Now on to the main focus of this show. Tom Robinson has long been a musical hero of mine, dating back to his 1978 anthem "Glad To Be Gay" and many wonderful songs and albums since. He was one of my dream interviews, and that came true in June when he hosted the Outmusic Awards in New York City. I was able to arrange some time with him, and captured about 70 minutes of wonderful and thoughtful answers, to questions about his music and his struggles with being gay, and then, bisexual. Naturally I cannot fit 70 minutes of talk into this hour show, but for those who want to hear the complete interview, I've uploaded it to my website for this month, where you'll also find lots of photos of Tom. On to the interview.
How would you describe your career to someone who has never heard of you?
I'd have to say that my career as a queer musician really started with a suicide attempt, where in my early teens I fell in love with somebody, as you do in your early teens. It was somebody of the same sex and at that time if you were queer you went to prison in the UK for four years. It was an imprisonable offense. So that meant that there was not role model one for a gay teenage anyplace in England or Britain. And I would rather have died than admit to anybody else that I was in love with this other boy at school, and that was the option I chose. I took an overdose of pills and had a nervous breakdown as a result. And it was really…although I recovered from that, and was saved by a very great teacher and healer called George Lywood, it wasn't until my early twenties, when David Bowie turned up and sang "You Are Not Alone." And suddenly on the bush telegraph you knew what that meant. "Oh You Pretty Things," "John, I'm Only Dancing"…you heard songs suddenly, for the first time, instead of being almost about your life, reflecting an emotional experience that you felt except all the pronouns were wrong, suddenly it was actually about your life, and I resolved to myself that if ever in the future I had an opportunity to do that for somebody else, to pass it on so the idea could spread, then I would do my damnest to do it.
David Bowie had an incalculable effect on my life, because for the first time, at school, or among young people, you could be queer and you could be one of the good guys. Up until that point in Britain that had never, ever happened. That meant that when I first got into a band, even though it wasn't my band, I did my best to do my bit, and on the side from the band's main music career, I started at gay benefits, writing queer songs and turning up for gay liberation front dos, and eventually appearing at Pride, and at Pride '76 I got up and wrote a song called "Sing If You're Glad To Be Gay," specifically for that occasion. And when I quit that first band that I was in, Café Society, I was able to form a band of my own and do whatever the hell I liked. And I'd just seen the Sex Pistols performing, and it was clear that you could do whatever the hell you liked, and get away with it for the first time, and that confronting the audience was not necessarily going to be a problem. So, I thought I'd try out "Sing If You're Glad To Be Gay" in pubs and clubs and scummy dives and places around London where we were playing. And bizarrely, instead of throwing bottles at the stage, people went "yeah, that's alright." And it was a great lesson really, that people will treat you if you're honest, and straight with them, so to speak, they will often respect you more than if you're trying to conceal yourself.
Can you tell us a little more about the writing of that song? The reason I came to write "Sing If You're Glad To Be Gay" was because there were little yellow badges that said "Glad To Be Gay" on them, that were in wide circulation in the London gay scene around 1975, 1976. They were particularly popular among the Campaign for Homosexual Equality supporters, the CHE. CHE ran an assimilationist campaign where it was kind of gradual change through due political process, and not rocking the boat too much. And it meant that at those discos that they ran people would be wearing their "Glad To Be Gay" badges, and then they'd come out into the streets and take them off again and put them in their pockets. And at the same time police brutality against gay people had been upped in the long hot summer of 1976, and the police began raiding gay pubs, and people were taking it, too. There wasn't any kind of Stonewall reaction against that. And so I was infuriated by the fact that on the one hand the organizations that should have been campaigning for that were running little low-key discos in town where you could wear a "Glad To Be Gay" badge. Then you'd come out, hide the badge, and not do anything about what was going on in the streets to your brothers and sisters further down the road. So "Glad To Be Gay" was a bitterly ironic attack on the complacency of the gay community at the time, rather than a proclamation that one was glad to be gay.
Glad To Be Gay (1978)
What were the influences on the Tom Robinson Band?
