Robinson

"If England ever has a revolution it will come dressed up as a garden fete"

Iain Sinclair - Lights Out for The Territory*

This is going to be a collection of songs that I’ve written, songs that will otherwise get forgotten and songs that eventually lose their meaning and end up somewhere entirely different from where they started. Hopefully I can tell you a little bit about where they come from and sometimes that might take you to interesting places.

So I’m going to start with this, Robinson.

Do you know Robinson? I first came across him in a book by Iain Sinclair, and from there found my way to Patrick Keiller’s London (1992). London is a monologue delivered over a series of static camera shots, recording and documenting the life of the city from the point of view of its narrator, in conversation with “his gay friend, Robinson”. I don’t think of 1992 as very long ago ( I was alive, and just starting secondary school) but watching this evokes an old looking England. Old police cars. Old McDonalds. Old Tories fighting and winning an election. London is an amazing film, when I moved here it was one of the things that helped work out what the city might be about. I cycle past the London Stone every day as I go to work, I don’t think many people notice it.

It will become clear from this blog that I’m a terrible thief, so I took Robinson to put in this song. He doesn’t talk much, but it matters when he does.

Of all the songs that I’m going to post, this one is probably the easiest to write about. In the wake of a bunch of people forcibly endorsing JDsports, Krissi Munson in the Guardian complained that bands weren’t political enough, that they didn’t have enough to say about contemporary events, so I thought “Yes. You are right and it must be easy to write a song like Ghost Town or White Riot or Do they Owe Us A Living or National Shite Day” and this is what I came up with... A song about going to the pub with an imaginary homosexual from an early 90s arthouse movie. Steadfastly and self-pityingly avoiding anything going on around us.

One thing I do worry about is how much things need to be explained. Do you need to know about Julia Martha Thomas and her grisly demise? The net huts on the beach in Hastings? The lady on a boat fending off rioters with an airgun as they dodged police helicopters in Hackney marshes? Now you know who Robinson is you know that he’s not mine, that everysosatisfying three syllable descending rob-in-son fall off the tongue name to say is someone else’s. I hope that’s OK. I hope that he doesn’t mind being pulled out of the screen to cameo in a folk song.

*flicking through this book I now can't find the actual quote, apologies for any inaccuracy.

Trial. By Witchtrial.