Composer and lyricist Steve Brown, who has died of pulmonary fibrosis aged 69, had a career unlike anyone else’s. A musical theater writer, he co-created Spend, Spend, Spend (1998) – about football pool winner Viv Nicholson – which prompted fan mail, cherished by Brown, from Stephen Sondheim who called it “the first good British musical”.
As a comedian he worked closely with Rory Bremner, Harry Hill and Steve Coogan on TV shows and tours, most notably as bandleader Glenn Ponder in his Alan Partridge talk show Knowing Me, Knowing You (1994). Brown also produced critically acclaimed debut albums by singer-songwriters Rumer and Laura Mvula. The latter was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2013, a low musical prestige that you might have thought went further than the man who also wrote the Wonky Donkey jingle for Ant and Dec’s SM:TV.
But Brown made no distinction between his work for stage and screen, comedy and music – or even children’s television. “He took all the songs we did together,” Coogan said, “to a level where they didn’t have to stand for the joke to land. He said, ‘let’s make the music good too’. Why? Because we can. Because he could.”
Brown’s collaboration with Coogan lasted thirty years, after they met in the satirical puppet show Spitting Image, for which Brown wrote songs. It led to a well-remembered moment on Knowing Me, Knowing You, when a grumpy Partridge fired Brown’s character live on air (“You’re fired, I’m firing you. In fact… it’s already happened, you’re a fired man”); as well as a duet between Coogan (as his Tony Ferrino character) and Björk for Comic Relief in 1997 about an affair between a sleazebag and his au pair (“The memory lingers / You cook the kids’ fish fingers”); and a song – performed during Coogan’s touring show – that teases the comedian’s irritated gossip reputation: Everyone’s a Bit of a Cunt Sometimes.
Brown – “a very friendly man with very good values”, in Coogan’s words – was highly regarded by most who worked with him, largely because he himself was not (or did not find himself) in the spotlight. “Comedy’s best-kept secret,” Hill called him, although Brown did gain recognition, winning an edition of Pointless Celebrities (with Barbara Dickson) in 2021 and briefly appearing as Noel Gallagher alongside Jon Culshaw’s Liam in the television version of Dead Ringers .
While he played second fiddle to Hill on TV shows and tours, Brown was an equal partner – and close friend – to the comedian in their theater endeavors. Their 2014 X Factor musical I Can’t Sing, produced by Simon Cowell, was a hit with the critics and a flop at the box office. In 2022 their show about the New Working Years is Tony! (The Tony Blair Rock Opera) did good business at the Park Theater in North London and on tour.
Brown was born in south-east London, the third child of Margie (nee Sewell) and Len Brown. After teaching himself to play guitar and piano as a child, Brown left Bromley boys’ grammar school at 16 and played in a variety of bands on the same south London pub circuit that spawned his most contemporary David Bowie.
He got his break writing music for the West End and radio comedy, and when the alternative comedy wave reached its peak in the 1980s, Brown surfed it – in the Perrier-winning sketch group Writer’s Inc, alongside Smack the Pony co-stars, among others. creator Victoria Pile. , and on Radio 4’s late-night comedy offering In One Ear.
Work on Spitting Image – on which Brown joined his first wife, the impressionist Jan Ravens (to whom he was married from 1983 to 1993) – followed, and he was at Coogan’s side in the 1990s when Alan Partridge’s character took off took. Success in its own right came with Spend, Spend, Spend (co-written with Justin Greene), which – in its first West End production, at the Piccadilly theatre, starring Dickson – won the 1999 Evening Standard Prize for Best musical won. It “fully deserves to join Blood Brothers as an ‘up yours’ working-class entry among West End musicals,” the Financial Times reviewer wrote, calling it “the most glorious new musical I’ve seen I can ever remember.”
Brown struggled to replicate that early success. Due to rights issues, a musical adaptation of the film It’s a Wonderful Life never made it past its first performance at the New Wolsey theater in Ipswich. Brown’s two comedy musicals with Hill were a source of joy and professional satisfaction for both, but they did not flourish commercially. “My wife,” Hill said, “refers to us as the Flop Twins.”
Before his death, Brown was making plans with Coogan for an Alan Partridge musical and a stage adaptation of Coogan’s 2013 film Philomena. (A revival of Spend, Spend, Spend is in the works – as yet unannounced – for Christmas 2024.)
But Brown enjoyed his TV work – composing for Lenny Henry, the sitcom Not Going Out and Hill’s TV Burp, among others – and was proud to nurture the careers of Mvula and Rumer, whose debut album Seasons of My Soul a critic wrote : “every song sounds like a standard”. He was also proud of the careers of his sons at Ravens, Alfie and Lenny, who followed their father into comedy and music respectively, and benefited from his encouragement and insight. Brown later married actor Deborah Cornelius in 2010. His family remembers a man with a voracious appetite for learning, as well as mischief and play, who valued his achievements while believing he still had much to achieve.
“So what is life then? / What does it mean, what is it about?” Brown once asked, in a My Way-like song written with a wink for Coogan’s Portuguese lounge singer alter ego Tony Ferrino. ‘Is there a God up there? / Why is he there? What is he doing? / Don’t ask me. I’m not sure.” According to Coogan, “Every time I turned around on stage and looked at Steve, he was always smiling and laughing, even though he wrote a lot of it and had heard it all a thousand times before.”
Brown is survived by Deborah, Alfie and Lenny and his stepdaughter Manon, and his siblings Christopher and Susanne.
• Steven James Brown, composer and lyricist, born October 25, 1954; died February 2, 2024