Tom Robinson performing a short acoustic set at Tramshed Cardiff as part of the 6 Music Festival 2022. The "download file" link can be found via the three dots menu. Setlist:

1) You Tattooed Me
2) Eighty
3) Too Good To Be True
4) Glad To Be Gay
5) 2-4-6-8 Motorway

TOM ROBINSON: solo in Cardiff

<b>Highlights from #James6Music episode of Now Playing @6Music 6-8pm 15 June 2014... now complete with all SIX songs!! </b> You can see a video of highlights from this session here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p021n534

"The band James performed tracks - picked entirely by listeners - live in the 6 Music Studios for this themed playlist show. Alongside their live songs, James' front man Tim Booth was also on Twitter, interacting with listeners in real-time and sifting through suggestions for non-live tracks to play by other artists thematically linked to the band. Since forming in 1982, 6 Music favourites James have become known for a wealth of indie anthems, including Sit Down, Come Home, Born of Frustration, Laid, She's A Star and many more. Out earlier this month, Le Petite Mort marks their 13th studio album."

Tracks featured:
1) Moving On
2) P.S.
3) Just Like Fred Astaire
4) Lullaby
5) Come Home
6) Walk Like You


James live on Now Playing @6music

Crossing The Sands by Tom Robinson discussed with Ian McMillan (plus guests Paul Bailey and Jane Draycott) on BBC Radio 3's The Verb, 28 February 2004. 

CROSSING THE SANDS
You are the very blend of beauty.  
Your fire consumes my bones.  
Where are you today?
We miss the ones we love

Since the first rains have we wandered
Allah, you are generous: end our hardship
The girls since nightfall are telling tales
And break our hearts 'til tears flood forth
Why save for poverty and wretchedness
Must we cross the desert of al Admour
time after time
Carrying the pitch black night
'Til it turns cold in our grasp

On the road to Egypt
We stretch the starry spaces
Entering a wilderness never worries me
This is the fate of the ambitious man
Who refuses to stay home
Especially when you wake in the dawn
And there is nothing
as far as the eye can see

Rocket, my camel of the Soviet Union
Have you yet passed Addika?
Have you found its wadi and entered?
Have you found her smoky scent?
Haven't you told her that
	your rider is raving for her love

My heart you lack patience
longing for the girl you've known since youth
You see the dark-skinned and sandalled
Dare you advance in anger
Don't you know I am the jungle?
Lair of the dreadful viper

I wished her joy at Ramadan
Nour al-Din, my brother, go to her
Her face is like lightning in the darkness
Because of her I lose my sleep

Rocket, camel of the Sudan
Beneath this rein your head glistens
Sleek and tasty as a fish
Your eye like a Seiko watch....
Your rein like an arrow pursuing a gazelle
Blood boils through your neck
Astride you I leave this world
And all its fleeting comforts
Rocks strew the way to Mayozer, Tugat and...
morning will find us far beyond
The sands that none have dared to cross
 

Crossing The Sands

Failure Without A Conscience

Peter Gabriel's unreleased recording of Bully For You cowritten with lyrics by Tom Robinson. From the bootleg compilation "PG III The Shop Tape 1980"...

PETER GABRIEL - Bully For You

Now available as a lossless quality download from http://tomrobinson.bandcamp.com

01 Murder At The End Of The Day

03 Rikki Don't Lose That Number

18 War Baby [12  Single Version]

Alec Guinness reads Four Quartets by TS Eliot: full text is at http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/fq.html

Alec Guinness reads Four Quartets by TS Eliot

06 War Baby

Written by Tom Robinson and Peter Gabriel

07 Atmospherics  Listen To The Radio

Can't Keep Away

02 Invitation  What Have We Got To Lose

03 Not Ready

04 Mary Lynne

14 Day After Day

Still Loving You

Old Friend

2-4-6-8 Motorway

The original 1985 demo from which You Tattooed Me was developed. After rampaging around the lowlife dives of Europe with youthful tearaway Arthur RImbaud, Paul Verlaine eventually had to go sheepishly back to his wife and family and ask for forgiveness. But why, his wife wanted to know - what on earth was the attraction. Verlaine's retort gave me the first idea for the song: we had a love like tigers ("nous avions un amour de tigres").

