The
original Tom Robinson Band: Ambler, Robinson, Kustow, Taylor
Strangely, the
band appeared on the scene as if from another planet with the bouncy hit single
"2-4-6-8 Motorway", a track that was about as political as "Little Deuce
Coupe" but had the kind of rabble-rousing English football song quality that made
people want the shout along to it whenever they heard it. When the song debuted in the UK
in the middle of 1977, it went to the top 5 of the charts and stayed there for over a
month. Newcomers TRB were on the cover of NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror
almost before they got to play their own test pressings.
2-4-6-8
ain't never too late
Me and my radio truckin' on thru the night
3-5-7-9 on a double white line
Motorway sun coming up with the morning light
(from "2-4-6-8 Motorway")
But Robinson
was not a newcomer; in fact he’d already been through a very tough initiation to the
music business and to life in general. Born in 1950, Tom was the son of a classically
trained musician who found rock and roll to be repugnant and made his feelings quite clear
quite regularly. Between pressures from home and the pressures of fitting in at his school
(the cause of which will subsequently become apparent), Tom one day attempted to commit
suicide by overdosing on a fistful of aspirins and anti-depressants. "When I woke
next morning", he recalls, "It took about two seconds to realize I was still
alive before bursting into floods of uncontrollable tears. I was so bloody useless I
couldn't even manage to kill myself. It felt as if something had snapped - it took about
half an hour just to get my socks on, and facing another day at school was utterly beyond
me. They took me off to the psychiatric wing in Cambridge, where they made me change into
pyjamas and get into a bed, and started taking my pulse and temperature, and giving me
plastic cupfuls of pills - standing over me to make sure I swallowed them. And those pills
were just the pits: they made you woozy and hazy so you couldn't think straight - a kind
of chemical cosh to keep you quiet."
After several
weeks of this treatment, one of his teachers from school arranged to have him be seen at a
therapeutic community for disturbed adolescents called Finchden Manor, a huge Elizabethan
manor house that was home to 50 other boys. Says Tom: "There were no locks on the
doors, no lessons, and no punishments. The therapy was simply the friction of everyday
communal life." At the end of an afternoon of looking at the place and talking to
people there, Tom and his father went back to see the man who ran the place. "He told
me they were fully booked, with a big waiting list - and in any case they didn't normally
take boys as disturbed as me. Then quite suddenly he turned to me and said "do you
want to come?" and it was my one chance, my one deciding moment to choose life, with
all its dangers & excitement of the unknown - rather than going back to the familiar
suffocation of home, school and despair. so I said yes, went back to school to pack, and
stayed at Finchden six years."
"I can't
tell you how thankful I am now, many happy years later, that my suicide attempt
failed."
A couple years
out of Finchden Manor in 1973, he and two other friends formed a folky sort of band called
Café Society, which seems to have been primarily driven by Tom’s bandmate Herewood
Kaye. The band signed with Konk Records, a side project of the Kinks’ Ray Davies.
Robinson was a huge fan of Davies, and was crushed to find that Davies paid virtually no
attention to his label or the bands on it. After three years of slopping around, the band
finally got an album recorded with Davies as the producer. The result was released in 1975
and is frankly horrible…being such a big fan of TRB, I spent years searching for a
copy and finally found one. I’ve played it twice…the day I got it and today
while writing this. I suspect I won’t ever play it again. Tom sings only on one
track, "Such A Night", and he sounds like he’s trying to imitate Leon
Russell (and doing badly at it). None of the elements of TRB are present in any form; this
record has its roots in 60s hippy culture and has nothing to do with the coming punk rock.
Robinson has claimed that the record is in no way representative of what the group was
like, but he also describes Café Society as Three Dog Night without the backing band, and
that’s not wholly inconsistent with what’s on the record.
In 1976, Café
Society started work on a second lp for Konk. In October the project appeared destined for
the same never-ending delays and screw ups as the first record, and deciding the situation
was hopeless, Robinson quit. The whole business left a bitter taste in his mouth,
especially given that the contract he had signed gave Davies 10% of everything Tom made in
music for two years after Tom left the label. But it also gave him fuel for one of
TRB’s greatest songs, "Don’t Take No For An Answer".
