JAMES BROWN INTERVIEW
He’s the ‘professional opportunist’ who blends magic, pickpocketing and hypnotic suggestion for theatrical and close-up entertainment. We talk bravado, creativity and the value of a magician’s mindset when it comes to hypnosis with James Brown.
I’ve written before about ‘The Rampage’ that baby-hypnotists embark upon when they first discover the magic of suggestion. Well, James Brown – award-winning magician, pickpocket, and purveyor of hypnotic suggestions – was a key figure in my rampage.
I became obsessed with inductions, believing them to be ‘the keys’ to the City of Hypnosis (spoiler alert: they’re not). I was seeking something less ‘alpha male’ than the ‘handshake induction’. And, as it turns out, if you spend long enough on YouTube, James pops up with all sorts of weird and wonderful inductions he concocted in his earlier years as a performer – from sprinkling someone’s face with water to, erm, rugby tackling them to the ground!
Kev has known James since the ‘change | phenomena’ conference days, and I’d gotten to know him via the UK Hypnosis Convention 2019. What first struck me about James was his bravado and creativity when it comes to hypnosis and suggestion. But since my time down the YouTube rabbit hole, I’ve learned a lot about the magician’s mindset. It was time to get James’s take on the intersections between magic, misdirection, deception and hypnosis...
We begin by talking about James’s background and journey into hypnosis. And it sounds like the hypnotic-suggestion sirens were a long time calling!
He followed his mum, and her mother before her, into a career in nursing, working as an auxiliary nurse in a nursing home, and studying psychiatric nursing at university before specialising in that field. But his talent as a magician saw him transition into professional performance in his 20s. Hypnosis seemed somehow relevant to his care experience and magic career, but there were three big turn-offs before he embraced it.
“I'd been doing magic for a couple of years, and, growing up, I'd seen people like Paul McKenna on television. But there was something about it that didn't sit right with me. While it was funny, I suppose from a child's mind there's the sense of, you know, it kind of looks like play-acting, and it's ‘unbelievable’, but not necessarily in a magical sense. I felt there was something… ‘grotesque’ is probably the right word… about this spectacle. It just didn't sit right. And it certainly didn't feel magical in any sense of the word.”
James dismissed it from his mind. But a heavy smoking habit since his teenage years brought him to therapeutic hypnosis. “I’d tried everything I could to control myself and go cold turkey and stuff. Then I did the whole Allen Carr thing – my parents paid for me to go to the live seminars three times. It wasn’t a cheap experience! But it would work for a time.”
This piqued his interest in hypnosis. But a magician at his local magic club, who did some stage hypnosis, put him off yet again. “I quizzed him about it and he told me, you know, the bare outlines from the perspective of you're doing this magical thing, you’re speaking to the subconscious mind and putting people into a trance. He was very much the vaudeville image one might have of a hypnotist – the hands raised over the subject, that Dracula thing going on! I just felt dismayed by it, and I kind of broke it off and left it again.”
Fortunately, a chance encounter with hypnotherapist Adam Eason* a few years later persuaded James there was something worth looking into. “It was because he wasn't a showman,” James recalls. “This wasn't somebody trying to deceive me in any way. This was somebody talking quite seriously about something.”
Finally, ‘the magic of hypnosis’ clicked into place. “I learned the basics from Adam and the magician in me couldn't shake this one particular feeling: and that is that every single time somebody explained how hypnosis was done, it sounded like the lie that a magician would tell when explaining how a magic trick works. It's absolutely plausible, it kind of rings true, and it sort of makes sense. But that's not what's going on.”
A request from a stage hypnotist to learn James’s pickpocketing skills resulted in an afternoon skills-swap in a bar. “I walked away from that, and – in a fearlessness that only really has ever pertained to my performance life – I just kind of walked out of one door, went straight into another room, found the first person I saw and just did it.”