When I left my first band, Café Society, and wanted to form something that really reflected my own concerns about the political situation in the country and indeed about the musical concerns of punk rock, which were basic and a lot more tough than Café Society could be, I wanted it to be real, heartfelt and sort of heart on the sleeve, really, I mean as you found it. I was profoundly influenced by the Kinks because I'd been signed to the Kinks' label and Ray Davies had signed Café Society and produced its first album. So there was always a strand of music hall running through the Tom Robinson Band, which sat ill at ease perhaps with the more rock and roll direction which the band took with the acquisition of the other members, and the general musical direction we took alongside Clash, Sex Pistols, Jam, Stranglers, Elvis Costello, Ian Drury, the other kind of artists who were emerging at that time. I always felt that the music had to come first, because nobody gives a toss what your political opinions are, or what your sexual politics are, if your music's rubbish. You have to get the music right first. Nobody would ever have asked me any questions about "Glad To Be Gay" at all, let alone sign me to a record deal, if the band hadn't delivered musically, and on the basis of entertainment when people paid their money to go into a pub and see us play if we hadn't done a great show, and left people with songs that they sang when they came out of the door, then my political opinions or whatever other work we did would have been irrelevant.
I've got an article from a 1978 Advocate, that talks about your first hit, "2-4-6-8 Motorway" and has you describing the inspiration for the 2-4-6-8 part…
I have certain strengths as a songwriter I guess that have come to the fore in the course of thirty years and some areas that aren't great strengths. I've never had huge strengths as an innovator. I'm good at putting ideas together and articulating them, and pulling together and making things work, but in all honesty I'm not the most musically original or lyrically original writer of my experience and I've tended to borrow from sources and put things together in a way that someone hasn't bothered to put together before, that seems to work. And with "2-4-6-8 Motorway," the hook came straight off the gay and lesbian marches that I'd been on as an activist during the early 70s. People were chanting "2-4-6-8, gay is twice as good as straight, 3-5-7-9, lesbians are mighty fine." So when I was trying to put together a chorus for that song I just thought well I know that, I happen to know first hand that large numbers of people can chant that, and enjoy it, and that it works with a kind of stomping beat. So, I freely acknowledge that's where the chorus for that song came from.
2-4-6-8-Motorway (1977)
In the late 80s you faced a backlash when the British media has a field day over your living with a woman. Can you talk about that?
Having enjoyed a period of notoriety as an out gay pop singer in the 70s, shock, horror, he sleeps with men, I then bizaarrly had a further brush with the tabloids, where, shock, horror, man sleeps with woman, and two years after I'd openly talked in the Pink Paper and Capitol Gay about the fact that I was, to my surprise, found myself living with a woman suddenly one of the tabloid papers got hold of it and thought, oh what a great story. It was some years since my last hit record in the
UK. I had really no idea that anyone gave a toss about what my, about what I would be doing at all, so it was a complete shock when somebody from the Sunday People called up my manager and said, "can we do an interview with Tom about his sex life?" She said, you know, "sod off." So they came around to my house and battered on the door and shouted through the letterbox, "Can we do an interview with you about your sex life?" And I said no. And then they waited outside the house until my partner came home from work on her motorbike and they snapped a picture of her and said "Can we do an interview with you about your sex life?" And she said no, so then they tracked down my father on holiday in France and said "can we interview you about your son's sex life?" And he said "sod off."
And I thought that was the end of it, but then that Sunday I was in the news agents and I saw a copy of the Sunday People and it said on the front, "Inside, Exclusive Interview With Tom Robinson." And it really went against the grain, but I had to buy a copy. So I got it home and opened it up and on the center pages, in color, there was a double page spread, which had the headline "Britain's Number One Gay In Love With Girl Biker: My Passion for Blond," by Rocker Robinson. It was all made up. It was just creepy, just really, really creepy. "A friend says he's so happy now he's not gay anymore." And, you know, how dare they? How dare they presume to know how our relationship worked or what went on behind our closed doors.
For the record I've never claimed to be anything other than gay. And it's only with reluctance that I came to about ten years later say, oh, sod it, you know, if living with a woman makes me bisexual, okay, I'm bisexual. If that makes it easier for you to understand, how I fancy men and happen to be living with the person I want to spend the rest of my life with who happens to be female, then, okay, I'm bisexual. I'm proud, and I started going to bisexual pride events and said, look, I'm not the only one this has happened to. And, why the hell not?
