In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities - #17: Tom Robinson

by Steve Miles

published: 29 / 10 / 2024

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities - #17: Tom Robinson

In his 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities' column Steve Miles makes a journey into the past and the future with Tom Robinson,

Article

You - yes you! If you want to begin to understand yourself properly, you need, to take the Butterfly Print Test. What is the Butterfly Print Test? Read on and find out… Along the way, you will read a truly inspiring interview with Tom Robinson, legendary singer-songwriter and new music champion. I was talking to him to discuss his tour with the Tom Robinson Band, which traverses the UK throughout October and November, ‘celebrating the iconic albums Power in the Darkness (1978) and TRB Two (1979)’. The press release notes, ‘TRB released a string of influential singles, including the landmark single 2-4-6-8 Motorway and the LGBTQ+ anthem Sing if You're Glad to be Gay; the latter famously banned by BBC Radio 1. Their debut album Power in the Darkness went Top 5 in the UK, confirming their status as one of the most important voices of their generation.’ But first, The Butterfly Print Test. People who understand themselves are rare. It has taken me the whole of my life to even begin to get there. First of all, we need to be able to separate our thoughts from our emotions. By which I mean, to have some awareness of how the feelings we feel colour the way we see the world. We all like to think that our opinions are derived from facts, and yet we can readily see that not to be the case in everyone around us. Our world views are generated at least as much by the hopes and fears, anxieties, unresolved childhood traumas, and peer pressure we feel as informed information and verifiable detail. We can easily see that process in others, and yet it is supremely difficult to recognise it in ourselves. On top of that, to be able to fully understand ourselves, we need to be able to step back from the maelstrom and gain some perspective. Dozens of times a day, I worry about things which by the end of the day prove not to have been worth worrying about. I like to think that had I the gift of perspective, I would worry a great deal less. If I were able to step back look at myself, and place events that are happening in the wider context, I'm certain that my actions and my decisions would be wiser and more peaceful. What I'm saying is that it is very hard for us to understand ourselves in our own context, and yet our experience on this earth would be greatly enhanced if we could. That of course, is one of the reasons I am so drawn to music. Because in the music I most enjoy, artists reveal to me their own struggles, decisions, worries, hopes and dreams, and that helps me unpick, explain, and navigate through my own path in life. Unfortunately, music, like television and social media - more than, say, literature or painting - has a tendency towards the echo chamber. The greatest thrill in hearing a new song is to hear the world you feel you are experiencing right at that moment laid out for you in sound. ‘Oh yes, that's just how I feel!’ It's a great emotion. ‘That's exactly what I think!’ It's a great validation. ‘They’re just like me!’ It's a great consolation. There is nothing wrong with any of those feelings: they are deeply important for us. But they do lack perspective. We are all so busy living our lives, experiencing the tsunami of emotions which every day brings, and navigating a path through the myriad choices, challenges, and missions of daily life, that it is almost impossible to step back and put all that in perspective. And so to the Butterfly Print Test. Most children, at some point will have experimented with the butterfly print. You take a piece of paper, fold it in half, and slap some watery paint on half of the page. Then you fold the paper back over, flatten it down with your palm, and open it up to reveal a disappointingly incomplete copy of the wing you painted on the other side of the paper. The aim is to produce a symmetrical butterfly. In my experience, it never quite works as well as you hope, but it's always fun. This is also true of the Butterfly Print Test. What you do is this: you take the date of your birth, and the time you are living now, and mentally spread them out in your mind like the wing of a butterfly. Then you fold that over in your head, squash it down with your soul, and produce a copy which goes in the other direction. That is to say, you project as far back from when you were born as you have progressed in real life from that date. I promise you, this can be a revelation. A good friend of mine said to me six weeks ago, ‘This country is going to the dogs’. He meant it from the bottom of his heart. He was born in 1945, so he’s 79 this year. He struggles with reading and writing, and as a result, the modern world can be deeply challenging for him. With so much being online, he is increasingly marginalised and left behind. He has always been a very capable man - practical, problem solving, hardworking, generous - but his growing sense of being excluded from the modern world, combined with the loss of strength, agility, and energy which age has brought with it, understandably leaves him feeling that the world has gone to the dogs. I am almost certain that he voted for Brexit, and I think he probably regrets it now. But, ironically, that betrayal by the Brexiteers - a promise to