TRYING NEW THINGS IN HACKNEY SPECIAL: Finding new music: Julian meets Robin

Hackney is a hot bed of new musical talent. Julian Cheatle went to meet one of the Borough's rising stars.





ROBIN Grey believes that if he puts in the effort, one day he will reap the reward.
He is sitting in a small Hackney recording studio, tucked away behind a row of terraced houses. He moved to London last year because, he says, that’s where his music needs him to be.

Everything Robin has done since school has been part of his grand plan. He learned classical guitar at school, as an homage to REM lead singer Michael Stipe and other legends who had classical training. He went to university because his favourite bands, like REM, had met at university. The fascination is not with REM, but with an ideal: Robin is a work-in-progress. “It’s all about being patient and working hard,” he says. He knows what he wants to achieve but understands only hard work and determination will bring success.

At university in Leeds he met some of the musicians that he has gone on to work with: Jonny Berliner and Joe Allen.
“We made a lot of mischief together,” he says. “We went to the Edinburgh festival and had a month long residency where we played every night, two or three times, for about a month.” The intensive schedule of performing was great practice, he says. Next, though, on the hard road to achieving his goal, was to learn more about recording. That was where the move to London came in.

“It’s a completely different art form to performing,” he says. “It’s like standing in front of a really harshly lit six-foot mirror. It highlights all the things that aren’t quite right, and then you have to stare at them. It makes you approach music in a very different way.

“There are two schools of thought here: the Bob Dylan approach, which is to just do it and leave the rough edges in, and the Paul Simon approach which is to spit and polish every millisecond. With my band Blue Swerver, every single second is like that, but a lot of the stuff I do myself is deliberately as organic and spontaneous and live as possible.”

Now he spends most of his time at the Blue Door, the studio he set up in Hackney last year. The room is packed with instruments: there’s a charango from Peru, a double bass, several guitars. He’s collected instruments throughout his life, wherever he’s been. In Ghana, for example, he acquired a one-string kalabash violin. He visited the West African country before starting university. “There was music everywhere,” he says. “I used to walk around with my minidisc, recording it all.”

And they wanted to hear him, too. “Kids used to sit outside my window and wait for me to start playing guitar in my bedroom. I used to say, ‘Oh guys, just come in!’ Somewhere in this small village in Ghana there’s a bunch of people who all know a song called Saxon Street, by a small Cambridge band, which was my favourite at the time.”

No doubt all the other instruments hanging on the wall have similarly colourful stories behind them, too. “I’ve waited my whole life to have a room like this – full of toys,“ he says. “It’s worked out perfectly. I can come here any hour of the day. Sometimes I’ve had sessions where I’ve recorded until four or five in the morning because I’ve just been in the zone.”
It’s these hours of hard work that will pay off in the end. Take the Arctic Monkeys as an example.

“With them it’s always been ‘the internet this’, ‘the internet that’”, he says, “but there’s a lot of hard work that goes on. They worked really, really, hard gigging. I’m sure they have had more than their fair share of playing to half empty rooms in the middle of nowhere. If you do lots of gigs and you’re good - which they are - you will get fans who’ll want to buy your records. But at the end of the day you’ve got to put on a good live show. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was just somebody at a record label who decided it was a clever way to market things.”

And so Robin’s patient wait continues. He is working on various projects at the moment: some in bands, some alone – most recently, Blue Swerver played at the Embassy Club in Mayfair. Robin thinks the band is currently his best chance of success. They're good - but Robin is an exceptionally talented musican, and he has a singing voice you could easily listen to for hours. Being stuck at the back playing the bass in a band isn’t where he belongs.


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