Rick Wakeman surrounded by a glorious assembly of vintage keys from the cover of his 1973 album "Six Wives of Henry VIII"

It’s probably not much of a secret to those who know me that I love vintage synthesizers. I used to gaze in awe at images of stars like Rick Wakeman and Vangelis  surrounded by tier upon tier of glorious synthesizers. I picked up brochures of the wondrous objects of desire and even managed to work out what each knob did by relating the sounds I heard to the descriptions in the brochures. 

I’ve personally been involved in creating synth based music since I finally got my hands on one the mid 1970′s. At the time synths were mainly analogue and subtractive, but they opened up a kaleidescope of new sonic posibilities, and there was a constant quest to create bigger and better sounds. They were exciting, groundbreaking times which spawned a new type of creativity that reach a peak in the 80′s new wave/synth pop era.

These days synthesizers are so readily available  that it’s hard to see what all of the fuss was about. There are computer programs and even apps for phones that replicate the the abilities of the vintage synths. Synthetic sounds are such an integral part of modern music that they accepted to the point of invisibility – but they’re in almost everything in the pop charts from at least the last two decades.

Vintage synths are exciting and have a raw power capable of shattering speakers and cutting right through from the back of the mix. I love them and that’s why I’ve created my own website where you can find a whole heap of rare and vintage synthesizersfor sale – you can find them starting here:

Slexa –  Rare and Vintage Synthesizers

A sonic powerhouse in a briefcase

My overiding passion in the mid to late 70′s was the synthesizer. It ticked all of the boxes – lots of shiny knobs and sliders, lots of elctronics and the ability to create a whole new realm of sounds. Whilst I was still at Maidstone I discovered the the Film, Sound and Video unit. Lots of experimental ideas were explored there with people like Brian Eno and Michael Nyman lending their expertise. The college even produced its own chart topping band called “the Flying Lizards”. Lurking within the department was a variety of musical instruments and electronic devices. My eye was drawn to a strange moulded plastic brief case – but this was no ordinay briefcase. Inside lurked a wonderful array of multicoloured knobs and sockets - the wonderful EMS Synthi A. The Sythi A looked more like a piece of test equipment than a musical instrument. In reality it was probably more of an experimental sound generator as, on its own, it didn’t have any form of keyboard. The keyboard that could be attached was the DK.2. The keyboard wasn’t calibrated to a standard scale so you could merrily venture into the world of micro tonal scales. There were no presets and all of the components like the oscilators, filters etc had to be connected via a multipin patchboard. No instant sounds here but brilliant to explore sonic ideas with – The Synthi A was featured prominantly on Pink Floyd’s “on the Run” from their “dark side of the moon” album. It was a steep learning curve especially in the absense of a manual but it gave me a solid grounding in the world of synth programming.

My first efforts using the Synthi A were far from musical. I had an old reel to reel that I recorded my efforts on, but without the right leads or interface to plug the synth directly into the recorder, I had to use a hand held mike to record. I had a stinking cold and was constantly sniffing in the background. At the college we were expected to attend “discussion” groups where we had to bring original works along to stimulate artistic debates. I bought my tapes in and was amused that the reaction was  admiration for the industrial soundscape I’d produced. – and in particular the sound remeniscent of a steam piston. I didn’t have the heart to reveal that it was in fact the sound of my sniffling lol. The Synthi A was a brilliantpiece of kit which I feel really priviledged to have had a chance to use, but it was a tricky instrument, especially if you wanted to create music. I borrowed it as often as i could and got to know it really well, but what I really wanted was a synth of my own….