turn back time, undo our sense of helplessness, collective and personal, and make the future less uncertain - has probably only fuelled his disillusionment and made him more likely to buy into the false and easy promises of the same people who mis-sold him an exit from the European Union as an end to immigration and a taking back control of our lives. But if you map back 79 years from 1945, you reach 1866. The year the Statue of Liberty was ‘opened’ and dynamite was invented. Electricity wasn’t available anywhere in the world, nor the light bulb, nor the first car. Life expectancy was around 40 in Britain and the British army was busy conquering India. It’s unimaginably long ago, yet when my friend, Alec, was born, it was only as far away as his birth is from now. Is it any wonder that progress has left him marooned and bemused? The Sex Pistols’ first album came out in October 1977. That is 47 years ago. Go back 47 years from 1977, and you are in 1930, the year after the Wall Street Crash. If you were alive in 1977 and someone had asked you to listen to music from 1930, you’d have thought they were insane. But the Pistols’ recent Lydon-less gigs were both sold out and rhapsodically reviewed. What’s changed? The Butterfly Print Test helps you put your life in context. It helps the past make more sense and the future seem less scary. But – paradoxically, perhaps – there’s also a very prevalent modern phenomenon of hankering after the past, looking at it through rose-tinted glasses. And that, by contrast to the perspective offered by the BTP, worries me a lot. Mainly for two reasons: one, because it’s simply wrong… and two, because it just doesn’t seem healthy. The most obvious evidence to cite is, of course, Trump and MAGA. The title track of the upcoming European Sun album is called ‘When Britain Was Great’ and it addresses this very issue – chronicling the horrors of the ‘Seventies and reminding the listener how partial and flawed a nostalgia for those years must surely be. Tom Robinson was born just five years after my friend and yet he has never fallen for that nostalgic narrative. He uses social media and the Internet as effortlessly as those who have grown up with it in their lives. ‘I wonder what we ever did before computers’, he says at one point in our zoom chat, as he relays a message to his wife while talking to me on video from his living room, interrupting our chat only to let the dog out. He comes across as a thoughtful, reflective, kind and generous man. But here he is, touring with two albums from the late ‘seventies and seemingly surfing on that same wave of nostalgia I just derided. Or is he? I want to know… I tell him how a recent email I received from one of the biggest venues in my area, advertising this autumn’s events, consisted entirely of bands celebrating the something-anniversary of a record or cover bands. And how a recent Rough Trade missive - the label once synonymous with new music and the common people - consisted almost entirely of offering me expensive and unnecessarily repackaged anniversary editions of albums that weren't even worth releasing the first time. Why is it, I ask him, that so many of our contemporaries have fallen for this fetishization of vinyl and the reliving of experiences they have already had, instead of seeking new experiences and new bands, and why, on a broader scale, do so many people seem to want to reclaim the past, as if we have just fallen from Eden into our current age? This was a tough, and probably rude, question to ask a man just about to head out on a tour ‘playing nothing later than 1979’. But I thought that if anyone could help me with these matters, it would be man who has spent the last twenty years championing new music on BBC 6 Music, and who was well known in his music for criticising the morals and mores of the time. His tour, I suspected, was hardly going to be just about revisiting his most famous records in some thoughtless cash grab – unlike, say, oh, some famous Manchester louts - and so it proved. We didn’t even discuss dynamic pricing. TRB split up in 1979. A great, career-covering interview with him by John Clarkson appeared in this very magazine in 2020, and I recommend reading that alongside this one. But rather than go over those areas again, I opt to seize the opportunity to have Tom help me tackle that question of a longing to return to the past, or the imagined past, which is so prevalent in our world today. He's patient with me when I challenge him, forgiving when I ask personal questions, and open in his answers. Patiently, wisely, and articulately, he explained why he feels it’s not only valid, but essential, to revisit the songs that made his career. He explained how he deals with the fact that attitudes have changed since his songs were written and was passionate about what he sees as the vital, essential connection with his audience. And there’s more than just that, because Tom has a lot of interesting things to say – about growing up queer in post-war Britain, about punk, about fame and success, about the audience-artist bond, and about politics, then and now. It was very much worth my time talking to Tom, and it’s very much worth yours to read the results here. I started by asking him what he remembered about the time the records were made. - -It was quite an experience to go through. It kind of reminded us of that Little Richard Thing of, ‘He got what he wanted, but lost what he had’. Fame was something I dreamed of without having any idea what that would