Un Amour De Tigres

War Baby

OLAFUR ARNALDS - Þau Hafa Sloppið Undan Þunga Myrkursins

Recorded live at Zaal de Roma in Borgerhout, Antwerp 13 January 2007. Sound taken from Patrick Gyselinck's excellent PA mix. Featured musicians: Tom Robinson (voc, ac gtr), Adam Phillips (gtr, b/voc), Sam Kelly (drs), Max Taylor (bs), Tim Sanders (sax, keys), Lee Griffiths (b/voc, perc) and TV Smith (gtr, b/voc). Video of "Cry Out", "Merciful God" and "Never Get Old" from this concert can be seen at http://tomrobinson.com/promo . All tracks downloadable as 320kbps mp3 files.

Glad To Be Gay

WILLY MASON - Oxygen, recorded live in session for 6 Music in 2005. One man and a guitar - louder than bombs. Just goes to show you don't need fancy production to write a hit - just a great, great idea.


WILLY MASON - Oxygen

Click "download" to get wave file with beat markers between the different patterns.

Review of Casio Rapman RAP-1 from for Making Music magazine 1991
"The Casio Rapman ?" I hear you howl... "Why waste valuable pages devoted to the cutting edge of music technology to tell us about a TOY ???  We want software specifications, synth librarians, synchronisers, samplers, sequencers, stereo studio sound systems - not cheap children's crap from Casio."  Patience, gentle reader... As Brian Eno, that much misunderstood guru of lo-tech, once pointed out: "in the studio you often see a keyboard player spend hours scrambling through the electrons searching for a new sound, when it's obvious what he's really looking for is a new idea."  

Of course new technology is highly exciting and great fun to drool over - why else would we buy this magazine from month to month.  But why do any of us need all this gear, really ?  Theoretically, to improve our music making in some way or other...  Will Studio Vision with a Mac IIfx and Proteus card improve our songwriting, our productivity or our chances of getting a record deal ?  I doubt it. What you and I, and Brian Eno (not to mention every record company on earth) need more than anything is, yes, new ideas.

Consider instead the Casio Rapman - one hundredth of the price and, believe me, several hundred times more fun.  It doesn't sit and sneer at you - you don't have to plug it in, boot it up, interface it, struggle through the manual or upgrade your system software.  It has batteries, a built-in speaker and mike, and screams "play me" as soon as you've got it out of the box.  

In any creative field, fresh ideas emerge through play and spontanaeity - if you got even one first rate idea, a RAP-1 would be well worth the money.  But in fact you'd have to be a miserable po-faced bastard to resist jamming with it for hours.  I took the review model with me to Real World studios last month and had difficulty prising it back off every musician who saw it.  Manu Katché and his producer ordered four on the spot - even Peter Gabriel sat happily rapping and scratching away at the dinner table until Daniel Lanois came and dragged him back into the studio.

To describe operating the Casio Rapman as child's play is overstating the difficulty.  My son, aged one and a quarter, got the hang of it in seconds:  you slide the power switch from "OFF" to "RAP", hit a key - any key - and off you go, bashing the effect pads, scratching the turntable and shouting wild distorted nonsense through the microphone as you sway from side to side. Which rap pattern comes up depends on a glorious lucky dip -  ie which note you happen to hit first - after which the keyboard reverts to playing all the tacky sirens, car alarms and instrumental hits you could want - even one or two reasonably musical sounds if you're feeling ambitious.

When a fifteen month old child who's never seen a DJ or rapper in his life can do passable imitations of a chart-topping dance act, we traditional singer-songwriters are supposed to wring our hands in despair and ask what contemporary music is coming to.  However, the same cry was also heard when fifties teenagers first got electric guitars, and in my book the RAP-1 beats the hell out of a tennis racket and Bert Weedon's "Play in a Day".

As for the technical stuff, I always hate those reviews which simply run through a recital of knobs and faders (or, these days, pages and parameters) and spend paragraphs describing the appearance of an instrument you can see perfectly well in the photograph.  The really interesting questions (how does it sound, what can you do with it, does it have a nasty power supply, will it make me sound like Thomas Dolby, etc.) get skimped in favour of meaningless lists of specifications, most of which could just as easily be gleaned from the manufacturers' ads.

Still, I'd better mention that the Rapman features two basic modes: "PLAY" as a three-voice polyphonic keyboard, and "RAP" where you can play back one of thirty preset patterns, adding single-voice keyboard parts.  Three sound pads and a small plastic turntable offer additional percussion and effects in either mode.  The keyboard offers a choice of 25 tones - some synthetic, some sampled.  Several are beefy and quite useable, the majority are weedy and naff - though agreeably daft in some cases.  

The patterns themselves are two bars long - fourteen being drums only and (this is the good bit) sixteen including rudimentary bass and chord parts.  Me, I wouldn't know a credible rap pattern if it bit me in the leg but I know what I like.  Some of these little grooves could be made to work in any number of idioms, while one or two are genuinely inspiring.  Obviously the rudimentary drum kit sounds pretty thin and nasty through the internal speaker, but hook the RAP-1 up through a desk with some decent EQ and a pair of studio monitors and... surprise surprise, it still sounds thin and nasty.   Hey - what do you expect for eighty something quid ?  

No, don't be silly - of course it hasn't got MIDI.  But it has got a real stroke of genius:  for your money Casio not only provide a plug-in microphone but, yes, a harmoniser.  This has to be the cheapest on the market, and it's a brilliant addition.  Obviously anyone might feel a little awkward shouting "Yo Homeboys ! Tell these motherf***ers what time it is!" down a tiny plastic microphone in their parents' living room.  But whack your voice up or down a major sixth into Darth Vader/Bart Simpson mode and all inhibitions fly out the window in a stream of spontaneous gabble.  
My main disappointment was the turntable - a brilliant idea disappointingly executed because of using a ridiculously short scratch sample - presumably to economise on chip memory.  Luckily there's a longer and more workable scratch sound on one of the keyboard patches, while the turntable's alternative voice - a spacey vocoder sample - is a pefectly useable substitute.  Oh, and the other bad news:  the tempo change increments are completely out to lunch.  Most patterns seem to default at around107 bpm - one step down gives you100 bpm, while one step up is 114 bpm.  So far, so approximate - but two steps up produces126 bpm, while two steps down results in 94 bpm. Maybe I'm missing something here.  Have those cunning Casio chaps programmed in every hip tempo known to rap and left out all the others ?  Improbable, somehow.  In practice it didn't bother me - but you might not feel the same way. 

This inflexibility plus the lack of MIDI would make it hard to use the RAP-1 for any kind of serious work - perhaps the most compelling reason of all to buy one:  tinpot trash instruments are such a boon to creativity and inspiration.  Remember Trio's chart-topper "Da da da" with the orginal Casiotone VL-1 ?  Or how Roland's primitive and discontinued Bassline became THE flavour of 1989.  How Phil Collins would sometimes use an ancient CR-78 in preference to his own drum kit ?  Or even, God forbid, the dreaded Stylophone on Bowie's "Space Oddity" ?   The great thing about cheap instruments is that they don't intimidate you;  we all have this spurious distinction in our heads between "work" and "messing around" while paradoxically - as Eno is fond of pointing out - messing around often produces our most interesting work.

Can you remember the first record to feature a Fairlight, a Prophet 5, a Linn drum machine, Yamaha CS80 or modular Moog system ?  Neither can I - probably because the blasted things were so expensive at the time only super-rich boffins and bored pop stars could afford them.  And what did these people do after lashing out thousands of quid on some new gleaming piece of gadgetry they barely understood ?  My guess is, wet themselves in terror.  They certainly didn't doodle with it in the back of a tour bus. 

Encouragingly, it always seems to take several years before any low-end product filters through onto contemporary records.  On this showing you and I have until at least1993 to write and record the first Rapman-inspired hit single; after which everybody and their dog will follow suit - until it becomes terminally unhip again a couple of months later. 

