When Arthur Brown was arrested for performing in the nude: “I love Italian justice”
Stripping off probably isn’t the first thing you think of when envisioning Arthur Brown’s live spectacle.
The immediate image flashing to mind is likely a flamboyantly robed, war-painted sorcerer balancing a flaming helmet, burned into rock lore with his UK number one hit ‘Fire’. A central figure of the counterculture around his surprise pop smash, Brown, with his Crazy World band or Kingdom Come, has towered tall in music’s fringes, still dropping albums and playing shows some 60 years later.
The original shock rocker, Brown’s artful brew of arresting psychedelia and garage lysergia sounded like absolutely nothing else around him. Neither was there such highly-charged theatre. Glam was way off, Kiss had yet to don their greasepaint, and Alice Cooper was still a floundering hippy dregs outfit yet to find their horror niche.
Screaming Lord Sutch was too camp and ever to take seriously, but Brown felt like the real deal, an explosive, kaleidoscopic plume of glowing inferno, injecting some danger into a flower power scene at times a little too listlessly peace and love for Brown’s liking.
Efforts to get the pulse racing naturally demanded some full frontal nudity. TV had been treated to his top half, quite possibly the first performer to ever mime on BBC’s Top of the Pops topless, but live shows would often feature his naked self exposed to the lucky audience.
All part of the transgressive theatre and heady days of the counterculture. Local authorities failed to see the artistic merit, however, resulting in the long arm of the law landing Brown in hot water during the peaks of his provocative shock shtick.
The year was 1970, and Brown found himself sharing a bill with the likes of Aretha Franklin and Duke Ellington for Italy’s Palermo Pop Festival in July. Playing the Saturday, Brown sought to bare all as part of his act, tossing aside his red cape and satin trousers, save his trusty burning headpiece, and unleashing his maniacal dance ritual as naked as Adam. Lost in his spectacle, the aghast police personnel swiftly nabbed Brown by the arm, escorting him off the stage to a reported mix of Sicilian cheers and boos.
Police Commissioner Boris Giuliano didn’t take kindly to a naked Yorkshireman summoning fire in the middle of the city’s Stadio Comunale della Favorita, detaining Brown for a week at the historic Ucciardone prison. “I tried to argue that the witnesses for the prosecution who believed I’d been naked didn’t have good eyesight, and I was actually wearing flesh‐coloured underpants,” he told Prog in 2014. “The judge told me that he might have believed me – except for all the photos taken, which proved I was wearing nothing!”
Bang to rights. Deported from the country and instructed to never come back to Sicily, Brown was able to look back and see the funny side, as well as doff his flaming helmet to the country’s lax perceived law and order. “I love Italian justice,” he stated. “The facts don’t matter. Whoever has the better story wins!”
