Tom Robinson: Eton Rifle

Radio 6 Music should be safe from the government’s attempts to curb the BBC. It was claimed last week that the Downing Street spin team go into hyperdrive whenever Sam Cameron complains about hearing a bad news story on her favourite station. One of 6’s presenters is Tom Robinson, the former punk protest singer, who told a TMS elf about being invited to perform at Eton. “One of the beaks was a fan,” he said. “It was daunting standing in front of 600 sons of the ruling elite, looking at me and thinking ‘who the eff is this?’” He kicked the gig off with his 1978 hit Glad to be Gay, an apt anthem for Eton, since a former headmaster was the first man to be convicted under the 1533 Buggery Act. *

Times Diary.

PS Listen to Tom Robinson's Live At Eton ep on Lastfm.

* Nicholas Udall.

Terry Sue-Patt: 1964-2015

'Flippin' 'eck, Tucker!'

PS Terry was also the cover star of TRB's Up Against The Wall...

Banned: 2 4 6 8 Motorway!

Tom Robinson Band, Glad to Be Gay (1978) Originally written for a London gay pride parade, this song became a gay anthem after being banned by the BBC.

Telegraph.

Nope, Glad To Be Gay was not banned - it was a b-side on an ep so would not have been played anyway.
And what the fuck is a "gay anthem"?
It may have not been played on account of it being one of the most boring songs in the entire history of music.

PS At a quick glance most of these songs weren't actually "banned by the BBC."

Lou Reed: He Wasn't Too Keen On Journalists...

Apparently the last portrait, taken earlier this month by Jean Baptiste Mondino.

Only saw two queer-specific articles about Lou in the British media, which seems rather odd considering his stunning impact on your actual gay culture, but doesn't really surprise me.
Here's Paris Lees on the Channel 4 News website on what he meant to trans people.
And Tom Robinson wrote for The Independent on his "implied bisexuality"...

Perhaps it was our own hunger for affirmation that led my generation to try and cast such a complex – and downright ornery – individual as Lou Reed in the role of Gay Figurehead. If ever an artist saw sexuality as a vast, diverse landscape with many bright wonders and dark private places – and if there was ever an artist unlikely to identify himself publicly with just one corner of that territory – it was Sister Lou.

An Independent reader replies...

And let's not forget the Daily Mail's moving eulogy to Uncle Lou...

A VERY debauched walk on the wild side: He did more than any other rock star to give drugs a false and dangerous glamor. Now, after a liver transplant in May, Lou Reed's own excesses have finally caught up with him

Remember, the life of this rapacious, proselytizing drug-taking pervert was cruelly cut short at the age of just 71.

Just say no, kids!

Update: In Wednesday's Mail Jan Moir writes on Lou Reed and our "dysfunctional relationship with celebrity death."
Yes, that's the same Jan Moir who infamously wrote about Stephen Gately's Strange, Lonely And Troubling Death!

The Times: They Have A-Changed Etc Etc

This weekend, in the car with the children, I was playing Sing if You’re Glad to be Gay by the Tom Robinson Band. It’s just been re-released and I hadn’t heard the original version for quite a long time. I’d almost forgotten how good it was — direct and brave and true. At the end of the song comes the singer’s revelation that he is gay. Sing if you’re glad to be gay, sing if you’re happy this way. And the children wanted to know why he sang it.
You see, for them being gay is something so natural that the assertion seemed pointless, a “so what?” moment. It was the weekend of Pride, the parade to celebrate the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities. And it was being sponsored by Ernst & Young and RBS and Barclays. Gay rights, being gay, is safe to them and conventional and obvious. Come to think of it, they probably think it’s more edgy to work for Barclays or RBS. You wouldn’t lose your knighthood for being gay.

A post-prandial Pride piece in The Times. by executive editor and ex-Tory party worker, Daniel Finkelstein

In summary; everything's just fine and dandy here now and England swings like a pendulum do.
We're a bit let down by all these funny foreigners in those loser countries, though.
Especially Iran and Russia, who really don't play by our rules.
Much of the usual liberal hand-wringing in covert defence of Western neo-imperialism etc etc.
Oh, and did I mention I've got kids?

Readers' comments predictably descended into the usual vacuous bunfight, but it's always good to see one of the old solid-gold classics getting another airing.

"I have a very simple solution to the problems of the so-called "gay" lobby. If people, in general, simply kept their sexual preferences to themselves (and obviously their sexual partners), nobody would be persecuted because nobody else would know about it. Personally I have no interest in anybody else's sex life unless it involves me. What does upset me is the way that homosexuals flaunt themselves as though they have found a better way of life."

Glad To Be Gay: Persecution - Complex

I'm now married with kids, but Glad to Be Gay was about anyone who didn't conform, from lesbians to transgenders, a way of recognising that most of us have complex sexualities. I never imagined that, 35 years later, it would be called the gay national anthem, or that we'd have openly gay pop stars and a Tory prime minister campaigning for gay marriage. I received a letter from a US teenager who had been disowned by his Christian parents. He'd just taken an overdose when Glad to Be Gay came on his college radio station. He put his fingers down his throat, threw up, and moved to San Franscisco, where he was now living happily. It would have been worth writing the song for him alone.

Tom Robinson talks to Dave Simpson in The Guardian about writing the much misunderstood Glad To Be Gay.

• Tom's website. Lots of anniversary stuff going on.
Suggested title for Tom's next compilation LP... Now That's What I Call... Worthy (But Boring).

Tom Robinson: Get Your Facts Straight

"Singer-songwriter Tom Robinson became a darling of the 1970s gay liberation movement with his song ‘Glad To Be Gay'.
"But just a few years later, he fell in love with a woman and was booed at the 1987 London Pride event.In a new programme for Radio 4 he examines how he came to terms with his sexuality and finds out how bisexual people in different parts of the UK cope with attitudes towards their relationships.
"In the documentary, he meets bisexual people struggling to be understood by their straight and gay friends.
"Producer Ashley Byrne explains the reason for making the programme: ”For some reason bisexuality remains a bit of taboo in the media and society at large. We’ve been trying to cover the issue on both TV and radio for years. So it’s a real credit to Radio 4 that they’ve had the courage to go with a topic which often gets overlooked.”

The ever reliable Pink News, cut and pasting a press release as per.

Erm. Tom Robinson has always been bisexual. Here's his first ever interview with Julie Burchill for NME in 1978.
And I think the reason bisexuality "often gets overlooked” is cause it bores the tits off people.