Of course the burning question in the wake of the MARRS and KLF litigation will be who owns the copyright when a two-bar snatch of music from the Rapman's ROM finally does take the charts by storm.  (My money's on patterns 20, 22 or 30 - but then what do I know ?)   Everyone at Casio UK was extremely cagey on this subject.  On domestic instruments with demo sequences, they told me, Casio always negotiate an appropriate composer's rate with PRS for all titles featured - "Hi-ho, Hi-ho", "Someday my Prince will come" and so forth - and account scrupulously for every instrument sold.  But are these two bar drum patterns actually someone's copyright, I wondered.  They weren't sure.   How about the ones where there's a bassline and a couple of chords as well ?  They were even less sure.  

It's a tricky one, this, for obvious reasons - the wrong reply could end up costing your bosses in Japan several hundred thousand pounds.  Finally the official answer came back that all copyrights relating to the RAP-1 are owned by the Casio Music Corporation, and that seemed to be that.  My own guess is that if someone appeared on Top of the Pops with a song featuring the instrument prominently they'd be more likely to receive a massive sponsorship deal than a writ for breach of copyright.

In conclusion, you don't have to know, understand or even like rap music to derive huge enjoyment and (with luck) some fresh ideas from the Casio Rapman. If you hanker after cheap portable creativity and have waited too long for bug-free Yamaha QY10 machines to arrive in your local shop, I'm afraid you'll have to hanker a little longer, however.  The Yamaha, if it ever arrives in quantity, promises not only the portability and hip patterns of the Rapman, but a wide range of musically useful features to interface with your existing equipment.  If you have a limited budget and very little equipment so far, the QY10 - even at £249 - should prove far better value for money, if a great deal less fun.  On the other hand if you're already reasonably equipped and can afford to lash out ninety odd quid in search of a little wacky inspiration, I'd warmly recommend you to do so. 

Tom Robinson

Beats from Casio Rapman 1 (slow)

Click "download" to get wave file with beat markers between the different patterns.

Review of Casio Rapman RAP-1 from for Making Music magazine 1991
"The Casio Rapman ?" I hear you howl... "Why waste valuable pages devoted to the cutting edge of music technology to tell us about a TOY ???  We want software specifications, synth librarians, synchronisers, samplers, sequencers, stereo studio sound systems - not cheap children's crap from Casio."  Patience, gentle reader... As Brian Eno, that much misunderstood guru of lo-tech, once pointed out: "in the studio you often see a keyboard player spend hours scrambling through the electrons searching for a new sound, when it's obvious what he's really looking for is a new idea."  

Of course new technology is highly exciting and great fun to drool over - why else would we buy this magazine from month to month.  But why do any of us need all this gear, really ?  Theoretically, to improve our music making in some way or other...  Will Studio Vision with a Mac IIfx and Proteus card improve our songwriting, our productivity or our chances of getting a record deal ?  I doubt it. What you and I, and Brian Eno (not to mention every record company on earth) need more than anything is, yes, new ideas.

Consider instead the Casio Rapman - one hundredth of the price and, believe me, several hundred times more fun.  It doesn't sit and sneer at you - you don't have to plug it in, boot it up, interface it, struggle through the manual or upgrade your system software.  It has batteries, a built-in speaker and mike, and screams "play me" as soon as you've got it out of the box.  

In any creative field, fresh ideas emerge through play and spontanaeity - if you got even one first rate idea, a RAP-1 would be well worth the money.  But in fact you'd have to be a miserable po-faced bastard to resist jamming with it for hours.  I took the review model with me to Real World studios last month and had difficulty prising it back off every musician who saw it.  Manu Katché and his producer ordered four on the spot - even Peter Gabriel sat happily rapping and scratching away at the dinner table until Daniel Lanois came and dragged him back into the studio.

To describe operating the Casio Rapman as child's play is overstating the difficulty.  My son, aged one and a quarter, got the hang of it in seconds:  you slide the power switch from "OFF" to "RAP", hit a key - any key - and off you go, bashing the effect pads, scratching the turntable and shouting wild distorted nonsense through the microphone as you sway from side to side. Which rap pattern comes up depends on a glorious lucky dip -  ie which note you happen to hit first - after which the keyboard reverts to playing all the tacky sirens, car alarms and instrumental hits you could want - even one or two reasonably musical sounds if you're feeling ambitious.

