43 f
Mike) and the Olive Tree in South Croydon which often featured Jacqui McShee from Pentangle and Ralph McTell. He was work- ing his singer/songwriter schtick when his headmaster called. Discovering that the young Denselow was, as he puts it, “play- ing guitar in a few pubs” his esteemed teacher said: “I think you should go to Burundi. The UN wants people to go there and help with the refugee camps.”
Robin conferred with his friends. They assured him that Burundi was in Northern India, a fashionable destination at the time, and thus armed, went off to the interview. “I talked about India. They were quite confused. But a guy behind the desk said. ‘Well I was in India and you’re clearly absolutely right for the job. Here’s your ticket!’ And the ticket said London – Kam- pala, which I had heard of and Buchurum- ba which I hadn’t. A week later I found myself in a mud hut in the middle of the highlands of Burundi with tens of thou- sands of refugees to look after, with two other people I’d never met before who were also my age. I was about 18.” And so began Robin’s obsession with Africa.
It was a life-defining experience, musically and politically. Typically, he says the refugees were an amazing lot who looked after him very well indeed. “I sat in a mud hut and plucked away on my gui- tar and they were bemused by that. The most exciting stuff was listening to the radio and all this amazing music coming in from across Africa. We were right next to the Congo. It was Mobutu’s era: rumba, Franco and all this stuff was blasting out over the radio. I didn’t know what it was, I just loved it.”
One of his tasks was to prevent cor-
rupt officials from selling food from the aid trucks destined for the camp. One night the cook who looked after Denselow and his two co-workers discovered a plot to murder them. He rushed up to their hut brandishing a spear, shouting at them to get out. “We thought he’d gone com- pletely mad. Then he came out of the hut with a mamba stuck on the end of his spear.” The deadly snake had been placed by Robin’s bed.
Shocking for the boy from Wolding-
ham. “Yes, I’m eternally grateful to my headmaster for pushing me forward for the job.”
He’s not being sarcastic and his would- be assassins needn’t have bothered with the mamba. Almost. Hitching around East Africa with a friend during a week off, they were “somewhere near Kilimanjaro on the Kenyan side, a truck was coming towards us. The first vehicle we’d seen for hours and hours. The guy who was driving said ‘Ooh look there’s a truck coming!’ and drove straight into it. Denselow woke up in hospital four days later, in no fit condi- tion to return to the refugee camp. Recu- perating with friends in Mombasa, await- ing a flight home, Robin bumped into a school friend in the street. The chance meeting resulted in Robin selling his ticket and the pair hitchhiking back to London, via the first Anyanya rebellion, the war in Southern Sudan, in 1964.
“There was nobody at the border.
We hung around for three or four days getting a bit hungry and bored, wonder- ing what was happening. Then the Sudanese army did a sweep down into Uganda and we hitched a lift with them, sat on the armoured trucks heading towards Jura. They were shooting and
setting fire to villages as we went north and I thought this was a bit odd. I didn’t know there was a war on.”
The experience cemented his ambi-
tion to become a journalist so whilst at Oxford he edited the university magazine, Isis, and wrote for The Charwell student newspaper, turning in his first big pop interview for them. “Dylan was doing a press conference at the Savoy. Don’t Look Backwas being made. It’s the bit where he’s horrible to all the journalists. I was wandering round London with my dad and I said to him, why don’t we try and get in? He was up for stuff like that: so I was hanging around the edge of the con- ference and launched a few questions at him and chatted with Joan Baez who was wandering around.”
H
“Wandering around” crops up a lot when you talk to Robin, it’s quite uncanny how often this seems to have happened in the right place at the right time.
e says he became a music jour- nalist on the back of the Dylan episode really, having done his bit for The Croydon Times. And whilst he was now busy writing about folk music he did not neglect his performing career (he repeatedly refers to his efforts as “very bad”, or “dreadful”) and remembers that his tutors at Oxford, John Bayley (married to Iris Murdoch who would drop in on his seminars) and Tolkein’s son Christopher, were horrified that he spent so much time going up to London and hanging about in folk clubs.
He can’t have been that bad. An invi- tation to perform at the Beaulieu Folk Fes- tival in 1966, an invitation he regards as “mysterious”, involved him “ploughing through my limited repertoire, peering through the pouring rain at my sister, who was the audience sitting under an umbrel- la.” During a break in the foul weather, he entered a New Singers contest to finish second. This brought Nat Joseph from Transatlantic Records rushing up waving a piece of paper, saying “Sign here!” He did,
With trusty old Levin guitar.
discovering later that he’d signed away his publishing for life. It was not an eventuali- ty that worried him. It’s a matter, he thinks, of some embarrassment that one of his compositions appears in a book of new English songs.
More exciting was his competition
prize – to make a record for Pye – and just as good was the opportunity that day to see all the other artists on the bill, includ- ing Martin Carthy, Phil Ochs and the Watersons. “So I rang up the Guardian who I hadn’t written for and asked them if they wanted a review of the Beaulieu Folk Festival. They said ‘Who are you?’ but agreed to have a look if I submitted some- thing. So I wrote about all the excellent acts, not myself, obviously, and to my amazement they printed it!”
Robin was on a roll. A piece in the
Guardian and a record contract all in one day. “I thought ‘Shall I become a famous singer or a famous journalist?’ Of course I thought I’d become a famous singer!”
His writing for the Guardian contin- ued from then on in, his remit expanding to cover pop and rock after reviewing The Doors’ now legendary gig at the Round- house. “I had 200 words, so had to leave out Jefferson Airplane who were support- ing.” Then coming down from Oxford with a respectable degree, he secured an attachment to the Africa desk at the BBC World Service on a traineeship scheme.
Working on the programme Broadcast
Rhodesia lent an early opportunity to marry politics and music: “I wrote some anti-Ian Smith songs which I played on the radio.” And having played his part in the downfall of that regime, Robin went to Biafra, for Focus On Africa, to file his first war report. But it was in Freetown in Sierra Leone, that the huge impact of the pro- grammes they put together in a basement in Bush House hit home. “I heard this music coming out of the shops and I thought it sounded familiar. Everything stopped. Then I realised it was the Focus On Africa theme tune. Everyone listened to it. We went to interview the president and he stopped to listen to the pro- gramme.” It was a humbling experience for Robin and galling to think of the cuts to Bush House, knowing the amazing effect the programmes have.
The horror Denselow witnessed in Biafra presaged the atrocities that he would continue attesting to – first as a producer for Panorama and later as a reporter on Newsnight from its inception: Vietnam at the fall of Saigon; Mozam- bique; Rwanda – its victims of barbarity and ensuing cholera, bodies piled high in pit after pit. Angola, where his escape with his crew could have been written by Graham Greene. Iraq for three months, where his crew was the only BBC team in the north not to suffer fatalities. Iran where the students demonstrating against the Shah held burning paper up to his face and the faces of his small team to dispel the teargas, only to be shot dead the next moment as so many were, all around them.
How does he deal with the burden of horror? He demurs… What was going through his mind when he was locked up as a spy?
“I wasn’t very happy about that.” He doesn’t like to discuss war stories. But how did he cope?
Photo: Elizabeth Kinder
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