The EDP Wasp Synthesizer - A symphony of Black, Yellow and Plastic

The major synth manufacturers at the time were Moog and ARP and lesser players like  Roland and Korg were coming up fast. The only snag was the price. The classic MiniMoog cost more than £1,000 in 1978 which is an astonomical sum in todays money. There was no way I could afford one of these beasts on a student grant but salvation was at hand. A UK based company call the Electronic Dream Plant (EDP) had decided to create synth that was actually affordable! It was a mighty little box of tricks and, with it’s distinctive (if not subtle) colour scheme of bright yellow and black, it was well suited to its name – The Wasp! it came in at around £200 which, although still a substantial sum at the time, was actually affodable. I scrimped and saved and finally gotenough to make the journey to Rod Argent’s keyboard shop in the West End of London and walked out with a box that felt far too light to contain  anything. Iwas not disappointed. For the money the Wasp was immensly powerful and it was true synthesizer . It had a keyboard …  of a sort in that it didn’t have any keys at all. Instead, it had a strip of yellow and black sticky back plastic printed to resemble a keyboard. This was stuck directly onto a section of the main circuit board  which protruded through the plastic casing. I wasn’t ideal but it was still playable and the sound helped  to compensate for it. The Wasp helped pave the way for a synth revolution – it was never going to be an instrument for the virtuoso keyboardist like Wakeman or Emerson,  but it’s limitation as a playable instrument let to experimentation by would be musicians who hadn’t got traditional musical training, the very kind of person that had spawned Punk.

The Spider - a massive step forward to making electronic music accessible

As if to compensate for the lack of playability EDP’s next piece of kit was a god send to the electronic musician. Keeping with the creepy crawly theme, it was called the ”Spider”. It wasn’t a synth – it was a sequencer. A sequencer is a device that can be programmed to play synthesizers automatically. There were a few sequencers around at the time but they were expensive and were often limited to playing 8 t0 16 notes by setting knobs to the required pitch. The spider went much better than this. It boasted up to 256 steps or, even more revolutionary, 84 realtime notes meaning it could play back exactly what you played in via the Wasp.  In reality, the step time sequencer was far more valuable and I deal for setting up bass line sequences. Once more, I saved up my pennies and made the journey from Maidstone to Rod Argent’s and the box felt even lighter – but it was worth it. It’s hard today to appreciate the impact that the sequencer and synth actual had on music. There are very few pop tracks these days that don’t use some form of synthesized or sequenced sound lurking in the back of the production, but back in the late 70′s this sort of technology was the exclusive property of the electronic musician. Armed with my newly acquired duo of black and yellow boxes I set off on my new journey as an electro musician, a path that I’d been awaiting for quite a while.

The Wasp’s  first live outing was interesting – It was at the main hall at Maidstone College of Art with my fellow illustration students Martin Handford and Mike Gornall. We’d previously been together as a rather dubiously named  punk band but now, safely renamed to D3, we decided to go Ska. I was the sole musician armed with a double manual organ, my Hohner Clavinet and the Spider & Wasp combo – my first bank of keyboards, nut quite up to the standards of Rick wakeman, but I was chuffed . Mike was on drums, Martin was on Vocals, and a friend called Vanessa joined in on “backing” Vocals …. although she was really there because she was quite sexy and wore a tight black leotard…. we were young!! lol.  I decided to program the entire melody line for a cover of Madness’ Swan Lake into the Spider – lots of notes but, hey, it could handle it. All started well, and then the dodgy  stage electrics kicked in. The sequencer stopped the lights dimmed and we looked like lemons… then the power kicked in. The sequencer burst back into life and so did we.. unfortunately the power kept dying and then coming back on. The Spider kicked back in to but got progressively faster with each reboot – poor old Mike was breaking into a sweat trying to keep up but Martin and Vanessa just danced on regardless. With every power surge the crowd gave a bigger cheer and when we finally reached the end the crowd went wild… well they were mainly art students and the beer was cheap. A valuable lesson was learned that night – don’t rely completely on technology working the way it should and keep the sequences simple for live performances. The D3′s never made it to any sort of pop stardom, but Martin did go on to reach a different type of global domination, as the creator of a character that roamed the world dressed in a red and white stripey jumper and a bobble hat, aka “Where’s Wally” (“Where’s Waldo” in the USA).

