Notes from Robyn on Patreon in 2021

Charlie and I also recorded a demo of “Raymond And The Wires” a song I’d recently written in a kitchen in Sydney. It refers back to the time when I was 11 and went to ride on a soon-to-be-extinct electric bus with my father Raymond. He had recently given me a book about buses and I had become particularly obsessed by electric-powered vehicles (trolleybuses & trams) that were on the way out. I loved the way they drew voltage from the thick black wires that hung above them like a kind of handwriting in the sky. A few years later I felt the much same way about electric Bob Dylan...

Raymond was an ex-soldier with a stiff left leg that still ached from a war wound in 1944, 20 years previously. He wore thick glasses and often looked lost, walking with a distinctive lurch. Because he’d been that way all my young life it didn’t occur to me how much he must have constantly suffered from his disability: as a teenager he had been a sprinter. He and I didn’t have a very direct relationship, but every so often he would focus on doing something with me. Whenever I was with him I absorbed him at point-blank range, and he fuelled me with the creative drive that compels me to this day.

So it felt special that he indulged my electric-traction fetish and took me to Reading, just outside London which still had the overhead wiring and silent, hissing trolleybuses: a town famous for manufacturing biscuits/cookies, and where Oscar Wilde was criminally jailed. But to me Reading will always be where my father and I attempted to bond, sitting downstairs on a now long-demolished trolleybus.