ROB DA BANK
[click here to by Rob da Bank's compilations]
"Hello you, you, and you too. It's da Bank here for the next two hours, playing the best in left field, right field and any bloomin' field we can lay our hands on."
So starts a typical evening on Robert 'Rob da Bank' Gorham's weekly BBC Radio One Leftfield Show, a colourful corner of the musical universe where you're as likely to stumble into stripped down motorway techno as you are woozy weird folk or a booty electro cover of an obscure David Bowie tune. It's the same blueprint that has made his annual Bestival festival jamboree the summer's cool ruler since it began in 2004, and it's not a million miles from the Sunday Best parties (entrance famously £1.99, Harvey as a monthly resident) he ran upstairs at the Tea Rooms Des Artistes in Clapham back in his days as a roving Muzik journalist in the mid '90s.
This insistence on the eclectic runs through everything, from his long-running Sunday Best record label, his own Lazyboy music or the myriad compilations from the Fabric 24 peak time club mix to 2006's Folk Off to the A-Z of Bestival release earlier this year, or his DJ sets and parties everywhere from Ibiza to NYC, right up to the pages of the technicolour coffee table book he's just finishing on the glorious world of festivals (Rob da Bank's A-Z of Festivals for Pan Macmillan). When Rob da Bank describes his modus operandi as "a mad drive the wrong way round a one way system," he's not messing around. Well, he is messing around, because messing around is what he does best, but he means it. And it shows.
Rob da Bank grew up in Warsash, Hampshire, playing trombone in brass bands and absorbing the vibes as his GP dad listened to The Beatles. He started playing hip-hop and funk under the DJ name of Rob The Bank, moved to London in the early '90s to study French and History of Art at Goldsmiths, and met his future wife and co-pilot Josie in the student union. They formed a romantic and raving union, putting whirlwind energy into nights out at now-legendary clubs like Rage and eventually putting on their own parties. "Sunday Best and Bestival wouldn't exist if Josie hadn't done the creative. It's a family thing. If you take me away you've got a really colourful party with no music, and if you took her away, you'd have a very plain event with music."
Sunday Best presents Bestival is the polar opposite of plain. The three times winner of Best Medium Sized Festival began with the expansion of Sunday Best into a tent at Glastonbury and started at Robin Hill on the Isle of Wight with an audience of 7,000 people in 2004. In 2007 the early bird tickets sold out in eight minutes. Now, it treats 40,000 to the summer's joyful final fling, packed with madcap features (ukulele players, physics demonstrations, laughter clubs) and a killer line-up. Not only do the festival team come up with crazy ideas, the fans do too. Last year 'Yasmin and her Hularama gang' organised a Swim To Bestival across the Solent. Ditto, the fancy dress, which now compels forum members to spend six months on their costumes, with monthly dinners and even costume AGMs. As a child, da Bank never attended fancy dress parties. "I'm an introvert!"
Despite this, he's the recognisable face of his festival, one of the few curated and run by an artist. "I like being on the frontline. It's important. You see Michael Eavis at Glastonbury, pounding round the site, checking everyone's alright – that's my responsibility." He blames himself for last year's wet weather: "I shot myself in the foot because I'd come up with the 30,000 Freaks Under The Sea theme. I had umpteen people coming up to me all weekend going 'You brought this on yourself!' There were submarines, jellyfish, divers, which looked pretty magical to be honest."
And then there's the radio. He and Chris Coco hosted the cult Blue Room show between 2002 'til 2006 after being approached by the BBC who wanted a show to cater for the millennial chill-out boom. It broadcast between 5 and 7am on Saturday mornings, wowing milkmen and depleted ravers with its happily wonky playlists, sneaking ambient, spaced-out dub and electro into the airwaves. He'd been lined up as holiday cover for John Peel when the great man died, and he held the fort in the weeks between Peel's death and the BBC's decision on how to proceed, record shopping with the DJs two young producers and filling shows with music from the crates Peel had left behind. He then filled Peel's Thursday night slot for 18 months.
These days, he presides over four hours of weekly radio, transforming his Sunday slot of midnight 'til 4am into two shows, the first 120 kaleidoscopic minutes (Rob da Bank: Radio 1's Leftfield Show) featuring anything from brand new dubstep to folk to oddball electronica, the second 120 (Rob da Bank & Friends) featuring guest specials from Bobby Gillespie or Lily Allen or Tom Middleton and his patented A-Z shows. It frequently includes music no one else has heard: "If some kid in Scunthorpe sends me a cover of a sea shanty and it's good, I'll play it." As a result of large Listen Again figures via BBC's iPlayer / Listen Again feature, his audience is now truly worldwide. Likewise the ever-popular monthly Sunday Best podcasts. As a result, da Bank is considered one of the world's most influential tastemakers.
As family da Bank started to grow (son Arlo was joined by Merlin in 2008), so did the family of festivals. Sunday Best presents Camp Bestival launched in July 2008 with The Flaming Lips and 82-year-old Chuck Berry on stage and 12,000 kids and big kids running riot amongst a Mad Hatters Tea Party, an insect stage and interactive theatre in the woods.
Bestival finishes the festival season, Camp Bestival drops in the middle, so why not kick if off too? Bandstand was launched in May 2008, in conjunction with Vauxhall Corsa, another successful brand partnership in a line of collaborations that includes Jack Daniels, Xbox, Strongbow, Red Bull and Vodaphone who selected da Bank's Police Dogs Bonfire for an international ad campaign. London's Billingsgate and the Carling Academy, Liverpool hosted two parties featuring Morris dancers, mini marching bands, the English National Ballet, Late Of The Pier and Mark Ronson. Rob is currently remixing Paganini, the infectious classical music used in the title sequence of the South Bank Show, and now placed in an Audi commercial. Watch this space…
Everything from Bestival to his Sunday Best record label (it launched Groove Armada and Lemon Jelly back in the late '90s and propelled dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip and teenage rockabillies Kitty, Daisy and Lewis into the charts) share the sense that they're a testing ground for future stars as well as celebrating off-trend old-school brilliance. "It's not like 'ooh, check me out' but it's nice that I've been one of the first to play Florence And The Machine, Black Kids, Ting Tings – we had them in session a year before they were in the charts. I like supporting music early."
Oh, and if two radio shows, two festivals, club DJ, a record label, book and a music publishing company wasn't enough, there's also his musical alter ego, Lazyboy. He and producer Mr Dan (Franz Ferdinand, Kylie, Emiliana Torrini) are close to finishing the follow-up to 2004's Penguin Rock, after a fortnight of condensed music making, with the dream team of vocalists soon to be unveiled. Along, no doubt, with more crazy daisy plans for the best music and the best fun. "I didn't set out to combine excellent music with excellent fun," says da Bank, "but that's what's happened. And that's what we're about."
[November 2008]
www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/robdabank | www.myspace.com/robdabank
For all things Rob da Bank, please contact: Ben Turner (ben@graphitemedia.net)
PLEASE NOTE: It is Rob da Bank and not Rob Da Bank
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