Ian Brown releases video for new solo single First World Problems


Stone Roses 5

Ian Brown onstage with the Stone Roses at Wembley Stadium, London. June 2017. (Alberto Pezzali / Live4ever)




Ian Brown is back on the chopper as his new solo single First World Problems gets a self-directed video.

Filmed in Dunham Massey, Stretford and Cornbrook, the promo is preceding Brown’s Ripples album, due for release on March 1st, 2019. It’ll contain three songs co-written with his sons, as well as covers of Barrington Levy’s Black Roses and Break Down The Walls by Mikey Dread.

This follows Brown’s reunion with The Stone Roses which started back in 2011 and which looked like it would deliver a new album of its own when the singles All For One and Beautiful Thing emerged five years later. However, as last summer’s live shows ended, Brown was telling the crowd at Hampden Park in Glasgow to not be sad it’s over, but ‘happy that it happened’:

“Closer I Am The Resurrection was this sensation at its most attenuated, the extended, funky jam of its second half a victory lap in a race the quartet never ran,” Live4ever’s review from the First Direct Arena in Leeds not long before concluded:

“Thank yous and farewells later, The Stone Roses glow is undimmed, a band which can do no wrong, even if that is by doing almost nothing for almost twenty years. Their gift is as a good times jukebox, a scrapbook of then and now, living clippings. Only time will tell if this will be enough to keep them in the present tense.”


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