James credits the ease with which he integrated hypnosis into his work to his background as a magician and, particularly, a pickpocket. “The thing that makes all the difference with pickpocketing is the ability to not give a shit. When you walk down the stairs and you just put your hand in your jacket pocket to get your keys to walk out the front door: you need to have that level of just not even registering what you're doing. It's that confidence, which is not the addition of some way of thinking or feeling – it is the absence of the concerns and fears around the situation. And that meant I could just walk up to somebody and hypnotise them. I didn't telegraph any anxiety. I didn't raise any alarms. I would argue that every great hypnotist I've ever seen has that one thing in common – that the sense of nonchalance.”
I think it’s fair to say that James both does and doesn’t care how hypnosis works. When it comes to the ‘doing of hypnosis’, how it works is immaterial to him and his participant. So he’s firstly a brilliant example of simply getting stuck in, and building a successful career and reputation from there. But he caveats a comment about ‘not caring’ how it works in the ‘doing’ context with his avid and active participation in discourse in the hypnotherapy and performance hypnosis communities. My sense is that James cares very much about the story, the nuance, the creativity and opportunism – the sheer magic – of hypnosis; friendly debates about, say, NLP or ethics are just a happy side-effect.
James shares an anecdote of a name-forget that shows his attentiveness to nuances of suggestion. “I just patiently repeated a name amnesia suggestion to somebody in different ways. And eventually it took, but I’d got it wrong up until then. It wasn't resistance. It wasn't persistence. It was simply, each time round, I painted a little bit more of the picture for him. I gave him the narrative, the story, the frame, and it wasn't quite right for him. So I added more detail. I just kept going until he went, “Ah!”. ‘What is it about this image that you don't like? Oh, okay, we'll get rid of that.’ And I just have the patience to keep adding that in.”
It was while performing at a corporate entertainment gig in his mid-20s that James learned to be mindful of the nuance. “I was doing some magic for this corporate event. And I did a bit of, you know, sticking feet to the floor, that kind of stuff – stuff I’d learned the weekend before! I was just going through the motions; not really understanding what the hell's going on, but enjoying it.”
The director of the company was a woman eager to participate in the entertainment. “She volunteered and really wants to be hypnotised. Apparently, she's been hypnotised before and was, she told me, a great subject.” James led her through an induction, suggestibility tests, and name amnesia and cataleptic statue routines. But he wanted to add an emotional journey to her participation, envisioning it culminating in hysterical laughter…
“I just didn't really think about it, but said something along the lines of, ‘As that wonderful feeling deep down inside you begins to grow and grow and grow, and then it just explodes out of you’. In my head there was nothing other than just wanting to laugh, you know, just: ‘explode with laughter’. She misunderstood the suggestion, because, for her, a wonderful feeling deep down inside that grows and grows meant something entirely different. And in front of all her work colleagues, she… proceeded to have a very loud and animated orgasm.
“I just stood there, wondering what the hell to do! I was mortified on her behalf, but she was having a great time. And I'm thinking: when she wakes up and is told what she's done, I’m going to be sued, I’m in real trouble here. Fortunately, it was a mostly female workforce, the boss saw the funny side, and the dynamics meant I got away with it. But, yeah, it was one hell of a lesson to be more attentive and to think carefully about what I say, and what the other person’s experience might be!”
This formative experience made James realise how powerful hypnosis is. “By that I mean how powerful we as human beings are, how we have the potential to influence others. That comes with huge amounts of responsibility. And on a serious note, I think it should give us pause to think graciously about what we do and how we do it. It does affect other people whether we want to pretend we live in a bubble or not.”
Wise words from a hypnotist whose favourite anecdote is of commanding someone to ‘sleep’ by simply slipping them the suggestion on a piece of paper! Hypnosis is mostly just suggestion – but suggestion is very powerful!
*Who’s now studying for a hypnosis PhD and so will soon qualify for a Cosmic Pancakes! academic interview!