I'd just
come from the country
Wide-eyed and naive
I signed on the line
I signed a long time
Now you won't let me leave... but you
Don't take no for an answer
When you've nothing to lose
Don't take no for an answer
Put yourself in my shoes
I don't want any trouble
I ain't after a fight
A well-respected man
You better understand, man
You're standing in my light
(from "Don’t Take No For An Answer")
"We had
no element of choice in Café Society", said Robinson in a 1980 interview with
Trouser Press. "We never wanted to be an acoustic semi-folk outfit; we simply
didn’t have any money, and all we owned was two acoustic guitars. No one ever gave us
any money, so we never got past two acoustic guitars. Also, we were quite green; a
combination of not having any money and not being hip enough to know what was needed. With
TRB I was broke, but at least I knew how futile it would be unless we borrowed and hired
and did a lot of ducking about to make sure we were able to play each night –
borrowed PA systems off other bands when they weren’t working. I didn’t even own
a bass until TRB had a recording contract."
As soon as he
left Café Society, Robinson began gigging in London with a constantly shuffling lineup of
musician friends backing him. The songs he was playing were in a new, confrontational
manner, and played with anger instead of being laid back. The press began to write about
what he was doing, and by the end of the year, he decided to put together a permanent
band. First in was old friend Danny Kustow, who had gone to Finchden Manor with Tom and
had known him for years.
Then they ran
small ads in the music papers looking for a bass player and drummer. At one audition, the
hopeful prospect had hitched a ride with a friend of his who happened to be a drummer. As
there was no one else to play drums, the friend sat in for the audition. At the end of the
night, the prospect headed back to answer more ads, but Robinson had found his
drummer…Brian (Dolphin) Taylor.
The maddening
search for a bass player continued, until one day 16 year old Mark Ambler showed up at an
audition. There were a lot of young teenagers in punk bands in those days, but Robinson
was already in his late 20s and the idea of playing with a 16 year old wasn’t very
appealing to him. But Ambler plugged in and start to play, and it was soon clear that this
was their man, so they signed him on. Except for one hitch. A couple days later, Tom went
over to Mark’s house (he still lived with his parents) to teach him the set. Mark
learned it all in no time flat, but then let on that he had an organ in the basement. One
listen to Ambler playing his Hammond organ and Tom decided that they needed to find
another bass player. Ambler would be bringing his Hammond to rehearsals from now on.
So the bass
player turned out to be Tom; not what he wanted to do, but he certainly was serviceable at
it. The band hit the club scene right in the middle of London’s punk explosion. Their
live shows drew rave reviews, and in the frenzy of major labels looking to sign new bands,
TRB weren’t going to go unsigned for long. Soon A&R men were popping in at all
their gigs.
There was one
slight problem. I don’t know how this article has gotten this far without mentioning
it, but, see, Tom has this, uh, this condition. Three-oh-two-point-zero, I think is
what they said down at the World Health Organization, wasn’t it? Oh, alright, the
bloke’s GAY! There, I’ve said it. But there’s more. See, unlike a
lot of gays who are pretty quiet about it, Tom didn’t try to hide it at all. And, in
fact, he wrote a song about it called "Glad To Be Gay" that is one of the most
convincingly angry and sincere performances you will ever hear in all of rock music. It
goes partly like this:
Read how
disgusting we are in the press
The Telegraph, People and Sunday Express
Molesters of children, corruptors of youth
It's there in the paper, it must be the truth... try and
Sing if you're glad to be gay
Sing if you're happy that way
Sing if you're glad to be gay
Sing if you're happy that way
Don't try to kid us that if you're discreet
You're perfectly safe as you walk down the street
You don't have to mince or make bitchy remarks
To get beaten unconscious and left in the dark
I had a friend who was gentle and short
He was lonely one evening, he went for a walk
Queerbashers caught him and kicked in his teeth
He was only hospitalized for a week
(from "Glad To Be Gay")
Not exactly
what the guardians of morality would consider safe listening for the kiddies at home! And
even some of the punk independents who were supposed to be willing to take chances shyed
away. Stiff Records president Jake Riviera called them "fucking queer music".
But EMI decided to take the plunge and signed up the band for an alleged 150,000 pounds.