When a fifteen month old child who's never seen a DJ or rapper in his life can do passable imitations of a chart-topping dance act, we traditional singer-songwriters are supposed to wring our hands in despair and ask what contemporary music is coming to.  However, the same cry was also heard when fifties teenagers first got electric guitars, and in my book the RAP-1 beats the hell out of a tennis racket and Bert Weedon's "Play in a Day".

As for the technical stuff, I always hate those reviews which simply run through a recital of knobs and faders (or, these days, pages and parameters) and spend paragraphs describing the appearance of an instrument you can see perfectly well in the photograph.  The really interesting questions (how does it sound, what can you do with it, does it have a nasty power supply, will it make me sound like Thomas Dolby, etc.) get skimped in favour of meaningless lists of specifications, most of which could just as easily be gleaned from the manufacturers' ads.

Still, I'd better mention that the Rapman features two basic modes: "PLAY" as a three-voice polyphonic keyboard, and "RAP" where you can play back one of thirty preset patterns, adding single-voice keyboard parts.  Three sound pads and a small plastic turntable offer additional percussion and effects in either mode.  The keyboard offers a choice of 25 tones - some synthetic, some sampled.  Several are beefy and quite useable, the majority are weedy and naff - though agreeably daft in some cases.  

The patterns themselves are two bars long - fourteen being drums only and (this is the good bit) sixteen including rudimentary bass and chord parts.  Me, I wouldn't know a credible rap pattern if it bit me in the leg but I know what I like.  Some of these little grooves could be made to work in any number of idioms, while one or two are genuinely inspiring.  Obviously the rudimentary drum kit sounds pretty thin and nasty through the internal speaker, but hook the RAP-1 up through a desk with some decent EQ and a pair of studio monitors and... surprise surprise, it still sounds thin and nasty.   Hey - what do you expect for eighty something quid ?  

No, don't be silly - of course it hasn't got MIDI.  But it has got a real stroke of genius:  for your money Casio not only provide a plug-in microphone but, yes, a harmoniser.  This has to be the cheapest on the market, and it's a brilliant addition.  Obviously anyone might feel a little awkward shouting "Yo Homeboys ! Tell these motherf***ers what time it is!" down a tiny plastic microphone in their parents' living room.  But whack your voice up or down a major sixth into Darth Vader/Bart Simpson mode and all inhibitions fly out the window in a stream of spontaneous gabble.  
My main disappointment was the turntable - a brilliant idea disappointingly executed because of using a ridiculously short scratch sample - presumably to economise on chip memory.  Luckily there's a longer and more workable scratch sound on one of the keyboard patches, while the turntable's alternative voice - a spacey vocoder sample - is a pefectly useable substitute.  Oh, and the other bad news:  the tempo change increments are completely out to lunch.  Most patterns seem to default at around107 bpm - one step down gives you100 bpm, while one step up is 114 bpm.  So far, so approximate - but two steps up produces126 bpm, while two steps down results in 94 bpm. Maybe I'm missing something here.  Have those cunning Casio chaps programmed in every hip tempo known to rap and left out all the others ?  Improbable, somehow.  In practice it didn't bother me - but you might not feel the same way. 

This inflexibility plus the lack of MIDI would make it hard to use the RAP-1 for any kind of serious work - perhaps the most compelling reason of all to buy one:  tinpot trash instruments are such a boon to creativity and inspiration.  Remember Trio's chart-topper "Da da da" with the orginal Casiotone VL-1 ?  Or how Roland's primitive and discontinued Bassline became THE flavour of 1989.  How Phil Collins would sometimes use an ancient CR-78 in preference to his own drum kit ?  Or even, God forbid, the dreaded Stylophone on Bowie's "Space Oddity" ?   The great thing about cheap instruments is that they don't intimidate you;  we all have this spurious distinction in our heads between "work" and "messing around" while paradoxically - as Eno is fond of pointing out - messing around often produces our most interesting work.

Can you remember the first record to feature a Fairlight, a Prophet 5, a Linn drum machine, Yamaha CS80 or modular Moog system ?  Neither can I - probably because the blasted things were so expensive at the time only super-rich boffins and bored pop stars could afford them.  And what did these people do after lashing out thousands of quid on some new gleaming piece of gadgetry they barely understood ?  My guess is, wet themselves in terror.  They certainly didn't doodle with it in the back of a tour bus. 

