Ian Brown ‘to team up with Marr’

Ian Brown (left) and Johnny Marr first met as teenagers in Manchester

Former Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown is planning to write

and record an album with The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, the singer has revealed.

The Mancunian rock legends are hoping to form a supergroup to write the soundtrack for a friend’s TV dramas.

“The idea is that Johnny writes the music and I write the words and the melodies,” Brown told BBC News.

Brown also wants to bring in former Stone Roses bandmate Mani or Happy Mondays bassist Paul Ryder, he said.

“We’ve got a mutual friend who’s writing a drama series. One of them’s about ticket touts, another one’s about grafters – kids who sell T-shirts and things like that – and another one’s about pickpockets.

“We’re going to get together and do the soundtrack for these dramas. We’d have to bring a drummer or a bass player in.”

Teenage friends

The pair have houses near each other in Lymm, Cheshire, but will have to fit the album in between their own projects. Marr recently joined indie band The Cribs and Brown has just released his sixth solo album My Way.

They first met as teenagers in the late 1970s, before their respective bands took off.

Marr recently told an interviewer that he had wanted to form a band with the singer when they were young, but was warned off because Brown was working with Stone Roses guitarist John Squire.

“He’s quoted in a book called The North Will Rise Again by John Robb as saying we’d seen each other around when we were kids, 16 or 17.

“He wanted me to sing and asked a mutual friend, but said ‘I won’t poach another guitarist’s singer’. So we’ve got to work together now.”