Maybe they felt they needed to restore credibility after cutting loose the Sex Pistols, or
maybe they felt more comfortable with homosexuality than with anarchy. Who can say? But
TRB were on board and off and running, and for the next two years, they would make the
most of their chance. "Within nine months we’d made the transition from signing
on at Medina Road dole office to Top Of The Pops, Radio One, EMI Records and the giddy
heights of the front cover of the New Musical Express", is how Robinson characterizes
the band’s ascent.
Not everyone
was impressed. In Zig Zag, John Walters reported on a TRB show played to a packed and
ecstatic crowd at the 100 Club and said this about Robinson: "He could be the singer
who brings back talking records". In Rolling Stone (describing their song "Right
On Sister" in a review of the first TRB lp) Dave Marsh said "This kind of
strident proselytizing would be much better off obscured by feedback." And there was
clear jealousy from many of the other punk bands on the scene at TRB’s fairly
meteoric rise to popularity.
But whether by
accident or design, TRB had hit on a way to connect with people who would become firm
followers. They made leaflets and flyers about their political views and sent them to
everyone who attended their gigs. They gave away badges and made up T shirts with the
band’s clenched fist logo. And they played regularly at benefits for the popular Rock
Against Racism organization, where their lyric themes fit like they were meant to. In
short order, the band had a huge following. Says Tom: "As a broke, gay guitarist
scratching a living on the fringes of the music business, I inhaled deeply. My band naile
its flag to the mast of minority rights and set sail across the London pub circuit."
Not that it was as cynical as that may sound; Tom clearly had personal reason to believe
in a lot of what he was singing about, and the band really did care about the causes they
sang about. But, as he continues, "like all political pop, involvement with Rock
Against Racism was always a double edged sword. It was impossible to know if you were
exploiting your popstar status to further human rights, or merely exploiting human rights
to further your popstar status."
After the
"Motorway" single, their next record was a four song ep called Rising Free.
Recorded live at London’s Lyceum Theatre in November of 1977, it contained the songs
"Glad To Be Gay", "Right On Sister", "Don’t Take No For An
Answer" and "Martin". Now the gloves were off…the first two tracks
were blatantly political blasts that touched to the center of white male values, and while
"Don’t Take No" is actually about Tom’s difficulties with Davies, its
atmosphere has more than a faint whiff of tear gas fumes from riot police about
it…the song just rips and is one of the three or four very best TRB tracks.
"Martin" on the other hand, is a lighthearted pub song that just happens to
feature stealing cars, beating up police, and getting sent to jail for it. The crowd
can’t help joining in. "Right On Sister" got panned by many critics for
being too heavy handed, and while I agree that Tom certainly sounds more credible singing
"Glad To Be Gay" than leading cheers at a woman’s rally, if NOW played
music with this kind of energy at their meetings, I’d show up more often myself.
Danny Kustow’s leads on this song simply torch the place. The ep reached #18 in the
UK singles charts.
In early 1978,
TRB finally recorded their debut album, Power In The Darkness. With former Sex
Pistols (and before that Roxy Music) producer Chris Thomas at the board, they achieved a
dense and meaty sound that has the same explosive rhythm feel to it as Never Mind The
Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols. Tom’s vocals and lyrics are on a less
primal level than the Pistols, but his anger is close to a match for Johnny Rotten’s.
The big difference is in Kustow’s more piercing guitar sound and Ambler’s huge
organ washes, which have no counterpart in the Pistols. The UK version of the lp contained
all new songs, but in the US (on the Harvest label), the "Motorway" single and
"Rising Free" record were combined for a six track bonus ep that made the album
almost a double. What the US version lacked, however, was the bonus stencil designed for
spray painting the TRB clenched fist logo all over your city. Apparently, Harvest was not
convinced that the little notice on the stencil telling people that it was not meant for
use on public property would protect them from American lawyers as well as it shielded EMI
from their British counterparts.
With the
exception of "Grey Cortina" (another car song) all the new tracks were what
Robinson called "street fighting songs". In a June 1978 Trouser Press interview,
Robinson said that the key songs on the album were the title track and "The Winter of
‘79". These are both fine songs, but the killers for me are "Long Hot
Summer" and "Up Against The Wall". These two both have a lyric fury
that’s matched by the musical assault. The messages are simpler than on the songs Tom
chose, but that’s what makes them so effective; nothing at all subtle.
