Ian Brown of the Stone Roses can grant your wishes

Anyone who’s seen the movie Big remembers the scene where a young boy has a strange encounter with a fortune telling machine which grants him the wish to turn into Tom Hanks become big, despite not even being plugged in. Now, it looks like Ian Brown, frontman of the Stone Roses, can do the same for visitors of the Piccadilly Record Shop in Manchester.

You may well ask one question: why? Well, recently, Ian Brown released Ripples, his first solo record since he reformed the Stone Roses in 2011. And yet, the new album the Stone Roses has been recording since shortly before I started writing here remains unreleased. And the latest single for the album, “From Chaos to Harmony,” was released recently, and with it, this music video where Noah Jupe (the son from A Quiet Place) has a strange encounter with a fortune telling machine with Ian Brown’s face:

And kudos on the Clockwork Orange reference in the lyrics.

And for the record, that animatronic Ian Brown is not CGI; it’s real. After the release of the video, John Nolan, director of the video, took the machine, and installed it in the Piccadilly Records Shop in Manchester. Brown regularly goes there, not only as a customer, but also occasionally to perform, most recently in February to promote the release of Ripples.

Quoth the official Piccadilly Records Twitter:

.@ianbrown can grant your wishes now The actual fortune telling machine from his latest video ‘From Chaos To Harmony’ is in a corner of the shop now! Ace work by #johnnolanstudio who made the model/created the video and spent today installing it.

Unfortunately, the machine is only on loan, and replies to that original tweet suggest that it will only be there for about a week. What will happen to it afterward is unclear.

And since I figured it would probably have been better for the article to show the Ian Brown version of Zoltar instead of the genuine article, here’s the original scene: