Part 2
Glad To be Gay...

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. "302.0", 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:

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. 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 nailed 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.

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.

continues at top of next column...

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:

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 by listeners at the Capital Radio Music Awards, 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 date the band's 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."

End of Part Two
Go to Part Three

STEVE GARDNER
for NKVD Online

LA debut, Summer 1978