Interview: Tom Robinson

Tom Robinson is back with a brand new (rather splendid) recording Only the Now, and he’s touring that LP across the country after some very well received festival appearances in the summer. The show stops off at the Cheese and Grain and Tom kindly answered a few questions for us: quick starters first and then a meatier main course. 

Slade or The Sweet?
“Slade had by far the better songs, they both wore ridiculous clothes and were fixtures on T.O.T.P. but The Sweet never wrote a song to touch Coz I Luv You (Jim Lea was and is a genius).” 

Recording or performing?
“Performing every time, recording is like having teeth pulled. Mind you working with Gerry Diver proved to be pretty painless – the musical equivalent of novocaine.” 

Radio 4 or 5 Live?
“To declare an interest: I only ever presented one programme on 5 Live (Where’s Dad – a Father’s Day special) whereas Radio 4 gave me my own Saturday Night series (The Locker Room) in the early 90s. So no contest – R4 every time!”

Small sweaty clubs or massive sunny festivals?
“Clubs – you get a better sound, and a better chance of getting hugged by good looking members of the audience afterwards.” 

What are you looking forward to most about the tour?
“Playing with the same storming band that made the album, they smashed it at the festivals we played this summer (Glasto, Green Man etc) – don’t take my word for it, have a look at our Latitude set.”

And what are you looking forward to least?
“The endless periods of ‘hurry up and wait’ familiar to all touring musicians.” 

The new record is delightfully eclectic in terms of style & sounds, and yet it has clear links with that first recording from all those years ago. How do you feel they work together, is Only the Now a complete departure or do you feel there’s some kinship between the two LPs?
“That first album in 1978 was – as one wag on Facebook put it recently – Only the Then. It was very much the product of the band that made that sound and the times it was created in. That said, the song writing is by an earlier version of the same person so there’s bound to be similarities. The present only really makes sense if you have some sense of the past that today has sprung from. But I’m bored shitless by nostalgia for its own sake – it has an unhealthy deadening influence on music, politics and daily life.” 

Speaking of all those years ago, what do you think was the biggest success of the punk/new wave movement?
“The DIY spirit – that sense of ‘yes, you can” that lives on in today’s online music culture. Creativity shouldn’t depend on the permission of gatekeepers. Punk said ‘here’s a chord, here’s another chord, here’s a third chord – now go form a band.’” 

And by contrast, what was its biggest failure?
“Its descent into conformity. When punk started it was a defiant liberation from the deadening norms of the wider society. ‘Punk’ itself was an attitude of mind that embraced ripped stencilled shirts, drag, makeup, pink mohair jumpers – it was a situation where everything went: Patti Smith, Wire etc. Within a year the identity of being ‘a punk’ had become just another uniform – a rigid dress code: black leather jackets, skinny bondage strides and Doc Martens. Everybody’s hair had to be spiked up, and all the songs had to be shouted in a near identical way. There was a huge appetite for something different, but a whole generation of lost teenagers ended up embracing just another identikit set of restrictions.”

Those halcyon days are now much mythologized and the events told and retold (often with a fair degree of revisionism), what’s the biggest misunderstanding about 1977 and all that?
“How awful those times were – National Front literature dropping through your letterbox, the Met completely out of control with the SUS laws, the arrival of mass youth unemployment for the first time since the war; the dog days of a discredited Labour government, fire fighters and refuse collectors having to strike for a living wage and Margaret Thatcher waiting in the wings for more of the same. Certainly the music scene was vibrantly alive and buzzing with creativity, but that was born out of desperate times and a sense of society falling apart at the seams.”

Looking back, what were both the best and worst things about being a musician in the late seventies?
“Best thing was that all bets were off and if you had an idea or a dream you could have a shot at creating it. If it wasn’t for punk, twenty-something pub rockers like Graham Parker, Ian Dury and myself would never have stood a chance. Also you didn’t have to be able to play or sing particularly well – which was handy for me at the time. The worst: the constant undertone of violence at many gigs – The Clash and Sham 69 were regularly followed by gangs of skinheads looking to kick a few heads in. That and the spit and phlegm hanging off your bass strings at the end of the night.”

And by contrast what are the best and worst things about being a musician in the 21st century?
“Best thing is the ease with which anyone can make, record and distribute music. If you have an idea or a dream you can have a shot at creating it – all you have to be is good. Worst thing: the ease with which anyone can make, record and distribute music. If you have an idea or a dream you can have a shot at creating it and not all ideas and dreams are equally interesting. It’s great that lots of people are having fun making music but the fact that there is an exponentially increasing amount of it competing for attention means that it’s still hard to filter out and find the genuinely outstanding new work.”

Let’s arbitrarily say that attitudes to the LGBT community scored 4/10 when your recorded Glad to be Gay; what score would you award now and what needs to be done to get to 10/10?
“If you’re measuring equality and mainstream acceptance for same-sex relationships (i.e. the straightforward L & G in LGBT) then a 4/10 in 1976 would give you a rating of about 20/10 today. We’ve come unimaginably far since then – way, way beyond my wildest dreams. Acceptance for the B – and especially the T – has lagged far behind however. In an ideal world “LGBT community” as a concept wouldn’t need to exist. Of course you’d still want social groupings among people with similar lifestyles and outlooks. But it would be great if one day we could live without the labels – if everyone could look beyond “what gender is this person”. To my mind the only thing that ought to count when two people meet if for them to ask themselves “Do I or don’t I find this person attractive.”

Finally B24/7 is compelled by peer pressure to follow the zeitgeist and ask you for your opinion of Jeremy Corbyn?
“The rise of Corbyn is the key thing – if it wasn’t him it would be somebody else. There’s a massive hunger for real change and accountability, which the support he’s attracted obviously reflects. But he’s not unique – look at the rise of the SNP and Syriza. People have had enough: if Scotland can break the mould of the corrupt old ding-dong politics, who knows what might happen here over the next five years. I’m all for the politics of hope.” 

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