Consternation
in Mayfair
Rioting in Notting Hill Gate
Fascists marching on the high street
Carving up the welfare state
Operator get me the hotline
Said, father can you hear me at all?
Telephone kiosk out of order
Spraycan writing on the wall
Look out,
listen can you hear it?
Panic in the county hall!
Look out, listen can you hear it?
Whitehall… up against a wall
Up against the wall!
(from "Up Against The Wall")
The lyric
story of "The Winter Of ‘79" may sound a little contrived today; when it
was written it was a hypothetical look backwards in time at events that seemed quite well
within the realm of possibility in England’s then crumbling society. But the fact
that clamping down on the poor during the Thatcher years seems to have gotten the country
through doesn’t lessen the despair that many people had in those times and which
Robinson captured in words so well.
It was us
poor bastards took the chop
When the tubes gone up and the buses stopped
The top folks still come out on top
The government never resigned
The Carib Club was petrol bombed
The National Front was getting awful strong
They done in Dave and Dagenham Ron
In the winter of '79
When all the
gay geezers was put inside
And colored kids getting crucified
A few fought back and a few folks died
In the winter of '79
Back in '79
(from "The Winter Of ‘79")
One thing that
makes this song work well despite the flaw revealed by the actual events is that in
addition to looking at the political turmoil, there is still a place for the human side of
things, as the song announces "Spurs beat Arsenal, what a game! The blood was
running in the drain." Because soccer, after all, is as important to British
youth as rioting.
By now
Robinson had developed the knack of writing songs that contained a sort of a miniature of
class struggle; kind of like condensing Doctor Zhivago to a 3 minute pop song. On
"Power In The Darkness" (written after Robinson got a pamphlet in the mail
urging him to vote Nazi in the next election) he takes a cue from Peter Sellers and acts
out both sides of the struggle; first singing the call to arms and then filling the role
of the imminently reasonable evening news announcer reading the station editorial, which
goes:
Today,
institutions fundamental to the British system of government are under attack: the public
schools, the House of Lords, the Church of England, the holy institution of marriage, even
our magnificent police force are no longer safe from those who would undermine our
society. And it's about time we said enough is enough and saw a return to the traditional
British values of discipline, obedience, morality and freedom…
And at this
point, it seems like something in the veneer of civility and courtesy that this announcer
has always been able to maintain peels free, and in a sneering and increasingly agitated
tone, he continues:
Freedom from
the reds and the blacks and the criminals
Prostitutes, pansies and punks
Football hooligans, juvenile delinquents
Lesbians and left wing scum
Freedom from the Niggers and the Pakis and the unions
Freedom from the gypsies and the Jews
Freedom from the longhaired layabouts and students
Freedom from the likes of YOU!
(from "Power In The Darkness")
Although the
band would record another lp and continue on for two more years, it was at this point
where things peaked. Power In The Darkness reached number 4 in the UK charts and
ultimately won the band a gold record. TRB were voted Best New Band and Best London Band
for the year 1977 in a Capital Radio listener’s poll, but going forward the band
began the gradual disintegration that seems to hit all good groups. The first marker on
the road to ruin was that right after the album was recorded, Mark Ambler left the band.
"Actually", Tom says now, "You could go further and date the decline from
exactly that point. The circle was broken."
With tours
lined up to support the record, a new keyboardist was needed quickly. They recruited a
fellow named Nick Plytas, whose only recorded appearance with the band is on a live radio
show that was taped at the Bottom Line in New York City in the summer of 1978 and played
on radio in August of that year. Tom had been flown to the US earlier in the year for a
round of interviews in the US press, and now the whole band was over to show their stuff.
The gig was rough and raw, with Tom’s voice showing a bit of wear (not helped by the
fact that they did two shows that night and the second one was the one recorded for
radio). The band are plagued by Kustow’s guitar going repeatedly out of tune, but
they still deliver an energetic and powerful performance. Always praised for his
charismatic ability to make everyone in the crowd feel like he’s talking to them one
on one, Tom’s warmth shows through strongly on this show. He playfully teases the
music critics in the audience by pitting them against the everyday fans in a competition
to see who can sing the response to "Martin" the loudest, and he laughs and
stops the whole song when some punter calls out the response at the wrong point, saying
"Let’s try that again" and then backing up to give the guy a second chance.