Cuckoo:
This piece was commissioned by a production company to accompany a video about the English countryside. The client had asked if they could get some music that sounded a bit “Vaughan Williams”. Ok, Vaughan Williams was a genius and normally had a full orchestra to compose for, but I was up for it… Just one catch… the commission reached me at5pm and it was required for an edit starting at 8am the next morning – gulp. I sat down at my trusty keyboards and Atari 1040st running Notator (it’ll mean something to the techies!)and summoned up my recollection of Vaughan Williams music, – The Lark Ascending, Greensleeves, Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis etc. I started composing and within 3 hours I’d composed, arranged and recorded a 4 minute piece. Unfortunately, I’d got so engrossed in the process, I forgot to save it and, sure enough, the computer crashed and wiped out everything. I didn’t panic.. much, so I sat down and did it all again. The following morning I arrived at the studios, on time, with the tape including the main theme and a variety of 30 and 5 second stings. The client was delighted, the producer astonished and me barely able to string a coherent sentence together. I went home and slept. Ah, the joys of freelance composing!

Cuckoo2 by Robb Williams

Phoenix
This track was written for a spoof spy sci-fi TV series. Sadly the series never got made but it was meant to be about an almost “Barberella” type female spy set in a post apocalyptic future – a sort of Modest Blaise character. The producers wanted the feel of the classic 60′s series like “Mission impossible”, “the Avengers” and for those who remember it, “Adam Adamant”. The music had to reflect this so I went for a retro feel with a hint of technology thrown in

Phoenix by Robb Williams

Crispin’s Day
This track represents one of my first attempts at composing for theatre. It was part of my collaboration with Nick Hennegan for Henry V – Lion of England, a one man version of Shakespeare’s classic history. Because of the somewhat minuscule cast, the music lights and sound FX needed to bolster the action. Crispin’s day is probably one of the most iconic speeches in the whole world of theatre, so it was with some trepidation that I ventured to underpin such a classic with music. I could almost hear the purists cringing at the very idea. Nick was adamant that it was needed so I set about writing a piece that would reflect the mood of the speech.

The speech is basically a rallying call to raise the spirits of the troops. Henry starts off in a very personal way. He identifies himself with the foot soldiers and acknowledges that they’ve got their backs against the walls, but slowly he builds up the morale of gathered band of fighters suggesting that their feats on the battleground will become the stuff of legend, talked about for centuries to come. He culminates in a battle call of ‘Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ and they all go off and merrily bash the French in a resounding victory.

I wanted the music to reflect this so I started of with a simple guitar theme, building through a flute and slowly adding in strings until, finally, it reaches a crescendo of brass and tympani drums at the end. During the live performance there were certain points that I liked to hit in the speech and I rode the volume sliders throughout to get the right mix of actor and music, only releasing the full volume as Henry reached “… St George!!!!”. When it worked well, the backs of the neck never failed to tingle!!

21 crispins Day top and boost by Robb Williams

The Crucible.
This was written as the main intro theme to Rear Window Theatre’s production of Arthur Miller’s play, the Crucible. The crucible is centred around the witch trials in Salem of 1692. It was a tale of gossip, false accusation and paranoia which led to the execution of many alleged witches and even 2 dogs who were deemed to be witches familiars. I wanted to get a feeling of oppression with muffled voices accusing behind closed doors. As my inspiration I took a leaf out of the 1963 film “the Haunting”. In one chilling scene the muffled voice of an angry man could be heard shouting at a child. The words were indistinct but the menace was there.
This was exactly what I wanted to achieve for the intro to the second act and to create this feeling I used a breathy, almost vocal synth sound, using the modulation wheel to open and close the filter. I kept to low octave for the male voice and higher registers for children and women and set them quite far back in the mix. You can hear this in the second half of the track below. To open the first act I used a piano passage which was kept very stark with discordant strings cutting across to lead into the more orchestrated passages. It’s all done using sythns as I had to run the music “live” using sequencers for the performance. We performed the play at an old church on one occasion and the effect was quite remarkably eerie as the first notes rang out in the darkness. I think the audience were suitably spooked! lol

The Crucible by Robb Williams

Ethiopia

Ethiopia was a track that I wrote for a Tear Fund documentary about the women of Etheopia.  Sally Murcutt, the director and presenter of the documentary, recorded a group of tribes women singing in a group and wanted to use it in a more upbeat version to the original, slightly mournful version of the basic recording. I sampled the singing time stretched (or in this case “Shrunk”) the original vocal track and then set about putting a chord arrangement around it. The timing of the singing wasn’t very consistent but speeding the track up helped disguise this a little. I tried to get a joyful African feel to it borrowing a bit from my impressions of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” Album. The result was a far more upbeat and joyful rendition than the original vocal track!

