Tom Robinson at The Joiners, Southampton (18.10.2018) with Rob Green supporting.
This was a gig I waited about 47 years for and then nearly missed out on. An email about an altered doors opening time the day before alerted me to the fact that only one of my ticket purchases was being acknowledged – I whizzed back through messages and bank records to reveal my intial purchase of two tickets was never completed. Arrgh! Schoolboy error. Braced for an embarrassing confession to two old school friends who I was meeting up with, I was relieved to find there were still a handful of tickets left on that night beforehand, and I was saved.
My previous Joiners visits have led to me detaling more on this smashing little venue here: The Joiners venue.
Support tonight is Rob Green, a solo singer – great voice with acoustic guitar and a lot of smiley personality. We head up from the bar area, making our way down the toilet corridor to stage left. I politely ask a chap to let us push by…. oops, that was Tom Robinson.
Rob Green gets the full house crowd singing along, gently – proper mood lifting warm-up of pop with soul. He has a new EP out, Manhood. He’s loving touring with TRB and he’s involved in the main set as well, later joining in with encores and before the brrak, on stage merch selling – just the sort of supportive touring relationship you’d expect from Tom Robinson.
It’s a long time since TRB (Tom Robinson Band) had their two big albums: Power in the Darkness (1978) and TRB Two (1979). At the time they had a huge impact and I remember so many people at school having the albums, walking around with the albums, wearing the badges. TRB were the ultimate protest band – gay rights, social justice, dodgy policing spotlighted.
(I’m here tonight, after a series of concidences, with two guys from my school, both into live music still and both I went over 40 years without seeing, until they turned up in the Dorset area.)
Tom Robinson is 74 now. He’s had a career in broadcasting – Radio 6, World Service, loads of programmes, but TRB as a band was quite short-lived, 1976-79 and then just a few brief returns to playing. The band with him tonight, not from the original group, are Andy Tracey on drums (Faithless’ drummer); Jim Simmons (keyboards); Lee Forsyth Griffiths (rhythm guitar/vocals) and a jaw-droppingly good guitarist, Adam Phillips. What a fantastic ensemble of talent here in this 200 capacity venue. Tom, as ever, is on bass.
Tom’s voice still has that gravelly protesting tone – I bet he sounds great with a megaphone in one hand at a demo. Bully For You and Too Good To Be True are familiar early ones to gently start tonight’s nostalgic protest, not that most of these issues have gone away over the years.
There is that clenched fist as part of their band logo and so many of the songs come with a clenched fist feel – there is still room for light heartedness mind, in songs like the ‘talkalong’ number Martin from The Rising Free EP from 1978 or Grey Cortina, about ‘the cars and the men that drove them that he used to lust after’.
Tom has explanations and introductions to contextualise his songs – it is a set of tracks nearly all from the two original TRB albums. After part one of the set there’s a 20 minute break (we all need one – it’s an old crowd, well my age and upwards largely) and the band push back and forward through the sweating bodies, disappearing into the Joiners’ inner sanctum somewhere.
The big tunes roll in through the second half. I’d forgotten I knew so many of these. The Winter of 79 (YouTube link to old recording):
“When all the gay geezers got put inside
And coloured kids was getting crucified
A few fought back and a few folks died
In the winter of ’79“
Tom introduces Blue Murder. “Who remembers a band called the Angelic Upstarts?” A rumble of yes from the audience. He referred to hearing their song, Who Killed Liddle Towers, and looking into the detail to discover the horror of a man beaten to death in police custody, before Tom wrote his own song. Tom is still spitting out words when needed.
Two more from the Rising Free EP: Don’t Take No For An Answer and the infamous Glad To Be Gay – groundbreaking stuff in 1978. To finish, is the highest charting TRB single, 2-4-6-8 Motorway. (I was surprised that the Rising Free EP with Glad To Be Gay on only managed number 18 in the UK chart.)
Adam Phillips’ guitar is fantastic throughout – the whole band is superb but Adam is over my side of the room and it’s hard not to get tranfixed on his playing. I looked him up later to see the impressive array of artists he has performed with: Celine Dione; Richard Ashcroft; Tina Turner and on recent Cher albums, for example.
The inability to leave the stage easily means a pause for encore level applause and then a restart. “This is the second of the..two hit singles we wrote” before arguably their finest work: Power in the Darkness. I thought that would be it – my old legs were tired – goodness how Tom was feeling up there, aged 74…. but there was more. Rob Green was back on stage to help out with a ‘disco’ song Tom wrote with Elton John: Never Going To Fall In Love…written to show solidarity with the disco movement in a time when a lot of negative, rascist, homophobic anti-disco stuff was flying about.
Lastly, a Tom solo number, War Baby, from 1982, after TRB had split up.
So glad I could see Tom Robinson live after all these years, decades. Respect. A man who has always been prepared to speak out, sing out, for causes and when he was up against the old 70s culture of Britain.
[No camera tonight – just a few phone pics.]
Gigs with Ivan 