He introduces "Glad To Be Gay" with "You don’t have to be black to
like Bob Marley, and you don’t have to be a woman to like Joni Mitchell, and you
don’t have to be gay to sing along to this song." There’s a bit of a pause,
and then in a conspiratorial tone he goes "But it helps!".
But by now,
TRB were primed for a backlash. You can’t sing such abrasive songs without pissing
somebody off, and a rock band singing about rights and humanity is an easy target once
they achieve success…oh, yeah, let’s hear about the revolution and the workers
from a guy riding in a limo and making hundreds of thousands a year. Sure, right!
On hearing
this view Robinson added, "More to the point, especially in England, you can’t
be that self righteous without pissing someone off. For as long as the hits keep happening
they’ll put up with it, but like sharks once they scent blood in the water
they’ll move in for the kill."
But it WAS a
bit of a trap; there’s no doubt (in my mind, at least) that when the band put
together their first set of songs, they were motivated by things that they really cared
about, and when they wrote songs like "The Winter Of ‘79" they were writing
about things they honestly believed had a chance of happening. This kind of music works
well only when it’s sung from the heart by people who mean every word of the message.
And that’s exactly why it’s so rare; there aren’t very many people who are
in a position to have the motivation to write these kinds of songs from the heart. Once a
band achieves success, acceptance, and a moderate degree of comfort, it’s very hard
to stay genuinely angry, and it’s impossible to stay as angry as you were when you
had nothing and were fighting for every scrap. It’s the rare band that has the anger
for one record, and it’s almost unheard of to keep it for a second.
Somewhere
along the line, once the approach was proven successful, the surprise factor was gone and
the band now had an audience of fans and media expecting them to keep pumping out more of
the same. Much later, after the demise of the band, Robinson related in a Relix interview
a story about how at one point a well known left wing activist named Blair Peach was
detained by police and died in circumstances that would lead many people to suspect the
police (Robinson states as fact that the police murdered him). Said Robinson: "Cynics
in the music business were saying "I’ll bet Tom Robinson is going to write a
song about that and cash in on it", and at the same time I was receiving letters
which began: "Dear comrade. We noticed that you have not yet written a song to avenge
the murder of comrade Peach. Why not?" At which point I said, "That’s not
what this is all about.""
He went on to
say "The fact that I can play guitar and write doggerel song lyrics does not make me
a qualified political commentator. I don’t know any better than 90% of the kids in
the audience what the solution to anyone’s problems is. I can only state my own
standpoint, which is anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-discrimination, pro-civil rights,
pro-women’s rights and pro-gay rights."
In Trouser
Press, Robinson made his position even more clear when Bill Flanagan asked him point blank
what his choice would be if he had to give up speaking out on politics or playing rock and
roll. Robinson paused for quite a while and then replied: "I’ve been playing
rock and roll for 15 years. I ain’t about to stop now."
An additional
difficulty in maintaining the credibility of the whole picture was that Tom was just too
damn nice. Sure, he sang about rights and justice and making the place better, but
we’ve gotten used to our leftist revolutionaries being pretty stiff and self
righteous, and then here’s Tom Robinson admitting (in a song, no less) that he really
wants a hot car to go cruising in. Some revolutionary, huh! It’s so much easier being
a conservative where you don’t have to deny your own human desires to be credible.
So with this
as a backdrop, and with a collection of 23 unrecorded songs, the band headed for the
studios for a second time. Once again they were working with Chris Thomas, and they laid
down some basic tracks with him, but then Thomas was scheduled to do an album with Paul
McCartney, and you can guess where his priorities lay.
Recalls Tom:
"Actually we could easily have made the whole album in the time we had available; it
was power games, untogetherness, laziness and in-fighting that stopped us making the album
there and then with Chris that summer. He kept saying "I’m going fishing"
and walking out of the studio ‘cos he was so pissed off with it. We were at Rockfield
Studios out in the country. And that’s exactly what he used to do – pick up his
rod and line and go fishing anytime we were untogether in the studio."