Ethiopia by Robb Williams

Asia
Written for a documentary about destitute women in India, this track is a simple piece written in about 15 minutes. Mainly a piano piece, I tried to introduce a flavour of the world carrying on by using a repetitive sitar sample almost mimicking the sound of car horns and the buzz of the city. I deliberately made the main theme almost wander through this soundscape as though completely detached from its surroundings to portray a feeling of isolation.

Asia by Robb Williams

Bollywood

Written for the same production that featured the “Asia” track, this was design to be the complete antithesis. I underpinned a section about the vibrant colours and excitement in the new India and needed a brashness to reflect a more confident world personified by Bollywood glamour. It starts off with a sitar riff over a drone which was used behind images of the sun rising over the city, before bursting into life as the frantic bustle of business day kicks in. Various Asian themes are used throughout like voices and tablas to help root the piece in its environment.

Bollywood by Robb Williams

Henry V – battle siren
Some years after my first foray into theatre music I revisited Henry V when I was asked to create a score for a full cast version. This version was set in an almost tribal urban gangland setting slightly in the future. The production and the battles, in particular, was very choreographed. In this version I made the feel very synth orientated with screaming Moog sirens slicing through thick sequenced bass lines and drums. The Battle was fun to write. I love the power of drums so I used multiple snares to create the feel of two armies advancing on one another, The first section is very structured and disciplined with the excitement being signalled only by a throbbing string bass rise and the moog siren all with lots of slapback echo to further heighten the sense of expectation. Eventually the call for the charge is made and I break the drums into solo of toms which is eventually shattered by a manic moog arpeggio. Then all hell breaks loose until the serious of the situations slowly builds with a deep string rise. The battle was blocked almost like a dance for the production and lighting was used to chase and accent key breaks in the scene – all in all, exciting stuff

Henry V battle siren by Robb Williams

Robert Stanston performing Henry V - Lion of England

One rewarding avenue that I stumbled down was my introduction to the world of theatrical production. A one time girlfriend of mine was very keen on amateur dramatics.. aka AmDram. As a result I ended up being subjected to a variety of amateur theatre productions. Some were OK, others (dare I say, the majority) were painful. Amateur theatre is a strange world where the loudest voice often occupies the lead role regardless of ability. That said, many of our finest thespians have cut their teeth in amateur productions.

As is almost seemingly inevitable, at the first mention that I had artistic skills I was unwittingly recruited into producing some artwork for posters. I had managed to keep way away from becoming a member of the AmDram community but I agreed, for a very small fee, to produce a design for each play in the season. Part of the Am Dram bunch was an aspiring director called Nick Hennegan. Nick had already achieved a certain amount of fame locally as a radio jock on BRMB so, when he stepped forward to direct the theatre’s pantomoime version of “Worzel Gummage”, he was welcomed with open Arms. My lady friend was enlisted into the cast and I was introduced to Nick. The production was… erm… interesting but it was evident that Nick’s ideas were far more ambitious that Am Dram could really accommodate.

Nick and I were on nodding terms for a couple of years and I produced a poster for his first attempt at theatre production.  Nick knew of me as more of a visual artist than musician but as time went on we got to know each other a bit better and I helped him out once or twice in his promotions company which specialised in doing big electrical store openings around the country. And so it was for a while – I’d go around to parties at his place and the odd social gathering at the Billesley Pub in Brum. We had an abortive attempt at starting printing business together but it soon became apparent that it wasn’t meant to be, but we did seem to spark creatively when together.

All went a bit quiet and then,  over Christmas 1991 Nick caught the better part of Kenneth Brannagh’s “Henry V” on TV. He’d missed the first part which included chorus’s “oh for a muse of fire” intro, but he saw enough to have his imagination fired. He sat down at his word processor and wrote a draft version of a play called “Heny V – Lion of England”.  It was based on the Shakespearean classic but had a twist. Whereas Brannagh’s film had a cast of hundreds.. Nick’s was a one man show.

