Robb’s decades of music writing on front line
FOR four decades John Robb has been one of the UK’s foremost writers on music, interviewing everyone from Nirvana and Mark E Smith of The Fall to X-Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene and Factory Records founder Anthony Wilson. Now a new book, Do You Believe in the PowerofRock&Roll? , gathers together a selection of his work from ‘40 years of music writing from the front line’ – and this month the 62-year-old is embarking on a corresponding spoken word tour.
Blackpool-born Robb, who is also the frontman of the post-punk band Membranes and founder of the culture website Louder Than War, says he intended the book to provide a cross-section of his work for multiple outlets from over the years.
“I tried to do it in chronological order, so I did start from doing the fanzine (Blackpool Rox), the early days of Zigzag then to Sounds then to Melody Maker then to online, so it does give you an idea of how the nature of music writing has changed in the last 40 years as well,” he says.
As a teenager in the 1970s, Robb found punk “massively” empowering. “Like a lot of us from my age, we were glam rock kids. Top of the Pops was this portal to this other world that was amazing but you could never join in with it. David Bowie was from outer space and all the other people in it were from London. But when punk came along it was on your doorstep. Someone brought a copy of Spiral Scratch by Buzzcocks to school saying ‘they made this themselves’, and someone brought (the punk fanzine) Sniffin’ Glue with them and you thought, there is a way of making something like this.”
Robb was the first person to interview The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Stone Roses, he was also the first British journalist to speak to Nirvana. For him, it was about sharing his musical discoveries.
Getting to know a lot of people through music was, he says, “an important part of this process”. “I knew Alan McGee before he started Creation, he put my band the Membranes on in London, we became really good friends and I remember him talking about starting up a label in London, going round to other small labels to see how it was done. So when he signed the Mary Chain he brought them up to my house in Manchester to do the first interview for Zigzag.
“The two brothers hardly said anything because they were so nervous, Douglas (Hart) did most of the interview and McGee did all of the interview and then we went to watch Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry who was playing at the Hacienda and I introduced Alan to Tony Wilson. So in that one night I managed to set up the foundations of British alternative rock culture.”
Do You Believe in the Power of Rock& Roll? is published by Unbound, priced £14.99. John Robb appears at Selby Town Hall on March 22, Square Chapel, Halifax on March 29, The Leadmill, Sheffield on April 10, Pocklington Arts Centre on April 11 and The Old Woollen, Leeds on April 28. https://www.facebook.com/johnrobbofficial/