John Robb by John Middleham
John Robb may have one eye on the past, but he’s always looking forward.
Last year, author, journalist, musician and all round polymath John Robb released a book of select interviews accumulated over 40+ years working in (or more specially, around) the music business.
Its title? Do You Believe In The Power Of Rock & Roll?.
A matter of minutes in his company provides a comprehensive affirmative. A human encyclopedia, Robb doesn’t so much know about Rock & Roll, but is steeped in it.
We meet at Bristol Folk House, approximately midway through an extensive tour in support of Do You Believe In The Power Of Rock & Roll?, yet it’s a tour with a twist: the first half features John Robb rattling through how punk rock ‘ruined’ his life, while the second comprises an interview with a local creative artist.
The first hour flies past, Robb barely drawing for breath as he regales the audience with tales of his early dalliances with glam rock, how punk rock informed his outlook on life, through to encounters with Nirvana and Oasis.
To say much more would ruin the show, but Robb is an engaging speaker, astutely judging anecdotes that would be of interest and timing their execution expertly.
Unsurprisingly, Robb is equally engaging one-on-one. We spoke for an hour, but Live4ever could have spent double the time in his company, and barely scratched the surface of an impressive life thus far.
Demonstrating the skills that have made him such a respected writer, it’s less an interview than a conversation, with Robb asking as many questions as answering them, belying an authentic and obvious fascination with everything and everyone.
Tangents were followed by both interviewer and interviewee, and after a lengthy discussion about politics (“It’s all people my age and older. They’re washed up. This is their fear; the world changed without their permission. The younger people are honest because they have to be. Even if they don’t believe it, at 22 they surely think, ‘I’ve got no future’.”), and frustrations with our probable incoming government (“It’s like a band on their third album, you don’t have to go that pop!”), we eventually moved on to the tour itself.
“It’s a theatre circuit, so some of them are proper theatres,” Robb explains. “We’re about 12 dates in now. I was in Pocklington this week, near Hull, it’s a lovely town. God, it’s hard to get to because it doesn’t have a train station. Nice town, it’s a like a mini-York, but you have to get a bus there from York! This tour is places I’ve never even been to.”
“I didn’t book these dates but Phil Jones did, who does John Cooper Clarke tours, so he built him up through this type of circuit.”
Do You Believe In The Power Of Rock & Roll? was one of two books Robb released in 2023, the other being the lauded A History Of Goth, with a successful tour for the latter informing this venture, as he explains:
“I did A History Of Goth book tour last year and that went really well and had a good turnout, I did loads of them all over the world. Then Phil Jones said I should do a talking tour. I said that’d be a book launch too, to showcase some of things I’ve done and the conversations, so why don’t we just twin them? I’ll do one hour talking, and an hour of In Conversation. They’re both things that I do, but just in one evening. It makes it more fun.”
It’s an impressive roll-call of guests for the In Conversations, from Peter Hootton (The Farm), Paul Hanley from The Fall and fellow journalist Steve Lamacq. In Bristol, we are treated to one of the key pillars of local heroes IDLES, bassist Adam Devonshire.
“I booked all the guests,” Robb confirms. “It’s kind of people I know, or people who are interesting. I don’t super-know Dev, but I’ve met him a few times. I knew him before IDLES because he used to put gigs on at the Exchange. I saw him probably about 18 years ago now, but it feels like two weeks! It’s just going through who’s in the area and would be interesting to chat to.”
The Do You Believe In The Power Of Rock & Roll? tour takes John Robb all over the UK, with his encyclopedic knowledge not just reserved to music, and he has glowing words for the city he’s speaking in tonight: “You walk around the streets of Bristol, you can feel the cool buzz. It’s a hipster’s paradise, and I think hipster is a good word…being hip to things!”
Bristol is a great pop culture powerhouse, especially in the post-punk period onwards. From The Cortinas through to The Pop Group, all the way through to Massive Attack. I know 3D a little bit, and he’s like an old punk. I actually wrote about them when they were the Wild Bunch, for Sounds. I was the only person writing about them then. I liked what they were doing, but 3D was talking about great affection about the days with the Cider Punks in Bristol. What a dude!
Sounds is one of the many outlets John Robb has written for, from starting his own fanzine in the 1970s all the way to the present day with his website Louder Than War.
It’s an impressive career, even if he playfully scoffs at the word. “You’re using words that make it look like it was all planned!,” he laughs. “It’s totally hap-hazard, you just get up in the morning and do your stuff over loads and loads of years, which you never think about, and all of a sudden it looks like a pattern!”
“Now people in journalism do have careers, and so do bands. They know what their career arc is. When I started we had no idea, really. We had no idea how to be in a band or to tune our guitars up.”
“We used to play gigs out of tune. We only started the fanzine because of Mark Perry’s Sniffing Glue and thought, ‘It looks like somebody’s typed that’. I just got the old typewriter out and my mate said his dad was a photocopier, why don’t you photocopy it? We didn’t know what that was! We were 16 and you couldn’t Google it then! You had to make it up as you went along, and we just carried on doing that, really.”