Nick excitedly rang around a few people and eventually rang me to ask about producing a poster. Intrigued by the idea of a one man adaptation, I asked him to tell me more. His original idea was to use various chart songs to bolster up the acting with “just an Illusion” by Imagination playing as chorus walked. I seem to remember commenting politely that that seemed like a good idea, and then asked if he’d considered using some original music… and before I knew it I’d volunteered my services. Nick said he’d pop around for a chat so I sat down at my keyboards and composed a theme that I thought might work. By the time that Nick and his partner in crime, Keith, appeared at my door an hour later, I’d got a fully orchestrated version of the theme. Nick and Keith looked at each other and big beaming grins appeared on their faces. They liked what they heard. Nick planned to produce Henry for Keith’s Rear Window theatre company and before long we had an actor in Robert Stanston, and The MAC’s Hexagon theatre as a venue. I nievity carried us through and, together, we created a stonking good show complete with my music and sound effects and rock’n'roll lighting perfectly complimenting Rob’s acting Tour de Force. I created moods to unpin the action and really let rip with a thunderous battle theme to act as supporting cast with battle arrows panning front to back to further enhance the experience. We were convinced – would the audience be?

The Hexagon was a tiny theatre but it had an great intimacy. We had a mixture of friends and family, many of whom had witnessed their fair share of Hennegan cunning plans, and a smattering of paying audience. I think we surprised everyone that night in 1992, probably even ourselves. Nick, Myself, Rob and, the ever reliable techie, Tom Popley rocked the place. A fair smattering of theatrical ignorance meant that we didn’t know what you could and couldn’t do in theatre, so we just went for it andgot ourselves an instant hit . We hit the bar for a celebratory pint and Nick was approached by John Starkey who, it turned out, was Jasper Carrot’s manager, and he had a very interesting proposition. He just so happened to have a vacant slot in a venue at the Edinburgh festival and did we fancy filling it? Not a bad start considering this was my first attempt at theatre – this theatre lark was easy!

Of course we grabbed at the chance and before we knew we were struggling up the very big hill from Brum to Edinburgh in Rob’s clapped out old van which required almost as much oil as it did petrol lol. John had also sorted out a flat for us.. and oh boy, what a flat! Overlooking Meadow park, this was a luxury 4 bedroom apartment complete with pool table. We shared a venue with, amongst others, cult comedian John Ottway and legendary singer Sam Brown – this Edinburgh lark was fun!!

‘Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your own heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.’

Rest in peace Mr Jobs safe in the knowledge that you really have changed the world.

Wedding Photography in Devon and Cornwall is our passion

As well as the music and illustration, the other great Artistic passion in my life is photography. I started off with film cameras way before the idea that camera’s could digitally capture an image even represented the vaguest of possibilities. Like my illustration, my photography has always been about people using a reportage style to capture rock bands and theatrical stuff. I’m very fortunate that my wife, Natalie, is equally as passionate about people photography – so much so that she started a business specialising in photographing little people as a pre-school photographer. Together though, we work under the name of Iconik Photography and specialise in weddings. Nat’s ability as a portrait photographer and my experience in capturing events and performances, have come together perfectly so that we can offer a unique blend of reportage and the more classic style of photography. Photographing weddings was  something that I didn’t take on lightly as there’s a real responsibility to get it right, but now I relish the opportunity with each wedding to capture the true essence of a little piece of personal history.

Small, random sample of wedding photography in Devon and Cornwall by Iconik Photography below….

During the tour I got to meet and chat with Lemmy on quite a few occassions. What I descovered was, despite the somewhat fearsome persona that he offten seems to project, he was an absolutely brilliant bloke. He posesses and great inelligence and insight which, accompianied by a wonderfully dry sense of humour, makes him a fascinating man to talk to. He’s seen and met most most things rock’n'roll so anecdotes about his past, including his days of being a roadie for Hendrix, are pure rock history.

He cares about his music too, sitting in his dressing room before a gig listening to recordings of the previous nights offering. Any cock ups, front and backstage, are noted. Tripping up  three times in a row earned the offender a stint in a comedy cow outfit for the show – I remember Lemmy pointing out to me  a guy on the lighting crew operating a spotlight dressed in the black and white spotted outfit – obviously a serial offender lol.

