Martin Luke Brown doesn’t do bullshit

When Martin Luke Brown arrives at the café at 9am he’s already been to the gym. What the artist hasn’t yet mentioned is that he’s recently joined the sauna-ing (is that a word?) train and, equipped with one of those hilarious sauna hats carefully tucked away in his bag, he’s about to max out on self-care after our chat. Brown makes a point of letting me know this isn’t a dogmatic lifestyle choice, though. He doesn’t judge me for having two large glasses of wine and half a packet of cigarettes for my dinner the night prior. “Delicious,” we agree.

Eventually, we get onto what we’re here to discuss — namely Brown’s music career, which spans first getting signed after dropping “Nostalgia” (which led him to leave uni), working on a hefty lineup of collaborative projects, and being the only male member of supergroup FIZZ. And now? Brown’s return to solo work with his album, man oh man ! Looking back to “Nostalgia”, Brown sits somewhere between embarrassed and grateful for what came off the back of his debut 2014 track — he literally says “LOL” when I bring it up. “The idea of a twenty-one year old singing about nostalgia is so jokes,” he laughs, “like, you don’t know shit, man”. 

Perhaps more surprising than a just-about-adult making a music career out of something so shmaltzy is that Brown’s initial foray into music took place in his home town of Leicester. There he’d take to open mic nights (at “popping” smaller venues) with his pals. Even more of a shocker, though? The revelation of Brown’s church days. “My parents are really religious,” he says. “Like rock worship stuff but with loads of tea and donuts. That was, like, my entrance point to music.”

Beyond “clanking away” at his dad’s piano and avoiding as much music theory as possible as a kid (“it’s like reading a really boring book — my brain isn’t really wired like that”), the next major milestone for the artist was moving to London to study pop music and production. Brown describes it as “one of those nonsense courses that the government doesn’t want to exist anymore” Ultimately, he was more excited to be able to drop out of the course than to join it, and that was thanks to “Nostalgia” making waves. “I honestly think that was the last time I was truly excited.” He LOLs again. “I remember I was meeting a producer to potentially work with and my phone was just, like, blowing up. I don’t even know what was happening, but it was just going a bit, that song.”

And when Brown left music school, with him came manager George Baker. “He’s my rock, for sure,” he tells me. “We were both just kids. Like, what the fuck? We got labels emailing us saying they want to sign. It was crazy.” The reality, however, was a little different. “As soon as I signed it was horrible. Big pit of depression,” Brown admits. “I had all these expectations and they were just never [met]. You kind of go in and see all the plaques on the wall and think, oh wow, you guys really know what you’re doing. I’ll just outsource my own sense of intuition and do whatever you say. And that’s, like, a sure fire route to being fucked.”

Ultimately, Brown seems pretty relieved that he left the label when he did. “I actually think, if I was successful when I was 21, knowing what I was like and all the therapy I hadn’t done, I would’ve fully been an addict and probably topped myself,” he says. “It would’ve been so chaotic if it actually worked, so it is all for the best, for sure.” That too allowed Brown to sink his teeth into more collaborative stuff, racking up an impressive roster of production and songwriting credits with the likes of YUNGBLUD, Lizzy McApline, BTS (“that was fucking random”) and James Blunt. “I think I play, like, a good support role,” he says with a level of genuineness that feels kind of absurd for someone with over half a million monthly Spotify listeners on their own project.

Brown’s second wave of solo work, his 2023 album, damn, look at the view !, was an “accident” born from “dicking around” with his mate Matt Zara, who was equally as jaded with the “bullshit” surrounding the music industry. “I think we were each other’s safe space,” the artist says. “We’d just hang out and it was like we were fucking twelve years old again. That was really nice. You don’t get to do that very often.” It’s this laid-back approach that became Brown’s “pathway back into the artist thing”. “It was like, well, if I’m gonna do it, I’m just gonna do it in a really wholesome, easy way,” he explains. “I just fell in love with music again and I was like, I don’t have to do all the bullshit things. I can just do whatever the fuck I want.”

But impressive solo career or otherwise, you can’t really talk about Brown’s latest release without tapping into the FIZZ era, the supergroup Brown formed alongside friends Orla Gartland, dodie and Greta Isaac — another project that transpires to be an “accident”. “We just decided to book a week of writing and just see what the fuck happened,” the artist recalls. “We didn’t even have any intention of putting anything out. It was just like, let’s just do this for a laugh.” Another inadvertent album later and Brown landed his second major label deal with Decca. “It kind of did explode a bit,” he admits. “We’re all still really good friends but it was a mental era. I think we’re all still trying to figure out what the hell happened.”

It could even be said that man oh man ! is a byproduct of Brown’s time in FIZZ. “I was with three girls for a year, wearing makeup and shit — like kids TV presenters on crack or something,” he laughs. “I would say that’s a really strong pillar of my personality, but there are other bits, you know? That’s where the album came from — all of the stuff that wasn’t really present during the whole FIZZ time.” As the title of the album alludes to, man oh man ! is a decisive shift from that “girl-centric” time, “plugging in more to, like, my guy community”, as Brown summarises it. “I’m such a feminist. I’m so on board and so here for it, but I’m not a girl. I’d been neglecting that part of my life.”

What is the key theme of man oh man ! then? In some respects, masculinity. But Brown is aware that when that’s concerned, there’s a certain amount of sensitivity required. “I’m just trying to question it,” he says. “Within the more liberal space where I operate in ninety percent of my life, the conversation is generally around the bad things that men do.” He continues: “There’s so many things men could improve on, clearly. But it’s all well and good telling men what they should work on — go to therapy, learn to process your emotions, don’t be rapey – but there’s not many examples of what to actually do. I think, for all parties, it’s important that men thrive. If men feel like they’re demonised and are inherently bad, that doesn’t end well for anyone.”

And it turns out that the creative process behind man oh man ! was just as unfiltered as the sentiments contained within it. “We didn’t dick about with stuff,” the artist says. “We’d throw loads of ideas at it and it was quite messy.” About nine out of the album’s eleven songs were actually put together in a day, bar the odd tweak. “I’d listen to it and be like, oh, I want to change that lyric, or I want to change this. But, I don’t know, it just felt a bit wrong.” Essentially, the rawness reflects the “messiness” of that time in Brown’s life. “Everything was going on with the FIZZ breakup — I was moving house, my car broke down. And I was smoking so much weed, as well. The jankiness of it and it not being very complete, and it being messy feels kind of right. And I really like that for me.” With that, Brown picks up his sauna hat-laden bag and heads off to engage in an activity that is, probably, the exact opposite to smoking a bifta. After all, Brown’s “whole schtick is being free like that”.