Looking back on their
dificulties, Tom say: "However levelheaded you start out, if enough people flatter
you for long enough, some part of you will end up believing it. After two hit singles and
a maelstrom of media hype we had all turned into experts. I began telling Dolphin how to
play drums, he told me how to write songs and everyone's ego ran out of control -
especially mine. We were a tight little band but we weren't that good. After "set em
up" comes "knock 'em down" and TRB's fall from critical grace was unusually
rapid and savage, even by Melody Maker standards. More hits might have made this easier to
bear, but where our first album had been written over four years, the followup now had to
be delivered in four months. Managers, publishers, publicists, record companies, even our
road crew now depended on us coming up with the next hit. Which we never did."
Somehow the
band hit on the idea of Todd Rundgren to replace Thomas as producer (their choice, not the
record company’s!), and Rundgren accepted. "Dolphin’s idea", says Tom.
"I didn’t actually (to my shame) know anything about him at that point."
But now there
were more problems. They’d already changed keyboard players again, with Ian Parker
replacing Nick Plytas. Now it turned out that Dolphin Taylor didn’t care for some of
the new songs; especially "Black Angel" and "Hold On". In the end it
was proposed to let Rundgren choose which songs would be on the lp, and all the members
agreed to the idea. But when Rundgren chose the two offending numbers, Taylor found that
he couldn’t accept the idea of playing them in tours supporting the record for the
next year, and he decided he should go. Robinson later confessed to relief that Taylor had
left before the lp rather than after, thinking that it would leave them able to tour
without a lineup change right after recording. In the CD reissue of TRB II, the
author of the liner notes says: "A key personnel change – new drummer – had
turned the band tighter and terser." Terser maybe, but in no way tighter and
certainly not as intense. Taylor was a great drummer; newcomer Preston Heyman was merely
acceptable. And he didn’t last long, either; by the time the band was touring to
support the record in early 1979, Heyman was already gone – replaced by a session
drummer named Charles Morgan, who had played for Kate Bush and John Otway prior to TRB and
has been with Elton John off and on for past ten years.
"Preston
was an expensive London session drummer", says Tom. He was only ever booked to play
on the album and paid by the day. His pic was on the sleeve only to make it look more
bandlike."
When it
finally was ready the new album was good, but it wasn’t the classic that the first
one was. Rundgren’s production pushed Kustow’s guitar back in the mix, and the
sound was more keyboard oriented. According to Tom, "Kustow shrank more and more from
PLAYING the bloody thing – "Oh, why doesn’t Ian play a solo on this
one". Danny needs to be 100% emotionally committed to the song in order to play a
decent solo – one reason he’s done so little since."
Without
Taylor’s dynamic drumming, the attack also lost a lot. Some of the songs still roared
along with that old intensity ("All Right All Night" and "Days Of
Rage" being the prime examples), and others provided some pretty gripping lyric
content, but it seemed like there was no song that really merged the two aspects together
as happened so often on the first album. Robinson collaborated with Peter Gabriel in
writing "Bully For You", which was released as a single (with the unessential
non-lp flip "Our People"), but it was a fairly plodding track that lacked fire
and went nowhere. Several songs included a gospel-like backing vocal section that worked
pretty neatly, but in general the songs had to stand on the lyrics a little more than was
good for them. Reviews were correspondingly mixed.
That’s
not to say the album was without redeeming qualities at all; "Sorry Mr. Harris "
has a fairly laid back and funky feel, but it tells a harrowing story of a police
interrogation with Tom singing the role of the investigator…perfectly reasonable but
also perfectly willing to kill someone if required. The idea of Mr. Harris appears to be a
tie in to a fantasy family that Robinson uses for characters in several of his
songs…Martin from the first album, for example is also a Harris family member, and
another Harris pops up (dead) in "The Winter of ‘79". "Let My People
Be" puts Tom in the role of a Latin American subversive (well before the Clash put
out Sandinista), and has a nice soulful feel to it. And although the lyrics to
"All Right All Night" are a little shallow compared to previous efforts, the
overall song is pretty anthemic and easy to sing along with, and the same can be said for
the strong effort on "Days Of Rage".