actually entail and the pressures it would bring. I literally went from signing on at the dole office in north London to being on Top of the Pops inside three weeks. Of course, it gave me a career: if I hadn't had that sudden fifteen minutes of fame, I wouldn't still be talking to you now, and probably wouldn't have had a career in radio. I think I've made some 14 or 15 studio albums over the years, which is not bad off two hit singles, one in 1977 and one in 1983! -It could have been quite different. After Sector 27 finished (his post-TRB band) I had a nervous breakdown. It all fell apart. If the person I was then could have seen the life I've had since they would have been astonished that I have lived into my ‘70s and am still playing. That really would have been very surprising indeed. I really didn't think there was a long-term future. I would also have been astonished to find out that I was bisexual, and that I would end up happily married with kids and, you know, living a suburban life in South London. With a Gay Liberation Front activist! -I can't really wish for it to have been different because I wouldn't have got to where I am now, and who I am now, without having gone through all that, but some of it I could have done without… I think the single biggest thing that I would say to myself if I could talk to the 27-year-old me who was kind of thrashing around, lost in the middle of uncharted territory, not knowing where to go, is: ‘It's all about the songs, stupid! It's not about how marvellous you are, it's not about keeping the faith or staying true to your ideals, so much as the songs that are actually underlying all the NME articles and the public image. It is songs people like.’ I would have said, ‘Spend a lot more time writing songs and a lot less time writing diaries or replying to fan mail.’ Given that sentiment, it is entirely natural and right that Tom wants to play the songs his audience wants to hear. Those songs gave him the career he had, gave his audience pleasure, and are the very reason he can do a tour like this. -We took a poll from the mailing list and asked them which songs they wanted to hear, particularly from the second album. And there we go. One of the advantages of having had relatively few high profile records is that you can actually play all the high profile records in a normal concert, so people are satisfied, and you still have enough scope in the show to throw in the stuff that you want to play as well. We can cover all the bases of everything most people want to hear off both albums in the course of one evening. I'm not playing anything newer than those in 1979. You're revisiting a chunk of your youth? -Yes, every night. So that how does that feel as a 74-year-old? -It feels like honouring the person that I was then. And treating that material with respect. Performing the material to the absolute best that it can be performed. These songs have never sounded as good as they do with our current drummer playing them. So honouring them is one thing. The other is, you have to - well, I don't know if you have to, but I choose to - treat those songs as kind of like folk songs that you have to keep them to date. The trouble with folk songs is that you're often kind of honouring a minor strike from 1842 or a peasants’ revolt that is no longer relevant. I don't really want songs like ‘Power In The Darkness’ to become museum pieces. And so I try to keep the lyrics reasonably current without departing too violently. When you go to see Bob Dylan, he does ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ different every night with different lyrics and there's no one definitive version. You need to be able to feel the material when you perform it and mean it, so I won't be singing about Mary Whitehouse, you know?! Even Thatcher was a bit later… However, much of the first album in particular could have been written today. Take, for example, ‘Up Against The Wall’, which goes: ‘White boys kicking in a window/ Straight girls watching where they gone/ Never trust a copper in a crime car/ Just whose side are you on?// Consternation in Brixton/ Rioting in Notting Hill Gate/ Fascists marching on the high street/Carving up the welfare state’ – ‘Up Against The Wall’. -Whitehall has had us in a chokehold for the last fifteen years! But if you're a writer of pop music, you need to reflect the collective unconscious, if you can - or your bit of it. And when you get it right, it resonates with other people. But although we are that little bit closer to the brink, and the clock of doom is perhaps a few minutes closer to midnight than it was, with the environmental threats facing us, there is no doubt that this is a much kinder society that we live in today than the ‘70s. The world is an infinitely better place. Certainly in the United Kingdom, where we live, despite the gross inequalities and the manifest flaming injustices that we all see around us. Compared to the racism and the misogyny and the homophobia and the sheer baked-in injustice of ‘70s society, this is a so much better place to live in than it was then. I wouldn't go back for any money. There's no sum of money you could pay me that would make me want to go back and live in the 1970s Britain that I knew back then. It was a horrible world. I remember the spit dripping off my bass guitar strings and the constant threat of skinhead violence outside. It was just an ugly nasty society that we grew up in and we're still trying to shake it off. I think it's been shaken off to a fantastic