Ian Brown does it his way

Former Stone Roses front man Ian Brown releases his sixth album, My Way, next week and is preparing for a tour which comes to Birmingham in December.

The indie icon will be appearing Birmingham O2 Academy on Friday, December 18, 2009. Tickets are £24 plus booking fees.

Brown says he is delighted with My Way, a largely autobiographical album.

"I feel it's my best work, yeah," he says. "I certainly put the hours in. I started writing it about this time last year, not constantly, but on and off. We worked right through the winter, started recording it in early spring and finished it on July 7th, so we've gone through all seasons."

Brown explained how the album took shape. "The first song we wrote was Vanity Kills and Dave McCracken who co-wrote it - who I co-wrote Dolphins Were Monkeys with as well - he was signed by Roc Nation and was asked to write a song for Kanye West.

"Amanda Ghost wrote the melody, Dave wrote the music and they wanted me to write some lyrics and it had to be a sort of autobiographical song for Kanye. So we had a few pow wows and Amanda told me about him 'cos she knew him and Amanda texted him while I was there and said 'Kanye, I've got Ian Brown to do the lyrics' and I was made up 'cos he texted straight back and said 'Ian Brown-Stone Roses, hell yes' and I was like, fantastic.

"So we wrote him a song but we were a little bit late with sending it in and Amanda had said it's gotta be like a 'My Way' for Kanye, so I took that and thought, right, I'm gonna keep that for myself, I really like it. So that gave me the brief to make the album like 'My Way'.

"Me and Dave were also asked to write a song for Rihanna - Stellify, Brown's new single - and after finishing it, even though she could probably sing it better, I thought 'I'm gonna keep this', so I kept it.

"That set us off then, we thought, right it's gonna be a 'My Way' album - I'm gonna write about my life in music. I'm gonna write about coming off the dole, going into music, what happened along the way. That was my brief."

Although Brown has insisted that he is "anti-nostalgia" the album's lyrics see him revisit his past, including his years fronting the Stone Roses.

"It's not nostalgia to me, it's my life and all things come around," he says.

"There's a point to everything and everything comes around in a circle eventually. By nostalgia I mean repackaging, remastering, reselling, squeezing a lemon. That made me think about the Roses, as I've never addressed them in songs before. It was easy. I feel great about the Roses, I don't feel bad about it."

My Way is also noteable for including a version of Zager & Evans' 1967 hit In the year 2525.

Brown says: "I wanted to write a song about global warming 'cos I've not heard anyone sing a proper song about global warming or the effect that it's going to have being the end and everything.

"So I then had to come up with a song that's better than In The Year 2525. Them lyrics were written 40 years ago but they still resonate as powerfully today as they would have done then.

"I couldn't manage it and didn't come up with a tune that was better than that, so I thought 'Well, you know what? I've got a Mariachi sound sometimes anyway, so if I got a trumpet on it I could make it sound like one of my own songs anyway'."

* Ian Brown was talking to Holly Wild

* Visit www.ianbrown.co.uk