41 f All Round Robin
He writes about folk and world music for the Guardian and reports on the atrocities of African wars for the BBC’s Newsnight. And he’s been doing it for a long time. Elizabeth Kinder digs out the Robin Denselow story.
reporter and the Guardian’s stalwart rock, world music and folk critic, “but for a long time I think some people thought there were two Robin Denselows.”
“I
Understandable. It’s unusual to think of your mild-mannered music critic under fire, running for his life across an Iranian square in the midst of a massacre, the
don’t see any clash between writing about music and writing about politics,” says Robin Denselow, the BBC’s intrepid current affairs
Shah’s soldiers shooting to kill; or being held as a spy near the front line in Angola and told every day for four or five days that “Today is a very bad day for you,” as fellow prisoners are being tortured and killed.
He escaped torture then but may feel
that he’s experiencing some form of it now, as he sits opposite me in his light and airy North London sitting room. Though responding to my razor-sharp Paxman-like (his Newsnight colleague) questioning – “So Robin, tell me about your childhood” – with generosity and self-deprecating charm, he seems extremely uncomfortable talking about himself.
However I’ve learnt that Robin Denselow
enjoyed a third career – a promising early stint as a singer/ songwriter that began when he
was a young teenager. So I go for the jugular. “You went to boarding school in Reading?”
“Indeed. I was 13. I went to Leighton Park, a liberal public school. It was very multi-cultural and as unlike a public school as you can imagine. There was lots of music there and Marianne Faithfull lived down the road and used to take part in the school plays and operas.” Robin and Marianne used to take her mum’s dalmatians for walks. Later they performed in the same folk clubs and acted together in produc- tions staged by Reading’s Progress Theatre.
It was a happy time. He loved Leighton Park, a Quaker school, and when the time came it’s where he sent his son. It was there that Robin heard Lonnie Donegan and Elvis, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. Every- thing, he says, was mixed up then: “pop, folk, you listened to all of it, by any means you could, on the radio, records – whatever you could get hold of. Like everybody else in the early ’60s, pos-Donegan, I was slowly getting into English folk music.” He was inspired to sit around the school grounds strumming his Levin guitar with his friend Tim Fleming, “an excellent guitarist, much better than I am” whom he says “tried to teach me a few chords.”
Home, a liberal household, was in
Woldingham, a village on the Surrey/Kent borders. Pretty enough, he says, but the sort of place you want to get away from. His parents were pacifists in the war. Mum was a primary school teacher and dad “worked for the Church of England as a church commissioner.” He remembers they liked listening to music a bit, but were not particularly musical. He guesses that they were quite amused when he picked up the guitar. They must have been positively pleased when during one school holiday Robin kicked off his career as a journalist.
“The local paper was the Croydon
Times. I was always keen on journalism and when I was 16 I rang them up and said ‘how about doing some writing?’ I became their drama critic in my school holidays and covered the Women’s Institute version of Hamlet and things like that.” The first music piece he ever wrote was for that now defunct paper, a tribute to Cyril Davies in Croydon in 1964, featuring Long John Baldry, Wizz Jones and Ralph McTell on the bill. Robin was still at school.
He left to study English on a scholar- ship at New College, Oxford, an event that he says startled everyone, including him- self, and which he credits entirely to his English teacher. Having a ‘gap six months’ before going up, he performed in folk clubs, including the Reading Folk Club (where, through Marianne Faithfull, he met Sally Oldfield and her young brother
Photo: Judith Burrows
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