Jim E. Brown @ The Grove

At just 19 years old, and despite his multiple degenerative issues, Jim E. Brown's surreal, satirical brand of indie jangle pop left a lasting impact on The Grove, highlighting that the digital sensation has built a subculture in the unlikeliest of ways. Liz Clarke reports.

Having returned this year from a long hiatus, the first support act, Nottingham’s Burly Nagasaki, operate in an appropriately unique realm for a bill like this, with the fact that they have songs about the salt pills that Elvis Presley got into “On his way to becoming the unhealthiest man in America”; Elvis Presley’s 14-year-old girlfriend (not Priscilla, they clarify, but rather an age-appropriate 14-year old girlfriend Elvis had when he was also a teenager); and getting really into whittling spoons whilst working during the COVID-19 pandemic being proof enough of this. A two-person band composed of a steady drummer and jovial singing guitarist Joey Chickenskin, calling them indie-surf-egg-electro-punk still only summarises about half of it. For starters, they also have one song entitled Hair where conventional instrumentation is swapped out for a pair of trimming scissors and a comb played live, directly into the microphone. Yes, really. They’re a band worth seeing if you get the chance for this alone and are quite honestly indescribable otherwise.

Andy Burns, the other support act, is the Australian singer-songwriter moonlighting as Jim E Brown’s manager. His music exists in the realm of unusually composed pop music, pulling from, it seems, everything from the grandiosity of Talk Talk circa The Colour of Spring, to awkward modern lo-fi bedroom music. It’s the kind of music that makes you feel abnormally, uncomfortably serene, like that feeling when you feel as though you should be worrying about something, but can’t quite remember what, and it’s really quite beautiful. He also makes an unusual amount of strategically placed burping vocalisations throughout the set, with these weird inflections somehow being what render him a perfect match for Jim E. Brown’s own sense of humour…

Jim E. Brown himself has about three jokes. Thankfully they’re all really funny, for reasons owing entirely to the amount of conviction with which he delivers them. Before we even touch his music or performance, it’s all over his Instagram reels. Before each gig, he reviews various cities and countries’ junk food with such a downtrodden disdain emanating from his face and voice, that I awaited the Nottingham edition of this tradition like the Live Laugh Love crowd awaits Jeremy Clarkson’s A-Level tweet every year on results day. This is just a lot of words to say that he has built a subculture in the unlikeliest of ways, something which is also on display throughout the gig. We’ve also all chosen to believe that he is at once 19 years old in 2025 and was born on the 10th of September 2001, one day before 9/11, something which I hear mumbled jokes about at the beginning of the show. To be so precocious is a gift that comes at a great price and with great sacrifice, as the show shall reveal. 

The setup for the gig itself is Jim alone with a guitar and a synth box with his tracks pre-loaded into it, and nothing is more fitting than that. He’s not somebody it’d make any sense to give a band: this is his show, derived entirely from his vulnerabilities, and intimacy is the only way to truly achieve the sense of awkwardness his music has on record in a live setting. He opens the set with the title track of his latest double album, I Urinated on a Butterfly, where the spluttering vocal style he has chosen is on full display: it’s slightly incorrect to call it singing, and yet there really isn’t another characterisation for it. To call it anxious, uncomfortable rambling that really does sound like it’s coming from a 19-year-old alcoholic from Didsbury is to downplay the melodic quality which it does possess. Another track which hammers home just how fitting his vocal style is, I Found a Dead Fox Outside Sainsbury’s in Fallowfield, is played tonight, and the empty drawl of his voice sounds as though it could have been ripped from the sound your internal monologue for the rest of the day after seeing some particularly upsetting roadkill. The complete misery on his face online is also replicated perfectly throughout the entire gig: he constantly looks like he's on the verge of either crying, or collapsing into one of his cans of Guinness, and you can never quite tell which is more likely.

What stops this gig from only being a self-aware novelty for burnt out chronically online cynics, however, is that the songs are so catchy. You can genuinely sing along with ease to the likes of I’m About To Fall Over in Asda, and honestly, I do, as does most of the crowd. The song’s main riff, ripped from a daytime soap that exists only in fake memories of your grandparents’ house, is infectious, and feeds in perfectly into a chorus that is somewhere between a song written on a napkin on a drunken night out, and a bona-fide indie anthem. And then, of course, you’ve got Brown’s big hit, none other than I’m Quitting Prozac to Continue Drinking. A disco track in practice, though maybe not in theory, the wobbly bass synth line gets the people in front of me jumping up and down without much irony remaining, because it’s actually a really good song, even underneath the tale of booze as a preferable alternative to SSRIs that got it meme recognition in the first place. If I was going to be lazy, I’d possibly call it a new generation’s Ocean Man, for the extent to which it successfully meshes absurdist comedy with hook-laden songwriting. That song really has no right to be as good as it is. 

Throughout the set, he also plays Rat in Bin no less than four times, beating out night one’s three, a statistic gathered from a friend I ran into after the gig who had seen him the previous night. We assume this makes us his favourites, but he quickly clarifies that this is not the case and that how many Rat in Bins you get is dependent more upon vibes than any empirical system. It’s an interesting track to give no less than three reprises of: the imagery of a rat, desperately clinging on to his life as the concept of the bins being cleared away threatens to end it, is surprisingly visceral, leaving you with a lingering mental image of a clambering rat whose death is inevitable and entirely at the mercy of us, the careless human overlords. The inevitably of life being a shambles for human beings as well is a major theme of Brown’s work. Such classics as I’m Naked in my Room Huffing Nitrous Balloons capture the human condition in its most awkward, hopeless moments, with such a stark earnestness and self-deprecating sincerity that genuinely feels real, even despite the comedic value, with these tracks being the confessions of a man who is once completely at the brink of collapse and enough of a press darling indie star that he can kind of get away with it. 

It’s all a joke, yes, but the joke only works because we’ve all felt like this. We’ve all been the Rat in Bin at some point, and Jim E. Brown has tapped into something special by recognising the mundane misery of many facets of human existence, however he chooses to express it.

Liz Clarke

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Edited by Liz Clarke

Images courtesy of Jim E. Brown on Facebook