In recognition of my admirartion for the legendary Lemmy, I decided to use the great man as the subject for my first portrait drawn completely in photoshop , a true legend of rock!

I’ve always been interested in music and sound. One of my earliest memories was sitting down on front of the old black and white tv with my mum, watching a film. I can’t remember what the film was, but at one stage the music took center stage with a huge swathe of strings pumping out through the tinny television speakers. I immediately turned to my mum and said “what instrument is that?”. She told me me it was an orchestra, to which I replied, ” I want to play one of those”. She smiled and told me it wasn’t one instrument but lots of instruments playing together. The seed was planted – I wanted to make music that sounded like an orchestra. On another occassion, I remember discovering that, if you slowed down a record on the old Dansette record player, the instruments sounded different and had a much bigger feel to them, more bass! My mum had Pat Boone’s version of “April Showers” on a 45rpm Single. When I slowed this down to 33 and a 1/3rd rpm, the bells on it sounded superb to my ears   – they had a mystical quality to them. My love affair with sound was well and truely born!

I come from a background heavily influenced by music – primarily from the trad jazz scene. My Dad, Nick Williams, was a popular face on the Birmingham Jazz scene as vocalist, Tromboneand Double bass player in various Midlands band including the Eagle Jazz Band. Nick started out on tea-chest bass back in the 1950′s and was well known for his love of props, masks and a liberal dosing of slapstick. He ran his own band for a while and counted a future rock legend, the teenage Carl Palmer of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, amongst one his line ups. It’s become almost folklore in the family that my Dad, obviously totally missing the point of Carl’s technique, took the lad tone side and told him he’d never make a drummer….and so fate stepped in and proved the “old man” as my Dad is affectionately known, totally wrong!!

My step father, Gordon Whitworth was a huge influence in sparking my musical interests. Gordon is a highly respected international Jazz Trumpeter well know for his appearances like the George Huxley Jazz band and Monty sunshine. He initially encouraged me to take up the trumpet when I was about 9 or 10, which I diligently practiced but had no real desire to play. Gordon also worked as a cabaret multi instrumental act during the 70′s, serving his apprenticeship around the working men’s clubs of the Midlands circuit. One of his specialities was a George Formby tribute using a Ukulele banjo, and it was through this instrument that I learnt the fundaments of chord structures. The 4 strings of the ukelele are tuned to the same notes as a guitars top 4 strings, so the chords learnt on it could easily be transferred to the guitar. Gordon taught me the rules to working out all of the variations in chord types and how to transpose them across the different keys. this was to prove invaluable in later years and it’s a skill that I’ll always be grateful to Gordon for. Armed with this knowledge and Gordon’s huge old 1950′s accoustic with strings like cheesewire, I taught myself the rest of the fingering to make the transition from 4 to six strings.

In the 60′s the world of popular music underwent a dramatic change. Bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, heavily influenced by American stars like Elvis, Little Richard and the sound of the Blues, had set the pace, and soon the syrupy sounds of light music began to be pushed aside by a new, more exciting music. As bands started to compose their own songs, different sounds started to appear as musicians embraced different instrumets and ideas form other cultures. The Beatles and the Beach boys seemd to compete in creating ever more complex soundscapes resulting in ground breaking albums like “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Pet Sounds”. The recording studio suddenly emerged as an instrument to be played and experimented with. The future of music was born – although not everyone was as excited as myself. On hearing “I am a Walrus” for the first time, my Mum commented about the Beatles,; “such a shame – they used to be so nice and now they’ve gone all weird…”. Enter heroes like Jimmy Hendrix, The Doors, Cream etc, and the musical landscape was changed for ever.

In Birmingham where I was living, people that my Dad knew from the local scene like Spencer Davis and Roy Wood who used to pester my Dad for the chance to sit in with the band, suddenly started to make an appearance on the radio. Carl Palmer started to prove my Dad wrong by joining the crazy world of Arthur Brown, eventually scaling he global heights with ELP, and the Moody Blues transformed from a blues band into one of the pioneers of symphonic rock with the release of “Days of Future Past” with the haunting sound of the mellotron playing a major role in the sound.