To support the
album’s release, the band hit the road in the UK in late March for a three week tour,
and then hopped the Atlantic for a North American leg starting in mid-April. They started
on the west coast in Vancouver, heading town to town southward to San Diego, and then
after a few dates in the middle of the country, off to the northeast. I was lucky enough
to see them play in San Diego in early May. As I recall, the gig was on a weeknight at the
old Roxy Theatre, which has since been torn down and replaced with a post office. Two
shows were scheduled (not that unusual then), one early in the evening at 7:00 and another
at 11:00. Only a tiny handful of people showed up for the first show…not more than 30
or so. I still remember sitting in the theatre in the near dark waiting almost and hour
for the opening act…a horrible synthesizer band called Gary Wilson and the Blind
Dates. They came out with flour sprinkled all over themselves and played with a dim blue
light on. Very depressing. Finally they cleared off the stage and roadies hauled away
their gear. More waiting. After 20 minutes or so, a group of guy comes down the center
aisle of the theatre, each carrying a case of beer. They peeled off cans and tossed them
to the folks in the crowd, me going – hey, what’s this? Then they jumped up on
the stage, grabbed their instruments, and ripped into their set…and despite no
Dolphin and no Mark Ambler, this was one hell of a great band on a very hot night. By now
my memories of this gig may have inflated out of all proportion to what really happened,
but I do know that at the time my impression was that I had never seen anything to compare
with it. The buzz I got from that show has only been approached rarely since then…one
of those gigs where you go home and dream about seeing the band and you keep recreating
the gig in your imagination for weeks afterwards. Robinson was the consummate showman; not
in some Mick Jagger preening sort of way, but because he somehow made everyone feel like
they had been his best friend for years.
They played
the bulk of the material from both TRB II and Power In The Darkness. My
primary memories are of a vastly changed reggae version of "I Shall Be Released"
and the play acting job the band did on "Power In The Darkness" where Robinson
sang the TV editorial part with a hideous rubber mask on. And then when the show finally
ended and the band couldn’t play another encore, Robinson came back out on stage and
said "Look, I’ve talked to the promoter and he says we only sold about 10
tickets to the second show, so if you all want to stay, you’re welcome to." So
despite having to sit through another dreadful Gary Wilson set, I happily did. Dragged
myself home at 2:30 AM, blissfully happy and not caring if I was going to be late to work
the next morning.
At this point,
though, TRB were pretty nearly finished. They were hardly a band anymore…no longer a
bunch of guys who got together and built something up together, but instead it was Tom and
Danny and two hired guns. This kind of situation is rarely stable, and when Kustow decided
it wasn’t working, the whole thing fell apart.
Robinson
always was a bit of an omnivore when it came to music. He teamed with Elton John to write
the disco song "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again" which was released as a solo
single (although the flip, an uninspired cover of a song called "Getting
Tighter", was done with TRB), and then when bands like Joy Division, XTC, the Cure,
Gang Of Four, the Monochrome Set and the Human League began pointing towards a new
direction that might fill the gap after punk, Tom was more than intrigued; he put together
a new band called Sector 27 and headed off in pursuit. Sector 27 made one pretty good
album, but were unable to escape the legacy of TRB. They got tons of press in a short
amount of time…probably as much as TRB ever got, but the questions were almost always
about TRB and politics and why didn’t Sector 27 do all those old songs anyway?
In a Trouser
Press feature on Sector 27 (entitled "Tom Robinson") Tom described the end of
TRB. "The danger is supposing that things changed once in 1977 and then stopped
changing; that’s certainly the trap I fell into. In that sense the breakup of TRB was
the best thing that ever happened to me. I have two principle reasons to be grateful to
Danny Kustow; one is for joing TRB when he did and the other is for leaving TRB when he
did. When he finally said "Look - this is a joke, we’re just going through the
motions" I was very upset and tried to get him to stay. When finally I gave in and
called it a day, I sat down and realized that the guy had done me the biggest favor of my
life; it was like a bucket of cold water at a time when I was just carrying on because
it was there."
And he now
says: "Having rashly believed all the undeserved public flattery on the way up, the
equally undeserved media vitriol on the way down was hard to bear."
After Sector
27, Robinson wandered off solo and toned down his style. He kept releasing records, but
his days in the spotlight were over, and the direction he was taking was even further away
from TRB…singer songwriter sort of stuff. Kustow also largely disappeared from view;
a shame, really, since he was a major talent as a guitar player…one of the
distinctive players of the 70s punk era. He and Mark Ambler played with Glen
Matlock’s band the Spectres (appears on a couple of singles) and did one US tour with
them. Dolphin Taylor joined Stiff Little Fingers and played on their Now Then album
as well as the Listen ep before they split up in 1983, and then played with them
again for a while when they got back together in the late 80s and early 90s.
