By Robyn on Facebook in 2023
Kennington, London: It was here only 51 years ago that I played my first rock gig. The band, which we posthumously named the Beatles, had two large amplifiers through which went two electric guitars, bass, and two vocal mics. Or maybe we had three amps. I was a foundation student at the City & Guilds art school and I volunteered my nameless fledgling beat combo to play the midwinter Art School Dance. The set included “Rain”, “Astronomy Dominé”, and “Waiting For The Man” and nothing written after 1968. Whether anybody danced is a moot point, but one of the male tutors did get into a fight with a male student and they knocked over the Christmas Tree. In the long-defunct spirit of having a Happening, I bought a box of soap-bubble cartons for the party-goers to blow soap bubbles, but the air was far too smoky and the soapy mixture just made the floor even less dance-friendly.
We were terrible yet returned to play the City & Guilds Summer dance and one the following winter, after I had left. I guess nobody else wanted the gig. The Beatles broke up, as Beatles do, not long after. This is my first visit back to the old art school in 50 years. Showbiz, eh?

Robyn spoke about his first gig (and a later memorable gig in Oxford) in a 1987 interview with Nigel Cross, published in Forced Exposure:

FE: You went to art college, didn't you?

Robyn: Yeah, but not for very long. I was at art college for a while in London, in a crummy little art college that I think Rolf Harris went to. That's its only claim to fame. What happened was a general kind of void, like anyone else in the early Seventies. My interests were fairly predictable - I was indistinguishable from the general post-hippie flotsam. I did my first gig at art school. We had this group called the Beetles and it compromised a friend of mine whom I was at school with, Rosalind's brother, Simon [Kunath], who crops up at various intervals, and this bloke who then went on to become a lord of something or other. A quite incredible mixture of people.

FE: What kind of things were you doing?

Robyn: The guy who was going to become this lord, he was Jim Morrison and my old school friend was Paul McCartney. I was either Syd Barrett or John Lennon. You'd get these bizarre hybrids of Syd, Jim Morrison and Paul McCartney crooning away and Simon played drums just like Moe Tucker and knew nothing about it. The best thing was that we played this drag ball in Oxford and all the glasses were broken, not over us, but every piece of glass went at some point during the evening. I lost the tape of it, but it was one of the original punk tapes.