And I had a kind of homecoming with the bisexual community around the late 90s, around '97 or so, where for the first time in ten years Pride in the UK invited me to attend, at Pride, but it wasn't Pride main stage, it was the Pride Bisexual Tent, and I just walked out onto the stage with a guitar in my hand and people shouted "Hey, Tom, where you been?" I said, "Making Babies," and they all cheered, and it was like great, because I was at a queer event with people with whom I could say, "Yeah, I've been making babies." And they said, "Yeah, so have we. It's cool" And it was like a second coming out all over again, to be welcomed back into the arms of the queer community, fully validated. And so I've been appearing at Pride events and events like Outmusic and Glamma, and things with a new kind of assurance that I'm not a freak, that I'm not an oddity, or somebody…or a traitor, or something. That this is just human experience, that sexuality is a wide and many splendored thing that deviates from the heterosexual norm in all kinds of ways, and I just happened to be experiencing one of them.
It sounds like you're not entirely comfortable with the label bisexual.
I was quite reluctant in the first instance to come to use the word bisexual with regard to myself because I didn't feel any different inside from the way I had always felt. I always found men attractive. I still find men attractive. I figure out of, you know, every 200 men that pass on the street, I'm going to go, 100 of those are nice looking guys. Now, with every 200 women that pass on the street, maybe one is going to turn my head. It's hard to find a way to put this into words. I've had sexual relations with many, many men, in common with most gay men of my generation. The numbers, well, after a while you lose count. That's just the way it is. It's not a gay thing, it's a male thing. Men are not particular about having to have an emotional rapport…you know, it's not the same for women, particularly heterosexual women, like to have some idea of who it is they're having sex with, and some kind of relationship with the person in my experience. I hope I'm not maligning anybody by saying that. But in my experience heterosexual men would like to be promiscuous but they aren't able to find enough women to be promiscuous with. A promiscuous heterosexual man will boast that he's had 80 partners in the last ten years, and you know they think that's really a big deal. And gay men tend on the whole to laugh at that, cause it's men seeking men and suddenly that constraint is removed, and so of course you have a great deal more partners. It's to do with being male, it's not to do with being gay particularly.
So the vast majority of my sexual experience has been with other men. I sleep with one woman and suddenly I'm a bisexual, the difference being that the one woman that I slept with is the one I fell in love with and wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
There have been artists, who I won't name, who have lost credibility when they, quote, switched. I think your approach kept you your credibility.
Part of the trouble that I experienced with people who read about my living with a woman via the straight press was that we had had some disappointments in the past, where people like Lou Reed and David Bowie who had been iconic for us in our coming out, and who had made a huge difference to us in reflecting our experience in their lyrics, publicly and vocally backtracked from their position, disassociated themselves, said "I never really meant that. Oh, it was all just for publicity." They distanced themselves from that earlier experience and made us feel kind of dirty by them disassociating themselves in that way. We didn't feel dirty because we felt proud of ourselves, but they made it seem like they felt we ought to…and that was such a disappointment. I guess then when the guy who had sung "Sing If You're Glad To Be Gay" appeared via the press to be announcing that he had turned straight, too, then they thought, "Oh, not another one." As I say, I've never claimed to be straight or to have turned straight, or to have stopped being queer in any sense whatsoever. It's merely an expansion. In addition to my repertoire I had added a further experience. Hey, all my lesbian friends had been telling me for years and years about how fabulous women were, and I found out in this particular instance they were dead right.
Gay Switchboard Jingle (1978)
That was Tom's Gay Switchboard jingle, recorded in 1978, and that phone number is still good. And this is a good time to invite you to visit my website, at www.queermusicheritage.com, where you can view the play list, and see photos of the artists and recordings, and listen to the show anytime. And also, be sure to listen to After Hours with Jimmy Carper, every Saturday night from midnight to 4 am, on KPFT, it's Queer Radio, with attitude.
What is the first song you think of when I ask of what song are you the most proud?
My flip answer to the question of what song am I the most proud is actually "(Wish I Had a) Grey Cortina" because it had a simple message to put over, and did it very, very succinctly in very few words and conveyed quite a detailed idea: "wish I had a grey cortina, whiplash aerial, racing trim, cortina owner, no one meaner, wish that I could be like him." It was a piece of pop nonsense which I was able to just kind of put together and throw out, and no other song that I've ever written is quite as succinct as that.
