"I HAVE to say, it was very enjoyable breaking the law in Belfast," chuckles Tom Robinson of his initial visit to the north as bass-wielding leader of anthemic punk rockers Tom Robinson Band.
"When TRB first came over in 1978 it was still illegal to be gay – 'Save Ulster from Sodomy' was very much the whole vibe."
Tom Robinson Band played QUB's Whitla Hall in October of that year (with local upstarts Stiff Little Fingers as the opening act), riding high on the success of their classic debut LP Power in The Darkness, an uplifting and empowering collection of catchy, angsty, socially and politically relevant songs directly fuelled by the anxieties and cruelties of those less enlightened times, which hit number four on the album chart.
The show came the day after TRB's Irish debut, a headline slot at University College Dublin's Belfield Fringe Festival, also featuring SLF. Homosexuality would not be 'de-criminalised' in the Republic until 1993, and only gained a limited legal acceptance here in the north in 1982.
Such a regressive state of affairs presented something of a challenge to Robinson, one of the only openly gay punk rock stars of the era. Having first caught the public's ear in 1977 with their infectious debut single 2-4-6-8 Motorway, TRB had gatecrashed the top 20 in early 1978 with their Rising Free EP featuring the Gay Pride-inspired live favourite (Sing If You're) Glad To Be Gay, despite the song being banned by the BBC.
Though he married long-term partner Sue Brearley in the mid-80s, the musician and songwriter has always asserted that he is "a gay man who happens to be in love with a woman".
"The Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association was then right on the frontline," continues Cambridge-born Robinson (71) of his earliest Irish visits, which stoked a fire within him to help effect positive change here.
"One of the things I'm proudest of in terms of that was that I did a joint show for charity with Peter Gabriel at Hammersmith Odeon on Christmas Eve 1978. We had an amazing band: Phil Collins on drums, Danny Kustow from TRB on guitar, me on bass, Peter on synth, Paul Jones from Manfred Mann on harmonica, Andy Mackay from Roxy Music on saxophone and Elton John on piano.
"The money was split between us: Peter gave his to a battered wives refuge and I gave mine to the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association. We made enough money to make a substantial difference to their campaign.
"It really helped them. I'm really really proud to have done that and to have been able to see on the ground that a real difference and change had actually come about."
Having been shown the 'sights' of Troubles-blighted Belfast by Tom Robinson Band fans on this initial visit, the musician felt confident about leading a revamped TRB line-up around town himself on a return trip a couple of years later.
"I decided to take all these innocent, gormless English musicians for a tour of west Belfast – in our van with English number plates," he recalls.
"There we were, driving merrily down the Falls Road, when this Army patrol screeched to a halt in front of us. Soldiers with machine guns fanned out all around us, shouting, 'What the f*** are you doing? You're in danger of your lives'. It was absolutely crazy."
He adds: "When we reformed TRB around 1989 and came over to do some gigs in the south of Ireland, our guitar player Danny [who died in 2019] – who was the world's most paranoid individual – was then convinced that we were going to be blown up by the IRA because of our English number plates.
"We stopped for tea in a village pub on the way to one of the gigs and Danny thought everyone was staring at us. This old guy got up to leave and, on his way out, he said to us, 'Good luck, lads'.
"A terrified Danny leapt up and shouted, 'Why? What's going to happen?'"
Robinson has returned to these shores many times over the years – thankfully without incident – both with his band and as a solo artist: he enjoyed his first solo hit with War Baby in 1983 and released the acclaimed Only The Now LP in 2015, which featured collaborations with John Grant, Nitin Sawhney, Billy Bragg and Sir Ian McKellen.
Despite the fact that his much-loved Saturday evening show was cancelled in 2021 after 19 years, the musician and broadcaster remains a fixture on BBC 6Music with two weekly programmes, the listener selections-based Now Playing and the new music-orientated BBC Introducing Mixtape – the latter dovetailing nicely with his website Fresh On The Net (Freshonthenet.com), which offers free 'insider advice' to up-and-coming artists.
The musician and broadcaster will be back in Belfast next weekend at the Imagine! Belfast Festival for one of his popular 'An evening with' shows, which will feature songs drawn from right across his back catalogue, plus plenty of stories and anecdotes besides.
Sadly, the date – which also features support by Paul Connolly from The Wood Burning Savages, the Derry band Robinson has long championed via 6Music – has now become unexpectedly poignant due to the sudden death of Robinson's long-time friend Gavin Martin, veteran Co Down journalist, poet and founder of legendary punk fanzine Alternative Ulster, who passed away suddenly while on holiday in Barbados last weekend.
"I'm still reeling about Gavin," he tells me.
"I knew him quite well: when I first played Belfast, Gavin was one of the cheeky young kids that came backstage to chat to us. And the last time I played back in 2017 at The Empire with my band, Gavin came and did a poetry thing with The Wood Burning Savages backing him.
"To hear that he just suddenly dropped dead aged 60 is terrifying. I think Paul and I will be paying tribute to Gavin when we do our thing for Imagine.
"I might get Paul to recite one or two of his poems, which were just fantastic. I used to play them on the radio – he'd upload them to BBC Introducing, so I'd present him as a 'new' artist. Nobody knew what a huge back-story he had."
Of course, gigging at the moment is a rather different proposition than the last time Robinson was in town, thanks to the pandemic.
"It's fantastic to be in a room with people again, to be able to see the whites of their eyes and their reactions," Robinson enthuses.
"I'm still being really, really careful given that Covid is going up in the over-70s – which of course means me – as we speak. So I take my own microphones with me and, when it comes to meeting people afterwards, we ask people to stay masked and to bump elbows rather than shaking hands.
"People have been very respectful about that and at least it means that we can all still have a chat."
Such concessions to safety pale in comparison to what Robinson had to put up with when live music attempted a tentative re-opening in England last year, as he explains:
"The very first gig I did was just after lockdown eased, and the promoter was so paranoid that they made me play behind a head-height perspex screen," he recalls.
"But that was just for singing: I was allowed to speak to the audience without it, so I was continuously ducking around it all night. It was kind of ridiculous!"
:: An Evening With Tom Robinson, March 26, Crescent Arts Centre Cube Theatre, Belfast. Tickets via Imaginebelfast.com
