Breakthrough East Anglia folk rock band Brown Horse are returning with their second album, All The Right Weaknesses, out April 4th. In anticipation of the release, we spoke to the band’s singer, Patrick Turner, and got to know more about his ‘firsts’ in music.
First Song You Wrote: I joined my first band when I was 11, and pretty much began writing songs around then. I can’t remember what the first I ever wrote was, but the first I wrote for what would become Brown Horse was this song called ‘Saturday Night at the Norfolk Skittle Saloon’ (this is around 2017). It was a song about all these strange characters who go out bowling in Norwich one night. The chorus went: “It’s Saturday night at the Norfolk Skittle Saloon / I wish you were here to see / ‘Cos they’re playing Robbie Williams on the speakers / And you could buy a Newcastle Brown for me”. It wasn’t all that good, but it was fun to play.
First Live Performance: The first year of us performing live together was almost entirely at weekly open mics. We’d usually play a mix of old-time standards, Michael Hurley covers, and original songs. We’d been playing in different formations for a while by this point, but I think the first time we all got on stage together was probably at the Walnut Tree Shades open mic in Norwich, sometime in 2019. They’ve redecorated it since then, but every inch of wall behind the stage used to be covered in framed pictures of golden age Hollywood legends and Americana-adjacent memorabilia, and there was only room for about six people to watch you play. It was great though.
First Official Concert: I’m not sure what makes something an official concert, but the first show we played at an actual rock venue where people had to pay to get in was a support slot at Voodoo Daddy’s in Norwich in the summer of 2022. We played at the old Voodoos on Timber Hill (they’ve recently moved location) six times over that next year and it was pretty much where we worked out how to be a band. The entrance to the old Voodoos was through this alleyway (which doubled up as a smoking area) with the venue right at the end. We had some of our best nights ever at that place, but if you walk past it now you’d have no idea there was ever a music venue there, just an unmarked black door sandwiched between a nail salon and a barbershop.
First Festival: The first festival we played was the Norfolk and Norwich Festival in 2022*. I think it started out as a classical music festival ages ago (the Wikipedia page says 1772) but nowadays they put on all kinds of events every spring in Norwich, including having local bands play at the bandstand in Chapelfield Gardens. This was the first show we’d played since before the pandemic, the first with electric guitars, and the first we’d been paid for. I remember having loads of fun. We played a few songs we’d written over the lockdown which would later make up our first album, Reservoir.
*We had actually played NNF beforehand in 2019 as well but we weren’t on the bill, more like background noise in a beer tent.
First Headline Show: Our first headline show was at a place called Space Studios on Swan Lane in Norwich. It’s mostly a nightclub now but the guy running it saw us busking on Blackfriars Bridge on its opening week and asked if we wanted to play a show there. It was a pretty weird one. The crowd were all seated and we were paid in Carlsberg and hummus. I was playing drums and singing for some reason, Emma on guitar, Nyle on banjo, and Rowan on accordion. Nyle recorded the whole thing on his phone and we still have it saved as a live album somewhere: Brown Horse Live in Space.
Brown Horse release their second album on 4th April via Loose Music.
