky’s recording studio in New York. In photos he looked mournful and out of time, with King Charles spaniel hair. He looked as if he would have felt at home in a Victorian drawing room, but the studio was where he met George Cameron, Tom Finn and singer Steve Martin (not the comedian). They became fast friends, forming the Left Banke in 1965. A No 5 hit, Walk Away Renee was big enough US hit for the group to record a Coca Cola jingle, and others – in their idiosyncratic style – for Hertz car rental and Toni hairspray. Pretty Ballerina gave them a second top 20 hit in early 1967, in what should have been the start of a brilliant career for Michael Brown, but instead the Left Banke’s catalogue would be depressingly small.
Brown had unlimited access to his father’s studio where, according to the Left Banke’s part-time lyricist Tom Feher, “he’d just pound away at the piano, and we’d all stand around the piano and try to emulate the Beatles and the Hollies.” One day in late 1965, Tom Finn had brought his girlfriend Renee Fladen along to the studio, and Brown was instantly smitten – in short order he wrote three songs about her, including Pretty Ballerina and Walk Away Renee; Finn and Fladen must have been very understanding of this infatuation. With orchestral arrangements from his father, and Brown’s knack for odd, bunched chords and a taste for extreme melancholy, the sound was quickly tagged “baroque pop” by the press. To show the songs could stand up perfectly well without the ornate arrangements, the Four Tops’ apocalyptic cover of Walk Away Renee reached No 3 in Britain at the start of 1968.
It wasn’t an entirely new sound – the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, the Stones’ Lady Jane and even the Troggs’ Anyway That You Want Me – were baroque in approach, and both the Zombies and Glasgow’s Poets had based their careers around minor key, semi-classical songwriting. But Brown had a special talent, and an instantly recognisable style that was realised on the Left Banke’s first album in early ’67, the awkwardly titled Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina. The writing and arrangements of Lookofsky and son could make your heart twist and snap: for example, there’s the moment on Pretty Ballerina, as the middle eight begins, lurching into an unexpected minor key woodwind and string section; and on the brumal Shadows Breaking Over My Head, at the point where Martin sings “It’s through for her and … me”, and the full barrage of strings and Brown’s piano come together, giving the impression of a love affair ending at that precise moment. The latter also features the briefest of matching, five note introductions and codas – they are quite beautiful, like miniatures, and just tossed away by a 16-year-old boy on an album track.
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That suggests Michael Brown thought there was plenty more where Walk Away Renee came from. Two hits into the Left Banke’s career, he took Brian Wilson’s lead and decided he would stay home and write future Left Banke classics while the rest of the band slogged away on the road playing sock hops and college gigs. The other members told him to get lost. One of the most pointless and depressing scraps in pop history meant that, at the height of their fame, they split into two factions, releasing two Left Banke singles almost simultaneously, the fey Ivy Ivy (by Michael Brown and hired hands) and She May Call You Up Tonight (by the rest of the group). Their label, Smash, understandably put minimal promotion behind them and by the time the spat was over, and Brown rejoined the group in late 1967, the momentum was lost. The real tragedy of this was that the Left Banke then released arguably their greatest single, Desiree. Urgent strings played Eleanor Rigby line at double speed, a bassoon was used as percussive counterpoint. there was a booming brass bridge – or is it a first chorus? – of Wagnerian import before massed harmonies sang out the title. Desiree was a masterpiece; it dared radio not to play it, laughed at contemporaneous efforts like the Stones’ Satanic Majesties and the Beatles’ lightweight Hello Goodbye, urged other groups to follow its lead, and then peaked at No 98 in November 1967.
Brown quit the group again, this time in disbelief. His career never really recovered. He continued to flit from one project to another, always placing the firmest imprint on whichever group he worked with. He wasn’t a member of Montage but may as well have been, as he wrote and produced their sole 1969 album, as well as playing keyboards. The highlight was I Shall Call Her Mary, another song about a would-be girlfriend (he had a huge unrquited crush on Mary Weiss of the Shangri La’s). By 1970 he was in Stories, a powerpop group, but left in 1973 – with typical ill fortune – just before they scored an American No 1 with a cover of Hot Chocolate’s Brother Louie in 1973. In 1976 came an album with another bunch of unknowns, the Beckies, on Seymour Stein’s Sire label – it was more than a decade after the Left Banke’s brief peak, but within the first five seconds of the Beckies’ One of These Days, you are quite aware that it’s a Michael Brown composition. It must have been heartbreaking for Brown to know that the group he had worked with so briefly in his teenage years were the musicians who could have made him a star. Occasionally he would get back together with members of the Left Banke and produce a single (Myrah in 1969, Two By Two – as a Steve Martin solo single – in 1971), but inevitably they would fall out again. In 2006 I was lucky enough to be an artist in residence at the Southbank Centre. The then contemporary music programmer was Glen Max, whose main ambition seemed to be getting the Left Banke back together to play the Royal Festival Hall, the building their modern baroque sound was made for. Steve Martin was located by a go-between, though apparently in poor health, and record dealer Bill Allerton was in touch with Michael Brown, who was apparently still writing plenty of songs, almost all of which went unreleased. There were promising email trails but, after several months, they all went cold. It seemed though, that there might be a second chance for the Left Banke. In 2011, a version of the group reunited, centred around Finn and fellow original member George Cameron, and the following year Finn announced there would be a new Left Banke album featuring compositions by Brown, but there’s been no sign of it. Looking back, it’s clear that Michael Brown’s talent was always going to be too fragile to sustain a music industry career. We should be grateful that he had any opportunities to record, that his dad gave him a break, and that other younger bands – Montage, Stories, the Beckies – were happy to accommodate his writing and playing. They must have been fans; they knew that, even with just those two hits to his name, Michael Brown was a songwriter of the very highest order.
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