“But the single biggest thing about punk was it made you believe you could do it. If it failed, it really didn’t matter. There’s been a load of stuff about Grimes this week, her DJ set fucked up at Coachella or whatever. So fucking what? At least she’s up there doing it. I respect anybody who gets up on stage and takes a chance, probably because I’m from that world of people just doing their stuff.”
Music journalism has undeniably changed. As with the industry as a whole, there is less money in writing about music, and as such career writers have moved on to more lucrative subject areas.
Those who write about music now do it out of love, an approach that ironically brings things full circle. John Robb is pleased with the evolution:
People nowadays say that journalists don’t slag anyone off. That’s good. My side, your side, everyone’s side, is that we like music. I’ve no interest in anyone slagging off the new Coldplay album. That’s like shooting fish in a barrel. I might not like Coldplay’s album, but I want to know why that connects with people in a very emotional and powerful way. I want that review to tell me that, not for somebody to say, ‘It’s really crap’. That’s boring. I used to hate those assassinations.
“Bad reviews serve no purpose,” he continues. “In the old days, people couldn’t hear the records and maybe you could argue there was a purpose with someone saying, ‘David Bowie’s new single isn’t as good as the last one. Maybe you should listen to it before you buy it, because you’ve only got 50p to spend on new records’. Maybe that was valid.”
“But now, most people know what the record sounds like before even you (the reviewer) did because it’s on the band’s Facebook page or on Spotify. Your job now is to contextualise it; you’re not describing something they don’t know.”
“It’s a completely different world now. I say to my writers: ‘You’re a cultural catalyst now’. If you see a great young band, let’s go crazy on them and write reviews but, also, get in touch with managers, agents, venues and say, ‘Fucking hell, check this out’. I think that’s more what you do as a writer. Running around town, soaking up the culture, trying to put it all together.”
Shucks. However, very few of today’s cultural catalysts (as we should henceforth be known) can boast about knowing Noel Gallagher of old. Robb had a cameo in the video for Council Skies last year, which came about because of their long friendship:
“He’d done a playlist on Spotify with the artists he really liked, like The Chameleons, Section 25…those are quite obscure post-punk, which is what he really loves.”
“That’s the Noel I remember from before. He’s not just Beatles’ Red and Blue albums – which are great, I love the Beatles as well – but Noel was more than just that.”
“I texted him and said, ‘That playlist is you, it’s what you really like’. He pinged back and said, ‘I’m in town next week shooting a video, do you want to be in it?’. We had a good laugh that day, and he’s like he was 30 years ago.”
“And Liam. If Liam was walking down a street a kid said, ‘Fucking hell, Liam Gallagher! I want to come and see your gig’, he writes their names down, they turn up at Wembley and their name’s on the guestlist!”
“I know that’s not like brain surgery or anything, but it’s a nice touch. Really cool underground bands don’t do that…I see those people who want to be cool, and they don’t give them the time of day. The Gallaghers are down to earth, and the rest of the band. In Northern/Manchester working class circles, they looked really cool. Bonehead’s a cool guy. Their clothes were quite expensive.”
“I wouldn’t dress like that, but I’m fascinated by youth culture. It’s a British thing, isn’t it? Even when we dress down, we try and dress up. It matters, doesn’t it? The clothes are really important…in other countries, it exists, but not like here.”
As well as being one of the pioneers of the term Britpop (alongside Stuart Maconie…it’s complicated), John Robb has a rather more impressive claim: the first person to interview Nirvana.
“I wasn’t conscious of it, I was told by the PR,” he explains. “The first cassette of Lovebuzz came to my record shop. It’s a great shop but everyone was moaning about how crap it was.”
I was like, ‘His voice is amazing’. It sounded like the wisest old man in the world and the energy of a teenager, all mixed together. Rasping like Lennon or Noddy Holder, who’s a great singer which people don’t talk about because he plays it for laughs…and Kurt Cobain liked Slade, which is an interesting fact that people don’t know.”
“Anyway, I rang up his mum’s house, and his mum said, ‘Kurt, there’s somebody on the phone’. He comes down the stairs and we spoke. I wish I’d taped that one! I thought they were going to be one of those bands that and me and 20 other people liked, I didn’t think it would be that silly.”
“9 months later, I went out to do a proper interview with them when they were touring with Tad.” The story doesn’t end there, but to repeat it here would deny the pleasure of listening to John Robb tell the tale, so a ticket for his show comes recommended if he’s in your area.
As the format of the show indicates, Robb may have one eye on the past but is always looking forward. “We’ll be doing festival stuff, and then there’s loads of different projects to be doing…I’ve been writing loads of songs so may get round to recording them (with his band The Membranes). It’s not like it’s a big rush because there’s a million people waiting!”
Perhaps not, but it clearly won’t stop John Robb following his passion and doing it anyway, an attitude that has served him in excellent stead throughout a formidable journey in music.