In 1989,
Robinson, Kustow and Ambler put together a brief reunion tour and played two sold out
shows at the Marquee in London and then several dates on the European continent. A live CD
called Motorway was released (but not until 1994!). "Actually", says
Robinson, "This is a bootleg of an album called The Winter of ’89 –
a complete bastard called Ray Santilli renamed it, repackaged it and flogged it all over
Europe and North America, omitting the proper sleeve and sleeve notes, and the band to
this day don’t see a cent when copies of this album are sold. He even sold it on to
some fucker in Switzerland who repackaged it again as Power In The Darkness, but
luckily demand by this time was very low and I think they sold next to no copies, so not
many people have been ripped off with that. At this level in the food chain artists are
completely powerless to do anything about these kinds of abuses. We told EMI and they said
it was too small for them to bother pursuing."
Motorway has its
moments…in general Tom sounds too polished as a performer to be believable in the
role of a revolutionary any more. The songs that work best are the opening "Number
One Protection" and "We Didn’t Know What Was Going On" (neither of
which were in the original recorded works of TRB and thus benefit from not being compared
to cherished older versions) and a lyrically remade "Glad To Be Gay".
"The Winter of
‘79" also gets brand new words talking about the break up of the communist
governments of eastern Europe. I thought I was hearing Robinson glorify
"Noriega’s brave defense" in the new lyrics, but Tom quickly set me right
on this… "Doh ! Where's your sense of irony? It's always a danger indulging in
these kinds of lyrics, I guess. "Noriega’s brave defense" is in similar
vein to "The British Police Are the Best In The World" ! At the time of the
recording Noriega's "brave defense" was still fresh in everyone's minds - and
consisted of the old scumbag running off to a catholic monastery or something and claiming
sanctuary from what I remember." Knowing this makes me feel a ton better, and
I’ll now vote the new "Winter of ‘79" as a capital piece of
re-working.
The song that
makes it worth having, is the new "Glad To Be Gay". It now includes the
following verse:
Now
there’s a nightmare they blame on the gays
It’s ruthless and lethal and slowly invades
The medical facts are ignored or forgot
By the bigots who think it’s the judgment of god
Wankers like Etherton calling us names
The gutterpress dailies still fanning the flames
The message is simple and obvious, please…
Just lay off of the patient
Let’s fight the disease
(From "Glad To Be Gay")
By and large,
though, Motorway is too politely played and sung to be anything but a nostalgia
trip. Where the old TRB would’ve coming barging in with cans of beer for the punters
and a loud and raucous time for everyone, on the reunion they’ve gotten so polite
that Tom no longer admits to punching policemen on "Martin"…he just says he
tried to. And Martin no longer smuggles booze into prison, either. Trading the tinkly
electronic keyboard Ambler uses is no plus, either…it lacks the feel that was present
on the original version and is miles from the powerful Hammond organ sound used on many of
TRBs best songs. "Though on simple point of information", says Tom, "Mark
played Fender Rhodes electric piano on both "Martin" an "Glad To Be
Gay" in 1977!"
So that
concludes the story. A brilliant career, way too short, but perhaps no longer than it
could possibly have been expected to be. Why it is that today TRB are almost never
mentioned as one of the classic punk bands of 76-78 is beyond me. There was nothing the
Clash or Jam had that this band couldn’t match.
"Yeah,
posterity hasn't been too kind to TRB", says Robinson. "It's a kind of Stalinist
revisionism on the part of the UK press, which I think then sets the tone worldwide. We
were on front cover of Melody Maker 8 times from Aug 77-Aug 78... By December 79 they ran
a 4-part review of The Seventies In Perspective, which included punk bands like Eater, The
Cortinas and Slaughter and The Dogs. TRB was not mentioned once, anywhere. Even in
passing."
One could say
that it has to do with Tom’s being gay, but the music business is far more tolerant
of homosexuality than the rest of society, so it’s hard to believe.
"Nope, that just doesn't
ring true, does it", says Tom. "It's just showbiz, folks. Things coulda been
better but they coulda been a damn sight worse."
Maybe
everybody just forgot. Shoulda been there back in ’79.