extent. There are so many more brown faces on television. There's still massive inequality; there are still far more men than women in the media, and the money that men gain from jobs is still more than for women for the same job, but we're getting there. It is at least better than it was. So I don't buy into this idea that it never changes, and it's all horrible. Even now, with all that’s going on (the Southport riots). We had Martin Webster then for God's sake! They didn't have the same plausibility as Nigel Farage, but people like him and a lot of more were the Tory party grandees then. The same record has ‘The Summer of ’79’, which eerily predicted a great deal of the conflict and authoritarianism that Thatcher brought in from that very year. - I've changed that lyric in the last few years. In the last verse, I’ve suddenly broken away from the old lyrics and just go: ‘This song predicted all these things/ But who cares what a protest singer sings/ ‘Cos Maggie was waiting in the wings/ Of the winter of ’79. Then loads of gay geezers got sick and died/ With striking miners getting crucified/ A few fought back and a few of them died/ After the winter of 79.’ - You know, you gotta stay true to the original spirit, but you still gotta stay true to the facts. Another striking part of the album that could have been recorded today is the fake speech from a conservative-minded voice in ‘Power In The Darkness’ which I always thought was real TV sample, but which was, in fact, written and spoken by Tom: ‘Today, institutions fundamental to the British system of Government are under attack: the public schools, the house of Lords, the Church of England, the holy institution of Marriage, even our magnificent police force are no longer safe from those who would undermine our society, and it's about time we said 'enough is enough' and saw a return to the traditional British values of discipline, obedience, morality and freedom.’ - When we were recording that album, the song wasn't actually finished. When we went into the studio, we only had one chorus. So to pad it out we put in an organ solo and then had that bit, but that's always been problematic because on a record, people couldn't see for sure that you were wearing a mask while you're delivering it, or that it was meant to be a parody. So it was a bit heavy-handed - well, very heavy-handed. But a lot of my rage at that time, I think, was fuelled by my feelings for my father. That speech, as it was presented, resembled my own father’s views. There's probably some personal animus driving that anger at the time. In my thirties, I was reconciled with my dad and we made our peace. And I came to know him as an honourable and a stalwart man, an admirable man in many ways - with failings, like all of us - but I made my peace with him and that gave me peace as a human being myself. I think it’s part of the process. I had the nervous breakdown, aged thirty in 1980, and went into therapy for ten years. Ten years of psychotherapy was needed really just to be able to inhabit my own skin. I was really quite a disturbed person, and I couldn’t have been very easy to work with for the other musicians in TRB at the time - or the managers, or any of the people around me. So it’s hard to separate the personal journey from the from the musical one, but I now kind of listen to me doing that, parodying the seventies and I hear the tone of voice very much having been from my own dad. I regret now having used him as a kind of Aunt Sally to kick, but it did help me get some important work done at the time, so you know… - I think we probably forget how strong and unapologetic the establishment was in the 1970s. The Reform Party today is a big fringe, but it's not at the very core of the country like it was then, where we had racist, misogynist, homophobic, elitist, discriminatory values baked into the system (the very themes, btw, of the aforementioned and soon-to-be-released ‘When Britain Was Great’). I think perhaps Reform are speaking for people who feel marginalised in their own country, and I can completely understand that. Those of us in the ‘metropolitan elite’, in the bubbles of middle-class London, lose sight completely of what life is like on the streets of Middlesbrough. That kind of working class, Northern, left-out community who have been fucked by the ‘metropolitan elite’. The danger of Reform is that they offer easy answers. Waving a flag and saying let's make Britain Great Again begs the question, when was this exactly?! Which specific year would you like to go back to? 1955 - was Britain so very fucking great then? Rationing had just ended. National Service was still in full force for 18-year-olds. Who in their right mind would want to go back to 1955? So, if not ’55, then when? Exactly when was Britain great? And if you do find a time you would like to go back to, and if you go back to it, you’ll find that the people who are saying it would have been a lot worse off then. In much more dire circumstances than they are today. So yeah, we've got to find solutions to that inequality and that injustice that many people are living under. But not ‘Let's wave a flag and beat up the foreigners.’ And what is the solution? -Steve, honestly, I don't know the answer. I'm trying to make sense of that time, because we're revisiting it musically in the next couple of months. I have been looking back at that, going through my diaries and trying to see what actually happened, and the context of the songs and part of the problem this: people would ask me all sorts of questions in interviews, because I was this mouthy git who was all over the front pages of the music press on a regular basis, and they asked me questions that I had no qualification for answering whatsoever! Like, ‘What do you think the solution to the problems of Northern Ireland is? To the sectarian violence and the occupation of the troops in Northern Ireland? What do you think about that?’ And, fuck me, I'm trying to tell them! But all I really knew was how to play the bass guitar! It's not really a qualification, being able to hit four strings with the plectrum! So I look back at some of those interviews and really cringe, because the honest answer would have been, ‘I just don't know.’ -And people still ask me now, would I help start Rock Against Racism again, you know? But it's like Chuck D said - in the face of Donald Trump - why are you expecting Public Enemy to come out and fight this shit, you know? We've done our shift. You need another voice at this point if you're looking for an energetic movement to combat the neo-fascist backlash which we saw in Southport. We didn't look to the veterans of Cable Street to come and help us into the racism of the ‘70s. You know, it wasn't their job to come and lead it. They were cheering us on from the sidelines. But it was a new generation that was needed and it needs to be as current and fresh-minted again now. Tom has already made clear where much of his 1970’s anger came from, and how much of a crucial role his upbringing played in that. But I wondered whether also it had to do with his sexuality, because, incredible as it now seems – and going back to the question of just how great Britain really was back then – for the first seventeen years of his life it was illegal to have the feelings he had. -Yeah, that's certainly true. And a seminal influence on me was the New York Theatre group Hot Peaches, who came over in ‘76 from Greenwich Village and did a residency in London. They recruited me as a guitarist, so I sat there every night and watched their show. I was incredibly, profoundly moved by the first-hand accounts of the Stonewall riot and the uncompromising liberationist ethos. ‘We’re here, we're queer, get used to it’ felt so different from the ‘Please excuse us for existing’ attitude that many of us had. That, combined with the Metropolitan Police having a kind of crackdown on the gay community because it made for easy arrests that same summer. That led to making the direct connection between that and what they were doing with the SUS laws in Notting Hill and Brixton. They were picking on minorities and it seemed to me that even if there weren't direct connections between our two communities (and the Afro Caribbean Community had very mixed views on homosexuality), we had a common enemy and therefore common purpose. And that was the same thing that lesbian and gay support for the miners had in the ‘80s. That same perception that what the miners and the gays of Soho had in common was the Thatcher government was no friend to either of us and their achievement in building that bridge was just fucking phenomenal. We saw them going round our clubs collecting to support the miners’ strike, and people said, ‘Well, they don't fucking support us.’ They didn't even know who we were. But when they they rocked up in that Welsh village (as depicted in the film ‘Pride’) with their donations, they found that common cause. (It is said that at the 1985 Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, a groundbreaking resolution committing the party to the support of LGBT rights only passed due to support from the National Union of Mineworkers.) -When Cafe Society (Tom’s pre-TRB group) was touring in early ’75, we played in Scarborough at the Penthouse Club. And the DJ came on at the end and said, ‘Next week we've got a band coming up from London. I don't know anything about them except they are meant to be the worst band in Britain and they’re called the Sex Pistols.’ And you knew it was gonna be rammed, just with that build up! So when I got back to London, I looked them up in the back of the Melody Maker and went to see them at the 100 Club. I mean… I hated it! It was horrible! It was contrary to everything we’d ever thought about music, about how you do your best to play properly, and do your best to be nice to the audience. They swaggered onto the stage about half an hour late, didn't bother to tune up, and first thing Rotten said when he got to the microphone was, ‘Who’s gonna buy me a drink?’ And it was sheer confrontation from then on. They didn't have many of the songs written at that point so they were doing cover versions of pub band classics like ‘(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone’. I particularly remember ‘Whatcha Gonna Do About It’ by The Small Faces, which they changed the words of, so that Rotten was going, ‘I want you to know/ I don't care’. So it was a shock. I left after about 15 minutes. I didn't wanna hear or see any more of it. But it was quite abundantly clear that whatever the next big thing was, it certainly wasn't going to be an acoustic vocal harmony trio like Cafe Society! So I did eventually then form a band of my own, without paying too much attention to the playing skills, but more to the availability and willingness of the potential members. And it was clear that it just had to be very real. -With Café Society, I was the only gay member out of a three-man band, so there was very much that thing for them that we don't want to be ‘that gay band’. But, of course, at that time that was the one interesting thing about us that any journalist would bother with, much to the chagrin of the other two happily married, heterosexual, pretty-songwriter colleagues of mine, who actually were much better singers and much better songwriters than I was. When I had my own band, it could be front and centre. That, and that punk brought people with different reasons for being angry together. Punk had a wonderful message of ‘Just do it yourself. Don't wait for the record industry. It's not about being a big star. It's not about conventional music, it's about just getting on and doing your own thing.’ It’s probably impossible to overstate how important TRB’s second single, ‘Glad To Be Gay’ was in the history of British music. -If you’re in a minority, you're constantly on the lookout for other possibly gay musicians and for the smallest hint of anything with something remotely LGBT in it. Growing up in the ‘60s and being a music fan, and being attracted to the same sex, there was no music for us. You’d listen to the lyrics and want to go, ‘That sounds almost like how I feel’, but there was nobody seeing how I felt. That didn't happen till Bowie in ’72 with ‘Hunky Dory’ when you suddenly went, ‘Hold on, that's about me, that's my life. He's singing my life with his song.’ After Bowie, I just said to myself, ‘If I ever get a chance, if I have a career in music and I ever get a chance to do for other people what this man and this music has done for me. I will. I'll pass it on, because we need to hear ourselves. We need to hear a reflection of our lives and our experience.’ --We just didn’t get it. The whole popular culture was boy meets girl. Magazines, romance stories, trashy novels, cartoons… The whole of popular culture, the TV soaps, it was all boy meets girl. There was no boy meets boy, girl meets girl, or boy is girl, you know, which was really the reality for us feeling excluded. -Funnily enough, you know it was, being able to come out completely as queer that enabled me to discover my bisexuality, because I didn't have anything to prove. All the time I was trying to deny the fact that I was attracted to other boys, any attraction I actually felt towards women was completely dwarfed by this terrible secret. Out of 100 people I was attracted to, 99 would be men, and one would be a woman. But I was attracted to an awful lot of people, so there were quite a few women when you add it up! It meant that when I did have a relationship with a woman I wasn't trying to hide or prove anything any more. And, actually, I met my wife at a gay switchboard benefit, but in in the world of the ‘80s, when the Sunday People went to town, you had no comeback. Then the thing that really clinched it was when our first kid was born. Somebody grassed us up at the hospital and we got a phone call from the Sunday People, saying, ‘We want to come and take pictures of your baby. We've got a story about you that you're really not gonna like, and we're gonna run it this Sunday unless you let us come and take pictures of your baby.’ So we went to a publicist and said, ‘How can we stop this?’ And they said, ‘There is nothing you can do to stop it. The only option you have where you can take back control is for you to take your own baby pictures, write your own press release, and send it to all the papers, except for the Sunday People, on the day before they are due to publish. And that will kill their story dead.’ So that's what we did and as a result I was in the Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Sun, The Mirror… Loads of scumbag papers that had been crucifying the gay community for years, and with HIV around, were now peddling unimaginable shit about our community. So, if you then see ‘Tom Robinson talks to the Sun’, and you see my picture holding my infant child beside the Page 3 model with the inevitable ‘Glad to Be Dad’ headline, you’re bound to go, ‘What the fuck?!’ I’d have said the same. In those pre-internet, pre social media days, there was no place we could go to say we were forced to do this, to make clear the threats that we were under, and the fact that we had no choice. We didn't think it was even a fucking story. But we just had to do So I turned up at Pride, as usual every year, with my guitar to sing ‘Glad To Be Gay’ and I got booed. And no wonder. Compared to the tabloid crucifixions that some people have gone through, it was pretty mild. But it didn't last. Because in ‘96 Pride changed its name to LGBT Pride. And an invitation came through, ‘Do you want to come and play the bisexual stage?’ So I took my guitar down once again, got up on this stage in this tent – which was absolutely rammed by the way - and as I was plugging my guitar in, somebody in the audience shouted, ‘Where have you been, Tom?’ And I said, ‘Making babies,’ and they all cheered. And it was like coming home. It was like a homecoming. As if to say, ‘In LGBT, B stands for something. It's not just a token letter of the alphabet that we stick in, it's something that people actually are. All I've done is move from G to B… And after that first splash of the tabloids, we just made a policy of never releasing photographs of them, never giving their names in public. I never link to any of my offspring on social media. We go back to the question of why, if the past was so bad, people seem to want to relive it so much? And Tom has a very convincing and empathetic answer. -Those songs were born in times of financial uncertainty, political uncertainty and right-wing violence: that's the world that was reflected in the songs. And what we tried to give was an upbeat message of solidarity and help in that atmosphere. And what I'd like to hope is that the audiences will come back this autumn to hear those songs of solidarity, in similar times of political and financial uncertainty and right-wing violence. So I think we can supply something of uplift and solidarity in equally difficult times. And if people have drawn strength from those songs in the past, they might want to come along and draw strength from them again in today's changed and worrying world. Does that work, Steve? It does, very much. But do you think people are so resistant to change from their artists in general? -Well, when you turn on the hot tap in the hotel, you want hot water to come out of it. When you turn on the tap, you want a certain thing to come out of it and when you turn on the radio station, you don't want to turn on Classic FM and hear Motörhead. Not everyone has music as the thing where you sit down on your settee between two huge speakers and listen to all the way through in perfect silence and reverent attention. Most people have the music on while they’re doing the hoovering, while they’re washing up, while kids are screaming in the back of the car. So when people want to go to a live experience, it’s a minority who are adventurous enough that they want to go to hear something completely unknown. And they tend to be younger. After that, if you're gonna make time in your life to go out, you want to see something you know you’ll like. At age 35 or 45 or 55, you might not want to risk it being fucking awful. ‘Play me some stuff I know. That's why I paid X pounds for this ticket. It's because this song is part of my youth, part of my childhood.’ I think there's room to introduce other songs as well, and it's one of the advantages of having had very few hit records myself is that I don't get into that bind which more successful artists face all the time of having to play all your hits. It must be a nightmare being Bruce Springsteen! -There’s something I routinely read out on stage before I play anything from a recent record. I just say to the audience, ‘I'd like to read out a review of Shakin’ Stevens at Glastonbury in 2008 on the Pyramid Stage: “Summer brings sunshine and with it, Shakin’ Stevens. An audience member appears to have lugged an actual green door all the way to Glastonbury in anticipation of hearing Shakey’s big hit, which the singer declines to play. Instead, from the stage comes the last announcement anyone wants to hear. We're gonna play a couple of tracks from our last album. It's greeted with an audible groan.” I'd like to play a couple of songs from my last album.’ That's what I say. -But I did dedicate 15 years of my life to trying to help people who are making new music precisely because they are competing not only against each other but against the previous fifty years. The difficulty of building an audience for somebody who's doing something that hasn't been heard before is immense and requires a lot of smarts to try and make that happen. What we do have going for those people is the internet. It's a jungle and the big beasts in that jungle are heavy duty predators, but it does mean there's a room for connection with strangers that was previously unthinkable. There’s Tom Robinson, looking to the future with optimism. And that takes us back to the Butterfly Print Test. If you look back to the world that existed as far away from when you were born as you are now in the future from that same point, I guarantee you will be amazed how far back in history you would go if you lived your life, as it were, in reverse. Tom Robinson is 74: the world he was born into was so very different to the world today, and yet he’s thriving. In a way, preparing for this tour has been his own version of the Test. Even millennials taking the Test might realise just how far they had travelled, and how well they had coped with the changes in the world during their own lifetimes. The Test makes us all realise how natural and normal it is to feel at times a little bit lost and a little bit left behind, but not to mistake that for decline and decay. Indeed, there are many young people who feel left out, left behind, or ill at ease, in the world today. And many of them are choosing the wrong solutions to their problems, because they're being told lies about the reasons they feel that way. A fragile dinghy, battered by the waves of the English Channel, half-filled with terrified children, isn't standing in the way of anything they want to achieve in their lives. It is the unseen movement in property deeds, profits, and unpaid taxes that swell the ever-growing wealth of a small minority of multinational oligarchs that is shaping the world in ways that squash the dreams of young people. What the Butterfly Print Test can do is remind you that your occasional or frequent sense of disorientation with the world is natural and normal. It does not denote some failing in the modern world. That the world is rapidly changing is not a reason to want to go back to the past. It's the reason to look to the future. And If you go to see Tom Robinson performing songs he wrote as an angry young man, I believe that even though you will be revisiting the past you will be doing so in the spirit of the butterfly print test and you will come out thinking more positively about the future. Which is as good a reason as you could wish for.