John Robb: My decades of music writing on the front line

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 in a way it does give you an idea of how the nature of music writing has changed in the last 40 years as well,” he says. “From fanzines to music papers then back to digital fanzines in a way, so it’s kind of come round in a weird circle, but with a much bigger reach than you would have in the fanzine days. Also, it gives you an idea of how the narrative on music in the UK has changed. Of course you can’t do the whole story of all music through your own prism over the last 40-odd years, but you can get a sense of how things change as you go through the book, so there is a sort of continuum to it.”

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. London could’ve been outer space to us in Blackpool. 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. I had no idea how you could make it because we were so naive, but we saw it was attainable, it wasn’t impossible to make it. I think that was a powerful thing. Also, with punk when Johnny Rotten said everyone can do this I know he didn’t really mean it, but we thought he did, so we had a go.

“It was empowering. None of the people I knew were ever going to go onstage, they’re not naturals, they didn’t go to college to learn how to be onstage, they were just mad little kids who loved music, they just wanted to make music and all of the other stuff that comes with it. You don’t make a band to have a career, you don’t make a band to even go on stage, it was just the drive to do something creative and punk empowered us to do that. For me, that was the revolution of punk, that was the thing that changed everything, more than any politics that came from The Clash, which was great of course​​​​​​, but ​​​​​​​this thing where a lot of a generation of people felt they could do something artful, it became post-punk, really. We all got it wrong but by getting it wrong ​​​​​​​we got it right, we created our own thing because you didn’t know what you were doing.”

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. “I think it’s just an extension of being a fan, you always want to turn people on to stuff,” he says. “To this day, you don’t necessarily write about stuff, but you go, ‘You’ve got to listen to this, check this out, check that out’. That’s what you do as a music fan​​​​​​​, not in any sense of one-upmanship, it’s just a shared experience. I’m actually more into ideas than anything – it could be musical, it could be artforms, it could be ideas that change the world, but if they engage you, you want to share them. That was always something that really fascinated me.”​​​​​​​

​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 because he had free train tickets because he was still working for British Rail at that point in time. 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 but laid it out like a McLaren-style manifesto 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/