But the true answer is "War Baby" is the song that I'm most proud of. The genesis of "War Baby" came at a low ebb in my life when I had run out of money and got massively into debt, particularly with the British tax authorities, and I had to flee the country and go and live on a friend's floor in Hamburg. And I really didn't know what was going to happen to me but I was there and I started writing some new songs. And he used to roll the most ferocious joints, large conical things that would sort of remove all semblance of reality and I used to somehow drive through the streets of Hamburg in my second-hand 20-year old car, ah, with the steering wheel on the wrong side, and make it to the gay sauna in that state, and kind of salve my soul through experiences there. And one particular evening I made it back to the flat somehow particularly stoned, after a particularly harrowing experience at the sauna, and just came back and wrote straight down "only the very young and the very beautiful can be so aloof." And the rest of it poured out onto the page, eight, ten pages of the stuff, just hand-written, stream of consciousness stuff. And it took about a year to get those ten pages down to something that you could actually sing in four minutes, but it came from a very, very deep place within me. I think it's the most truthful song that I've written, because I didn't think about it at all. The great artists are able to connect with a very deep part of themselves spontaneously, and I think that's the closest I ever came to doing it.
War Baby (1984)
Please tell me about the song "more lives than one"
"More Lives Than One" was kind of prophetic in a sort of way, because I was asked to write some music for a BBC Play for Today in the early 80s while I was in the middle of a passionate love affair with the big gay love of my life. It was to him I dedicated the whole "Still Loving You" album and we wrote the music together for this particular play on the TV and it needed a theme song to run through the credits, so I put together "More Lives Than One," because it was about a closeted bisexual man who was having sex on the side, unbeknown to his wife. And so the lines "sitting in the middle and it's hitting more lives than one" was about that. And then I resurrected it as a live performing piece in the early 90s, because it just seemed a kind of ironic reflection on my own situation, except of course that the woman I lived with, and eventually married, knew me as a gay man in the first place, liked me as a gay man in the first place, and found my gayness a huge part of the attraction and turn-on, which first threw us together, so there wasn't the element of hypocrisy that there was for the guy in the song
More Lives Than One (1984)
Tell me about the song "blood brother"…the song's an award winner
When you write songs, most writers I know have a little black notebook, well, it could be any color, that they put fragments of ideas in, as they occur to them. The fragment that started "Blood Brother" was "walking with your brother, your sister, your mother, so well behaved," which didn't sound like anything, but it was a vision of a teenaged boy, who's just got like a bit too old to be dragged along by his mother on a shopping expedition, and kind of imprisoned by being told by his mother he's got to go down into town on a shopping expedition. And that was all contained in this idea of being so well-behaved, but the inner life is at total odds with the outer life, and this kind of outwardly conformist idea for this teenaged kid. So, I started trying to work out what this was, how this could be a song, what was this about. It didn't sound like a line from a song. As I started writing this whole story poured out, again just in prose over ten pages or something, about this boy. I just wrote down everything about him I could think of. He was red haired, that he was freckled, lived on a farm with his family, he was the youngest kid…and again it didn't sound much like a song but I ended up with a whole story and then I managed to condense that into something I could sing. But there was much more detail in the original story then made it to the final song, but there are resonances of the original story in the song…
The song's an award winner.
The song eventually won a award, because at the end of the first draft it came to the line "open your eyes, here I am, I'm your blood brother." And suddenly I realized that wasn't the end of the song, that was the actual hook of the song and it gradually emerged that this was not a song about teenagers growing up. This was a song about bisexuality and a song more specifically about the specter of AIDS, and it's all very understated, although much clearer in the original story, and I think the resonances make it work. And again it's a song that means a lot to me personally.
Blood Brother (1990)
From the album "Cabaret '79," tell me about "Good To Be Gay"
"Glad To Be Gay" had a precedent that while I was working in Café Society and keeping my gay activity compartmentalized as a little side activity in a way the eventually proved untenable. My first side project was writing a little sing-a-long morale booster for the troops for an earlier gay conference called "Good To Be Gay" and the CHE organization, Campaign for Homosexual Equality, paid to press up 500 copies of it on vinyl, and then sell it at the conference as a fundraiser. [sings] "so it's the same old story all over the world, when a boy meets a girl" [and the lesbians come] "and a girl meets a girl, we all sing"….is it "we all sing together cause we're happy to say it's a natural fact that it's good to be gay." So that song was actually called "Glad To Be Gay" and initially when I got up and sang the song we now know as "Sing If You're Glad To Be Gay" at the Pride event it was "Glad To Be Gay, Part 2." So having started out with naïve optimism, it was then the bitter, the savage disappointment of the second song took over.
