Brown Belter

FORMER Stone Roses legend Ian Brown has hit back at critics who mock his singing - saying his success proves he must be doing something right.

Brown has faced claims that he can't perform live ever since Madchester gods The Stone Roses' 80s heyday.

"It just makes me laugh when people say I can't sing," he told Rated. "All of my solo albums have gone in the Top Five, I'm about to play the biggest arena in my home town Manchester for the fourth time, and about 10 different magazines say the first Roses' album is the best record ever made. I must be doing something right!

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"If I tried to be an opera singer, fair enough," laughs Brown who has just recorded new album My Way. "But I go and see other bands live all the time, and their singers are no better than me."

But even Brown, 46, has tried a bizarre new tack on his new single Stellify - pretending he was R and B sensation Rihanna.His longtime songwriting partner Dave McCracken was invited to pen tunes for Rihanna's last album Good Girl Gone Bad, and asked Brown to help out.

"What me and Dave came up with was so good, I wasn't giving it to anyone else," he admits. "It was brilliant, imagining I was Rihanna when I was writing it. It's given me a really different groove than I might have tried out otherwise.

"I can see myself retiring one day. Morrissey said recently 'There's only so much you can say about yourself' and I agree with that. I'd like to write for other people eventually, like Beth Ditto from Gossip.

"She's got an amazingly powerful soul voice, but I don't think her songs have been as good. She needs a more dangerous type of song, and I might be the man to write that for her."

Brown's new album is hardly the work of someone contemplating retirement.

Full of swaggering dance anthems, it's the first record where he sings of the demise of The Stone Roses.

"Because it's the 20th anniversary of The Stone Roses' debut, I thought it was the right time to say what I feel about the band," he explains.

"It's incredible that kids who weren't even born then are going out and getting the first Roses record, but it's sad that one record keeps getting repackaged again and again. How many times can you scrape that barrel?"

Brown dismisses any talk of patching up his relationship with John Squire, the Roses' guitarist who he hasn't seen since Squire quit in 1996.

"I'm just not interested," he says. "I don't bear John any ill will, but I'm only interested in the present, and John is the past."

But he reveals he's willing to tell all in an autobiography that he might write soon. "After My Way, I've got one more album before my record contract runs out," he says. "And then I might find time to finish my autobiography.

"I've tried a couple of times before - got as far as page 60 and then I get the urge to make an album instead. But if I don't have a record company, I might give it a proper go. There's some proper funny stories I can put in there, I know that much."

There's no danger that Brown's three children, aged nine to 13, will follow in their dad's footsteps, however.

"The only thing they're certain of is that they don't want to be famous like their dad," he grins. "I don't think they want the hassle. They've got musical talent, but they're more business minded.

"My eldest gave me a pile of posters recently and got me to sign them so he could flog them at a tenner a time on eBay."

Despite having been a success for 20 years, Brown still doesn't take it for granted. "I think the reason my fans respect me is they can see I'm one of their own who's done good.

"By rights, I should be working in a factory, and I try to give thanks every day that I'm not.

"If I wasn't singing, I'd probably be some old rogue, sitting in the sun and trying to do as little amount of work as I possibly could."

My Way is out on September 28.

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