A Life In Music: Mark Robinson. 40 years at the CBSO

40 Years at the CBSO, the Fiddle in 'Fiddle and Bone', dangerous flirtations with rock ...

I owe a debt of gratitude to a great Birmingham muso, R. John Webb (aka Ryan Webb, late of Rhino and the Ranters), who, when learning that I wanted to find a Classical muso for this series, suggested I talk to Foxy... a pal of his from Moseley, the proudly boho bit of Brum.  

'Foxy who?' I ask.

'Oh, I don't know his real name. But he's Classical' says Ryan.

'That can cover a lot of things. Which orchestra?' say I.

'Oh, the Rattle one' came the reply.

That started my pursuit. In due course we met up in one of Moseley's nicer coffee joints, and talked for hours. Clearly I was being sized up. But in due course, Foxy - Mark Robinson - who will absolutely not tell me why he has that nickname, agreed to be interviewed. 

So now, a detailed and fascinating conversation...

And the result is this podcast episode. You can jump to my podcast host to stream or download here, or you can head down to the bottom of this post to listen now.  

Very precise detail is what Mark goes for.  We covered an enormous range of topics. But as always in this series, if you put forty or fifty years into your craft, then you have the stories and experience.

The conversation gave me a chance to look at the life of a musician in a BIG outfit. Orchestras can run to 90 or more, so touring a band like that is a bit more than assembling a road crew. The logistics must be a nightmare.

The Prince of Wales

The Prince of Wales in Moseley, Birmingham has played a considerable part in this podcast episode. The Prince is a Moseley musicians' watering hole, with a long history of live music, and in whose snug we captured most of the conversation. 

Mark made mention of a benefit which took place in 2005. This was for the legendary Steve Ajao, whose podcast episode is here. I am indebted to Reed Alan, who filmed the benefit performance, and who has kindly allowed me to embed this video clip here.

Lives in Music

The Lives in Music podcasts celebrates people who have spent a lifetime in music. They may be famous; they may be people who have spent their lives working in the background for the love of it. But they all have stories. Listen here:




The intro and outro music in this series comes from the great bass player Mike Hatton, who you can hear interviewed in series 1, here. 'Everything Changes' is included in his excellent 2019 album 'Bassic Salvation'. Follow the album link for more :-)

Published in Series 2  (series 1 episodes listed here)

1 - Brian Travers of UB40
2 - Ricky Cool
3 - Mark 'Foxy' Robinson of the CBSO
4 - Roy Adams
5 - Gavin Monaghan of Magic Garden studios 
6 - John Mostyn
7 - Stewart Johnson: taking UK Country back across the pond
8 - Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention
9 - Roy Willams (JB's, Little Acre, Weapon of Peace, Robert Plant)

10 - Simon Duggal (Simon & Diamond, Apache Indian, Shania Twain, Desi Beats)

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A Life In Music: Gordon Giltrap

One of our finest craftsman. A fine guitarist and a really nice guy.

Imagine sitting right down in front of a terrific guitarist while he plays for you. It's an amazing privilege.

One of the things I try to do in the Lives In Music podcast series is to persuade my guests to include a little bit of live music as part of the conversation. That's tricky with, say, drummers, of course, so it doesn't always happen. 
But it happened here. Gordon was generous to a fault with his time.

Gordon Giltrap may be best known for his 'Heart Song' classic, but there is so much more to the man that that. Here, Gordon deconstructs some classic songs, plays some of his own material, and tells tales of his days as a wide-eyed teenager watching Paul Simon demo 'Bookends' to a folk club audience. 

This is a companion post to Lives in Music Podcast 9, featuring Gordon.
You can download it here, or scroll down to stream it from the bottom of this  page.

Gordon was playing as a scrap of a teenager in a scene that defined the best of UK 60s and 70s folk. He's still playing today, with boundless enthusiasm.

Links

Gordon Giltrap's website and facebook page carry details of his custom guitars, gigs, a freshly published biography and lots more.