"Good To Be Gay" was more optimistic
It was Pollyanna. "Good To Be Gay" was just kind of Pollyanna. I was still learning my chops as a songwriter, and it didn't have any kind of depth to it. But I was just trying to write something people could sing along with. At that time we didn't have any kind of gay music that was written specifically for our community so anything was better than nothing. I'm not particularly proud of it as a piece of writing in the long run except that it enabled me to learn how to write songs and gradually get better.
Good To Be Gay (1975)
I also loved your version of "Mad About The Boy" from that album
[laughs] Yeah, I loved "Mad About The Boy." It is a marvelous song. What's poignant about "Mad About The Boy" was that apart from "Matelot" where he came very close to revealing his true self, {Noel] Coward had to sublimate his gay sexuality in terms of public expression because simply it was an imprisonable offense at that time in the UK. You couldn't declare your homosexuality in the way that we can now. These are different, different times in the UK. So one senses rightly or wrongly in "Mad About The Boy" a sublimated yearning and that Coward himself had felt very much like that, and so in performing it I tried to kind of put myself in his shoes
Mad About The Boy (1979)
One of my favorites of your songs is "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again" Can you talk a little about it?
In many ways one of my favorite gay songs of all the ones that I wrote that had a specifically openly amorously gay theme, I like "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again" because I sent the lyric to Elton John and he came back with the music for it, and so it was a collaboration between two gay artists. And he is a great songwriter, there's no question, so it's got good changes and a decent melody. And his version of course was a slow ballad and…a bit drippy to be honest. And although he sent me back a demo which had all the pronouns as I'd written them, when he recorded it himself he kind of slurred them a bit, so where it's "I wish he didn't make me rabid" his is "I wish-he didn't make…" you know it was just a little bit on the ambiguous side. Ah, but that's all right. That's where he was at the time and what Elton has done (A) for the gay movement, and (B) in the fight against AIDS, with the Elton John AIDS Foundation, you know, is fantastic and we owe a huge debt to the man, so I think he's allowed to slur a few of his pronouns here and there
Never Gonna Fall In Love Again (1988)
I've got one more question to ask Tom, but before I get to it I want to thank you all for listening, and to especially thank Tom Robinson for the very special interview. And, as always if you have questions or comments about any of the music I've featured, please write me at qmheritage@aol.com. And I wish you would. My website, logically enough, is at www.queermusicheritage.com. This is JD Doyle for Queer Voices on KPFT in Houston, and I'll be back on the fourth Monday of next month with the next installment of Queer Music Heritage.
In recent years in addition to his music Tom has been taking on an additional role, as he's been hosting his own radio show on the BBC, and he tells me he's thoroughly enjoying learning about and sharing the music of many of today's artists. I want to highly recommend Tom's own website, www.tomrobinson.com. I think it is about the perfect example of what an artist's site should be. It's packed full of information about his music and career, and his bisexual activism. It's very organized and graphically excellent, a wonderful site.
Last question.
Tom, how do you think the song "glad to be gay" has fared over the years?
I asked a gay activist in London, Eric Presland, to help me with updating the lyrics once. I had periodically updated them from year to year. And he wrote back repeating an old joke where a businessman drives through the country and pulls up beside a farm laborer who's leaning on a gate and says "how do you get to Liverpool from here?" And the laborer says, "Oh, if I were going to Liverpool I wouldn't start from here." And in a way that's right. I mean "Glad To Be Gay" is a period piece. It is of its time and updating it isn't going to make it a modern song. I don't know. There's something probably to be said for singing it again with its original lyrics and it's original context and just leaving it at that, rather than trying to bring it up to date. And yet you know you can't help putting Matthew Shepard in it, or putting AIDS in it, or George Michael in it when these events happen, it seems daft not to go on a stage and drag them in.
Has the version with the Matthew Shepard verse been recorded?
There's no recording of the Matthew Shepard version, no, that's only been added in the last 12 months.
Well, at the end of our interview he graced me with singing a little bit of "Glad To Be Gay," with the new verses, done very acoustic, just with his guitar and an audience of one. What a treat that was. How often does one of your musical icons sing a major gay anthem, just for you. Well, I'm pleased to share it. Tom Robinson's "Glad To Be Gay."
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