The 70′s, for me, was a strange time for music. My sister Liz was into the Osmonds, David Cassidy, the Jackson 5 and later on, dare I say, the Bay City Rollers! My older brothers, Nigel and Martin, were into the more interesting stuff like the Moody Blues, Genesis and Pink Floyd. I was heavily into acts like Alice Cooper whose theatrics on stage perfectly fitted into both my love of music and imagery. Another act who combined theatre and music was David Bowie and his influence was to endure through the next decade to inspire a whole new breed of musicians as did Roxy Music.

At this time another band was to catch my eye and one member in particular was to lead me into a whole new world of electronic music. The band was Yes and it was Rick Wakeman and his seemingly endless bank of keyboards who sparked my interest. Suddenly, in his hand, the keyboards moved from backstage musical padding to full on headlining lead. The sound of the MiniMoog ripped through everything and screamed its way to the front with it’s unique sound. Lightening fast runs could be heard catapulting the often Yes songs up into a new gear. Suddenly the air was filled with the sound of the moog, hammond and mellotron and the sonic world expanded into a myriad of possibilities. My musical horizons expanded further when, along with my schoolmate Dave Carnell I stood in the hifi department at Rackhams awestruck by the sterophonic sound of Pink Floyd’s new masterpiece, Dark Side of the Moon. I knew really knew what he wanted to do in my life. I got a Saturday Job at the co-op and, armed with the princley wage of £3.50, went in search of his first keyboard – a Honer Clavinet D6 bought on HP from Rackhams. I was set on my road to fame and fortune.

the college punk band playing in Maidstone college of Art's Fine Art studios featuring me on bass, Rod Judkins on drums, Mark Taylor on guitar and Martin Handford on vocals

However, there was a scruffy little fly about to enter the ointment. Punk. The guitar ruled and Keyboards were a definite no-no! The good thing was though, you no longer needed a masters degree in music to get into a band – no virtuosity required. I’d just started art college down in Maidstone and the close proximity to London meant that many of punk’s finest jumped into their transit vans to perform at the college. I was hooked so I packed away my Clavinet and bought a bass guitar from the local 2nd hand shop. Along with house mates and fellow illustrators Martin Handford, Rod Judkins and Mark Taylor, we became a punk band with a name way too dodgy to reveal!! Mark was an excellent guitarist, I’d never played bass but had a vague idea how to play, Rod was …erm… untutored in the way of drumming, and Martin had a unique style of his own. lol Armed with a set of about 8 songs that lasted just under 15 minutes we stormed through the fine art department’s Christmas party, and a legend was born… ish.  We sounded crap but it was great fun – no one cared what we sounded like, we were a band. Eventually I bought myself a Les Paul copy from Macari’s on the Tottenham Court Road, and became the “axeman” for the band who had “evolved” into a 3 piece with Martin taking over the duties on the bass an, new victim… I mean member, Mike Gornall on Drums. We still sounded awful – for all of my knowledge of chords I was still no serious threat as a guitar player but we were having fun being punk legends for a few glorious minutes on stage. We were so keen to perform that, on one occassion, when the local council set up some temporary traffic lights outside the house that we shared in Barming, just outside maidstone, Martin and I seized the opportunity and set up our gear outside to serenade the waiting motorist. We could see the drivers were impressed as they kept waving at us with two fingers. Those punk days were brilliant and I got see some of the great acts of the time either at the college, nearby at the Cantebury Odeon or on ashort trip up the line to London. Bands like X-ray specs, the Buzzcocks the Clash, The Damned, Blondie, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Stiff little fingers, Eddy and the Hot Rods, the Romones to name just a few. Exciting times when creating music became carefree and fun, but another new musical revolution was on its way…

Iconik is an eclectic mixture of thoughts and creations by me, Robb Williams. I’m an multimedia artist, photographer and composer based in Cornwall.

As a visual artist I work as an illustrator and graphic designer specialising in traditional and digital illustration , caricatures and flash animation.

As a composer I create music to commission for theatre, television and multimedia productions.

As a photographer I work mainly with my wife, Natalie, specialising in wedding photography and portraiture.