Glad to be gray

First published in Let's Talk! Cambridgeshire, August 2004

Perhaps it was his Quaker upbringing that made Tom Robinson so honest. It is certainly his honesty that has made him one of the most consistently fine songwriters of the last 25 years. And it was honesty that made him stand up in 1978 and lead the choruses of his famous anthem, Glad To Be Gay.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about that so-public declaration is that ten years earlier the then-teenage Robinson had found his sexuality so difficult to deal with, so shameful, that he tried to kill himself.

And he has been very open about that too, even writing and presenting a Radio 4 documentary about the experience of surviving a suicide attempt.

Tom recalls quite matter-of-factly, "When I woke up in my school dorm next morning it took about two seconds to realise I was still alive and I burst into floods of uncontrollable tears. I was so bloody useless I couldn't even manage to kill myself.

"It felt as if something had snapped; the simplest decisions became the most enormous problems. That morning it took about half an hour just to get my socks on.

"I can't tell you how glad I am now, many happy years later, not to have succeeded back then."

Tom Robinson was born in Cambridge in June 1950. For the first eight years of his life, he lived mostly in Godmanchester. After that, he was a boarder at the Quaker school in Saffron Walden.

Or, as he puts its, "I grew up b asically either in Cambridge or 12 miles on either side of it, so it was always the big city to which I gravitated for cinema, shopping, theatre, nervous breakdown, psychotherapy etc.

"The first concert I ever went to was in Cambridge - The Yardbirds and Manfred Mann at the Odeon in 1965.

"I was also the only male member of my family not to go to university there - I didn't go to any kind of university at all."

Tom's schooldays came to a less orthodox end.

"They took me off to the psychiatric wing at Addenbrookes, where they made me change into pyjamas and get into a bed, and started taking my pulse and temperature, and giving me plastic cupfuls of pills.

"I spent many wretched weeks doped up to the eyeballs, being grilled by psychiatrists while listening to hits on the radio like Dead End Street and What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.

"My headteacher Kenneth Nicholson undoubtedly saved my life by sending me for an interview at Finchden Manor, a therapeutic community for disturbed adolescents in Kent ."

It was at Finchden that Tom, a former choirboy, encountered the great British blues musician Alexis Korner.

"He was a handsome, swarthy 40-year-old dressed like a gypsy, with a shock of grizzled hair and a voice like gravel, who stood up in front of us without a trace of embarassment - opened his mouth and sang, right there in the principal's study, about women, drink, policemen, civil rights and racism. In that moment I knew what I wanted to do for a living."

There was, of course, a bit more to it than that. Tom's often difficult relationship with his father seems crucial to much of what he has done.

"Father was an army captain during the war, then afterwards went to Jesus College , Cambridge . He did law exams and articles in Cambridge and worked in London - first in the Treasury solicitor's office, later as secretary to the Port of London Authority ."

Tom says he was astonished, after his suicide attempt, to see his father in tears, saying, "I don't want to lose you".

He also admits, " My whole existence as a teenager was a kind of sham, a fake, dictated by notions of what other people expected of me. Even in rebelling against my dad, I was reacting to an agenda of his, rather than forming fresh ideas of my own. He hated pop music - and I had taken up the electric guitar.

"It took 20 years to truly make peace with him. At 36 I wrote to my father apologising for all the hurt I must have caused him over the years with my rudeness and aloofness and bogus rebellion.

"He wrote back the letter I never thought he would ever write, with words I never thought he would ever tell me - about how proud of me he was, how he admired my determination to go my own way in defiance of his wishes - and how he nowadays bragged shamelessly about me to his friends."

So what was there for dad to brag about? Plenty.

Tom's first band, Café Society, was "discovered" by Ray Davies of The Kinks, but despite good reviews their album failed to make a breakthrough.

His next venture, the Tom Robinson Band, was described by the New Musical Express as "the most important new band in Britain ". Their first single, 2-4-6-8 Motorway, put them on Top of the Pops. And though the follow-up, Glad To Be Gay, was banned by the BBC, the music press loved it, and Tom appeared eight times on the cover of NME. The band's debut album, Power In The Darkness, went gold in both the UK and Japan . It still seems to sum up the rebellious feeling of its time, 1978, better than any other record.

Although TRB and the ensuing Sector 27 were both fairly short-lived, Tom went on to work with a bewildering range of acclaimed musicians - from Sting to Elton John, Peter Gabriel to Todd Rundgren. In 1996 he even guested with Manfred Mann - the group he had first seen on stage in Cambridge 30 years earlier.

His solo "comeback" in 1984 yielded hits with (Listen to the Radio) Atmospherics and War Baby, high personal and intelligent songs as good as any pop in that decade.

Through it all, and right up to today, he has been an articulate spokesman for gay and women's rights. He was an early leader of the Rock Against Racism movement, and he remains true to that cause too. He has done work for Amnesty International and the Samaritans.

These days, though he still writes and occasionally performs, he can be heard more often presenting other artists' work on the BBC digital channel 6 Music. It has, he says, restored his enthusiasm for music.

He is also a father himself, and says, "When a small person spontaneously flings his arms around your neck and calls you 'darling Daddy' the feeling is incomparable. Most of us are replaceable at work or at play, but no one will ever replace you as that child's parent. This relationship is for life."

Since having children, he says, music is no longer the number one driving force in his life, and he's happier for that.

He also admits to being happily married, to a woman he met at a Gay Switchboard benefit in 1982. So does this mean the gay icon is no longer gay?

He says, "I love my partner and kids more than anything in the world, but I'm still gay, glad and queer as a bottle of crisps.

"No one ever stopped being homosexual by sleeping with a member of the opposite sex. It's just that the boyfriend of my dreams turned out, most inconveniently, to be a woman.

"I still like men, and probably always will. I honestly don't feel one way of life is superior to the other. It's simply like growing up left-handed. These days I'm ambidextrous - it's no big deal."

These days he also seems happier and more settled than when he was younger and more famous.

He agrees. " No question. Life really did begin at 40 when I decided to put my music career second to home life.

"The record sales inexorably declined because there isn't really much of a middle way. In music as in all branches of showbiz you're always competing against the young, the talented and the very, very driven, who live, sleep and breathe career to the exclusion of all else, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I was like that myself early on, hence the handful of hits, but it very nearly drove me over the edge.

"So from 1990 onwards I've gradually been diversifying into work as a broadcaster and occasional newspaper columnist so as not to work myself into an early grave as so many of my friends, mentors and colleagues (Alexis Korner, Alex Harvey, Robert Palmer, Joe Strummer etc) have done."

There is still anger in the one-time angry young man. The war in Iraq , the Bush-Blair axis, poverty, racism and all kinds of bigotry still get his goat. But he is a quieter, mellower presence these days.

He doesn't miss fame, and is always surprised on the rare occasions when people recognise him in the street.

He says, "It's simplest to take it for granted that 99.9 per cent of the people you meet will never have heard of you, and to be honest that's just the way I like it.

"I was lucky that during my 15 minutes of fame in the late 70s the tabloid culture hadn't really started in earnest. Hand on heart: I wouldn't change places with the likes of David Beckham, Robbie Williams or Elton John for anything in the world."

It's a dead cert he wouldn't trade places with the 16-year-old Tom Robinson either. Honest.

• You can hear Tom Robinson's Evening Sequence on BBC 6 Music from 7pm to 10pm Monday to Thursday.
• His wide-ranging website is at www.tomrobinson.com