In the early 1990s, there was a certain kind of noise coming from Britain. It was loud, weird, and hard to put into a single category. Guitars were distorted, beats were taken from club nights, and samples were pulled in from places no one thought they would be. That crash sounded like the future for a short but really exciting time. One of the people who built it was Derran “Derry” Brownson.
Brownson, one of the founders of EMF, died on August 13 after being treated for a brain tumor that was cancerous. Fivety-five. The band posted on social media that he had died with the simple, sad phrase “Brother In Arms.” The words struck hard. In 1989, these people started something together in Cinderford, Gloucestershire, a small town that doesn’t seem like a likely place for a band that would go on to top the American charts.
Derry Brownson, one of the founders of EMF, was the official keyboardist, but that title never felt quite right. The band’s guitarist, Ian Dench, said around the time of their first album that Brownson liked the word “sample jockey” better. Think about that word for a moment. It was more than just modesty or branding. There was something real about how Brownson worked in it. There were no pre-set melodies or harmonic filler notes in his playing. In real time, he was putting together sounds from whatever was lying around in the early 1990s.
It’s all over “Unbelievable,” the band’s first single and the song that made everything different for them. Even now, it sounds like it was made by someone who liked both live music and hot clubs and didn’t see a reason to pick one over the other. A distorted guitar, a strong beat, keyboard hooks, and the recognizable voice of comedian Andrew Dice Clay were all mixed together in a way that sounds more like a club record than a pop song. In the UK, it got to number three. Then, on July 20, 1991, it got to the top of the US Billboard Hot 100. That must have seemed really strange to a group of young men from a quiet part of Gloucestershire.
It was their first album, “Schubert Dip,” and it went to number three in the UK and stayed there for nineteen weeks. This record is better now than people sometimes think it was back then. Plus, there’s a really weird part of the record built in. The first copies of “Lies” had a sampled recording of Mark David Chapman singing lines from a John Lennon song. Yoko Ono said no. The test was taken. The story shows how brave Brownson and the band were—they went with their gut and did what they thought was right, worrying about the results later.
He was still playing with EMF as late as May of this year, when he joined the band onstage in Frome. He had been living with a cancerous brain tumor and had surgery, so the fact that he made it back at all is the kind of detail that is hard to understand. The band talked about how thankful they were for those last shows. Even from the outside, it’s hard not to feel that way.
Along with bands like Pop Will Eat Itself and Jesus Jones, EMF was a part of a time in British music when the wall between guitar music and electronic culture was quickly falling down. What people thought about acid house and Madchester was changing. Samples were no longer just a technical trick; they were also becoming a creative language. Brownson knew that without even thinking about it. His contribution wasn’t just for show. It was building design.
He really was what the band said he was: a founding member, a bandmate, and a friend. His samples still sound like they were made by someone who really thought the rules didn’t apply, even though “Unbelievable” has been played on the radio for more than 30 years.