There's a ton of iffy facebook clips, shot mostly on wobbly hand-held phones, of Gordon playing live. Some are good; most are bad and don't do you or Gordon any favours. For some 70s vintage, here's Gordon on Top of the Pops in 1977

And if you love the sound of Gordon's guitars, here's the Fylde Guitars website.

Lives in Music

The Lives in Music series celebrates people who have spent a lifetime in music. They may be famous; they may be people who have spent their lives working in the background for the love of it. They all have stories.

The theme music for this series is by Big Q Fish. 'Boksburg Jive Toon' was written by Brian Neil, and recorded at the Jam House, Birmingham, in 2017.

Don't forget to subscribe!

Also published in Lives In Music  

all with show notes and music links 

1 - Ruby Turner 
2 -  Steve Ajao
3 - The Men Who Make Mellotrons
4 - Mike Hatton
5 - Horace Panter
6 - Jasper Carott   
7 - Sam Slater
8 - John Patrick
10 - Jim Simpson


The Podcast

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A Life in Music: Horace Panter

Horace Panter and music. Where do you stop?

I really can't remember first chatting with Horace Panter, but it might well have been in 1978, when the Specials played at Birmingham University. 

They were at that fantastic phase in a new band's career, when the band has gelled, strings of gigs have knocked them into shape, and the whole point of the exercise seems to be coming together in an exciting way. I asked them if they would do a session for the old BRMB Radio that night.

If not then, it would have been at the now long-gone Outlaw Studios, when the band squeezed six songs out of that three hour session for BRMB. I went on air with those songs the next day. That probably makes me the first DJ to have played the Specials on radio, by the way. Jerry Dammers left the session in a grump once his vocals were down, but Horace was the soul of patience and courtesy. And it's been that way ever since.

Talking music with Horace is completely engrossing and serious fun. It was really, really enjoyable. And, d'oh, I learned something about basslines for Time is Tight and Rescue Me. Marvellous for my age, me. We veered off my initial Lives In Music track, and wound up gossiping about all sorts of things, as you'll hear. You can get the podcast here, or go to your favourite podcast supplier to grab it. Or skip down to the bottom of this page to stream from this blog page. 

Music Links

Needles and Pins - The Searchers
Fifth Dimension - The Byrds
All or Nothing - Small Faces
Judy in Disguise With Glasses -John Fred & his Playboy Band 
Rescue Me - Fontella Bass
Time is Tight - Booker T and the MGs
Nite Klub - The Specials
Blank Expression - The Specials
Whiter Shade Of Pale - Procol Harum
Gangsters - The Specials
Monkey Man - Toots and The Maytals
Ghost Town - The Specials
Okie From Musgokee - Merle Haggard
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down - The Band
Willin' - Little Feat
Six Days On The Road - Taj Mahal
BHS - Sleaford Mods
Wind Whispers - Pete Williams

Band Links

The Specials website and wikipedia page
Horace Panter on facebook
Horace Panter Art on facebook and website

Lives in Music 

The Lives in Music series celebrates people who have spent a lifetime in music. They may be famous; they may be people who have spent their lives working in the background for the love of it. They all have stories. Lives in Music is a Radio To Go production.

Don't forget to subscribe!

The Podcast

 

Also published in Lives In Music  

1 - Ruby Turner 
2 -  Steve Ajao
3 - The Men Who Make Mellotrons
4 - Mike Hatton 
6 - Jasper Carott   
7 - Sam Slater 
8 - John Patrick
9 - Gordon Giltrap
10 - Jim Simpson


The theme music for this series is by Big Q Fish. 'Boksburg Jive Toon' was written by Brian Neil, and recorded at the Jam House, Birmingham, in 2017.

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It was fifty years ago today! The merchandise is here to stay!

Tell me about the good old days, son...

This is an excerpt - the whole flyer is below

One of Birmingham's finer music DJs, Dylan Gibbons, son of Steve, has dug out a lovely flyer and put it up on Facebook. It lists acts playing the long-gone Barbarellas in Spring 1974, 43 years ago. I was at the (also long-gone) BRMB Radio then. I interviewed some of those acts on air before they headed to the gig. My show ran from 7-10 at night; the timing worked. The complete flyer, with amazing spelling errors, is available to enjoy a bit down this post: you can see Queen, at the start of their run, and Cockney Rebel too. 

