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Photography and review by Dod Morrison Photography: http://www.dodmorrison.com/
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Tom Robinson first appeared on the scene in the 1970s with his band TRB (the aptly named Tom Robinson Band), and he also became known as a prominent political and LGBT Activist. Now 74 years old, he is still on tour with TRB who are performing songs from the albums ‘Power And The Darkness’ and ‘TRB Two’ which were released over 45 years ago. He is celebrating these albums in memory of Danny Kustow, who was the original guitarist of TRB and his fellow ‘refugee’ from boarding school.
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I arrived at the gig looking forward to hearing them play two sets of 45 minutes with a wee break in between.
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We were treated to some songs from TRB Two that they haven’t played in 45 years: ‘Days of Rage’, ‘Let My People Be’ and ‘Alright All Night’. Tom said it had been pretty enjoyable revisiting them over the week.
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‘Martin’ became the audience participation song of the evening where everybody shouted out “Martin” just before Tom sang it. It was a very enjoyable song which had everyone smiling and laughing along.
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‘Don’t Take No For An Answer’ was played, a song about Ray Davies of the Kinks hindering Tom’s early career when he played for a band called Café Society. Ray allegedly wanted to keep all the rights to Tom’s songs in the days before TRB.
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During ‘Bully For You’ we had a story about how it is compared to Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ even though TRB had it out six months before Floyd released their single.
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Just as ‘Aint Going To Take It’ was about to be played Tom stopped the band and said he’d updated the lyrics. However, as he’s getting older he now has to write them down and that he needs to wear glasses to be able to read them! Quite a few of us in the audience could relate to that.
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The song ‘Blue Murder’ went down well with the crowd. It’s about Liddle Towers and is a sort of follow up to the Upstarts song ‘Who Killed Liddle’.
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‘Glad To Be Gay’ was the best sing-along of the night. It was originally released in 1978 on the Rising Free EP and the BBC refused to play it on Radio One. Since then Tom keeps changing the lyrics of the song to current events so there have been quite few versions of it. At the end of the classic tune he said it doesn’t matter what colour of the rainbow anyone is. I agree with him, be who you are and not what people think you should be.
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Tom announced it was the end of the evening and jokingly said that he’d play a medley of his hits as they end the set with ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’.
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Normally at this point of the show the band would leave the stage, but it’s a smallish venue and Tom said there was no point as the fans were shouting for more. They played ‘War Baby’, the only song from the evening that wasn’t recorded in the 70s.
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