Part Three



The beginning of the End

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 Out". 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 TWO, 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 just 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, "Danny shrank more and more from playing the bloody thing the more alienated he felt - he'd say stuff like "Oh, why doesn't Ian play a solo on this one". Danny's at his best when 100% emotionally committed to the song he's playing."

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 guys 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 TWO 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.

continues at top of next column...

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 playerone 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 acquired the rights, 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 this album worth having, is the new "Glad To Be Gay". It now includes the following verse:

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, eitherit 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.

("On a 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. Our picture was on the front cover of Melody Maker eight times between August '77 and August '78... By the winter of '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.

STEVE GARDNER
for NKVD Online