Encouragingly, it always seems to take several years before any low-end product filters through onto contemporary records.  On this showing you and I have until at least1993 to write and record the first Rapman-inspired hit single; after which everybody and their dog will follow suit - until it becomes terminally unhip again a couple of months later. 

Of course the burning question in the wake of the MARRS and KLF litigation will be who owns the copyright when a two-bar snatch of music from the Rapman's ROM finally does take the charts by storm.  (My money's on patterns 20, 22 or 30 - but then what do I know ?)   Everyone at Casio UK was extremely cagey on this subject.  On domestic instruments with demo sequences, they told me, Casio always negotiate an appropriate composer's rate with PRS for all titles featured - "Hi-ho, Hi-ho", "Someday my Prince will come" and so forth - and account scrupulously for every instrument sold.  But are these two bar drum patterns actually someone's copyright, I wondered.  They weren't sure.   How about the ones where there's a bassline and a couple of chords as well ?  They were even less sure.  

It's a tricky one, this, for obvious reasons - the wrong reply could end up costing your bosses in Japan several hundred thousand pounds.  Finally the official answer came back that all copyrights relating to the RAP-1 are owned by the Casio Music Corporation, and that seemed to be that.  My own guess is that if someone appeared on Top of the Pops with a song featuring the instrument prominently they'd be more likely to receive a massive sponsorship deal than a writ for breach of copyright.

In conclusion, you don't have to know, understand or even like rap music to derive huge enjoyment and (with luck) some fresh ideas from the Casio Rapman. If you hanker after cheap portable creativity and have waited too long for bug-free Yamaha QY10 machines to arrive in your local shop, I'm afraid you'll have to hanker a little longer, however.  The Yamaha, if it ever arrives in quantity, promises not only the portability and hip patterns of the Rapman, but a wide range of musically useful features to interface with your existing equipment.  If you have a limited budget and very little equipment so far, the QY10 - even at £249 - should prove far better value for money, if a great deal less fun.  On the other hand if you're already reasonably equipped and can afford to lash out ninety odd quid in search of a little wacky inspiration, I'd warmly recommend you to do so. 

Beats from Casio Rapman 2 (default speed)

Tom Robinson tells the story of a true original: record producer and sonic innovator Joe Meek. Born Robert George Meek on 5 April 1929 in Newent, Gloucestershire, Joe became Britain's premier independent record producer in the early sixties, as renowned for his pioneering recording techniques and eccentric personality as for the futuristic sounds he created.

HOLLOWAY DREAMS - The Joe Meek Story Part 1

With thanks to Paul Lewis who posted it at https://youtu.be/H79_3Nv_eWo "The song ‘Merrily Upon High’ recorded on 21 December 1978 at Pye Studios in London. It was co-written and performed by Peter Gabriel and Tom Robinson. It was recorded specially for Nicky Horne’s Capital Radio show and broadcast for the first time later that day. The pair played a charity concert at Hammersmith Odeon on 24th December 1978. They were joined on stage by Phil Collins, Elton John and Mike Rutherford, plus members of Tom Robinson Band and Peter Gabriel’s musicians. I found this track in a box of tapes that I had kept for close to 40 years. I was delighted to find it still played OK. As far as I can tell this track has never seen an official release, although a re-recording was released by Tom Robinson sometime in the early 1980’s after TRB had split up."

ROB & GAB - Merrily Up On High

Home From Home, Vol. 1

Atmosphere (Listen To The Radio)

Live At The 100 Club

Too Good To Be True

Tom Robinson (b.1950) is a songwriter and broadcaster who's released 14 studio albums and won two Sony awards for his radio work. He champions new independent artists on his podcast The BBC Introducing Mixtape on 6 Music and sponsors the music blog Fresh On The Net. He's also co-written songs with Elton John, Peter Gabriel and Dan Hartman over the years. The original Tom Robinson Band first became known in the 1970s as supporters of Rock Against Racism and LGBT rights, following their breakthrough hit  ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’

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