Duncan Browne

As a boy, Duncan Browne intended to follow his father, an Air Commodore (British equivalent of a one-star Air Force general), into the Royal Air Force, but his poor health even as a youth precluded this as a possibility. Instead, he chose to pursue his interests as an actor -- he played the clarinet and studied music theory, but wasn't possessed to consider a career in music until, at age 17, he saw Bob Dylan in an appearance on a BBC drama called The Madhouse on Castle Street, during the American folk-rock star's first tour of the U.K. It was Dylan's guitar playing rather than his singing that served as Browne's inspiration and entryway to rock music. "Most people find that odd," he recalled in a 1991 interview from his home in London, "but I was interested in the way he tuned and played his guitar, especially on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan." In response, he bought a Yamaha acoustic model and taught himself to play in a technique that was heavily classically influenced. He spent some time busking around London and later traveled across Europe on 30 pounds borrowed from his father, before entering the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. During his three years there, in addition to studying drama, he kept up with his guitar playing and developed a greater command of music theory -- which he'd begun studying as a teenager -- and formed a folk-rock trio called Lorel. They were later signed to Andrew Oldham's Immediate Records and cut one single, ironically enough an original song that had the bad luck to use as its source the same Bach-originated tune that Procol Harum had utilized for "A Whiter Shade of Pale" -- Immediate saw no point in releasing the single, and the trio soon dissolved. Browne was able to salvage his own career out of the debacle, however -- he had...