But check the March acts, in the detail above. From March 28 to 30, Bill Haley and the Comets played. Then, Hayley was at the tail end of his career, aged 49 or so; he died at 55. At his peak, he played the Birmingham Odeon, in 1957. Haley it was who had the very first rock and roll hits, in 1953 and 54. Then Elvis came along and blew him out of the water.

Nostalgia kept Haley in business. And look! The very next day, a few years into his career, there's Steve Gibbons. Steve, of course, is still gigging now. How brilliant is that? The entire historic timespan of rock music, from 1953 to now, captured quite by accident on a playbill from two generations back.

The Nostalgia business. Ker-ching.

Floyd Cans! £379! Bargain!

It's lovely to look back at those days. Nostalgia's great fun. I do, however, get ticked off at the nostalgia industry. The Victoria and Albert museum in London makes a bundle putting on artsy nostalgia shows, generally about acts they wouldn't have given the time of day to when those artists were at their peak. In 2013, the show was David Bowie, and the merch page is still up on site, with goodies at eye-watering prices - £125 get you an album cover print; Bowie vinyls are £25 a pop. 

This year, it's Pink Floyd. Step right up, £20 gets you in the door, so you can be told all about it. Exit through the gift shop – where pink Pink Floyd headphones go for a mere £379, and a Dark Side Of The Moon cycling jersey is a snip at £85. Bargain! Have a cigar! That's some considerable distance from one of the albums of my student days, Ummagumma, half of which was recorded in front of maybe 200 souls at Mothers in Erdington.

Brace yourselves, though: Sergeant Pepper is now fifty years old. So there's shows on TV with learned and earnest experts. Just out: a 6-CD reissue package. While the Beatles had, by 1967, long since moved out to country estates in the south, Liverpool, logically, is putting on a summer series of events. Most of them are free, which is fair enough.

Thing is, I remember the day the album came out. We lapped it up, of course – the Beatles were ours – but it was part of our lives, not some pumped up deal, it wasn't a marketable experience. We were kids, it was our music, end of. The Beatles weren't gods; they were just good guys, our good guys. The marketing-driven reverence now being afforded the band, and which shoots though the poshed up Bowie and Floyd museum offers like a lucrative golden vein, simply wasn't there.

That deification of things past is there for commercial purposes. It's only another way to squeeze yet more money out of the original product, after cassettes, CD reissues, repackaging, remastering and more. With this reverence come the priests of pop culture: the writers, the experts, the pundits, the curators, generally quite a lot younger than the audience this music was first made for. Of course, that's nothing new – as long as I can remember, we've had fresh-faced jazz pundits explaining Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk, Wagner experts, Sinatraphiles, ready to explain it all.

Who knew? Well, we did, actually. 

Only now, I'm taking it personally. I'm being lectured about the music of my youth, the stuff I grew up with, by people who weren't born when it came out. And I'm sorry, that does piss me off. The music? It was and is brilliant, and it lives on. 

But its longevity and charm provides platforms for more revenue generation and pundit career development. The people who paid for that music in the first place are no longer part of the equation. 

I'm not saying pundits 25 years younger than me can't have valid or interesting takes on the music, mind - of course they can. There's always room for a fresh perspective. But that room only exists because of the nostalgia industry.

Meantime, looking at that frayed old 1974 flyer for those bands at Barbs, I'm thinking of the bands of the day, and exactly how great that classic Gibbons line-up was (the current one's pretty damn good, too). But there's no money to be made, or careers to build, out of that scene. The V and A won't come calling; fresh faced music scribes won't prance down Broad Street expounding to camera on how great it was.

But I bet they're working on those Police and Dire Straits shows right now, for some time next decade. Peter Gabriel and Genesis? That's an obvious one. What price a Coldplay retrospective for 2030? 

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I still do radio stuff on Brum Radio, a volunteer-run internet station. Listen online here; download the Brum Radio app here. My Brum Radio page is here; scroll down for all the shows. 

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