h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, I finally got my three songs up on my web page, http://www.Andrew.Robinson.net
Click and listen.

I wrote them all about 1968 when I was nineteen or twenty. My influences were the Beatles (of course) but also a bit of Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band, and the Irish incredible string band offshoot, Dr Strangely Strange. I was also fascinated by the chord progressions in Brahms's German Requiem, which we had sung in Trinity College (the University of Dublin Choral Society). I was studying music and philosophy, and life was gentle. People remember the sixties as a time of student unrest, and there was a bit of Maoism going on in college, but for the moss part the sixties were the decade of apathy. No point getting in a frenzy, the Bomb was going to wipe us all out any day.

So I wrote three songs, to see if I could. The Chimpanzee Song, Alexander Frink and Son, and Learner Driver.

In 1972, I took them to London to make my fortune. I hired Adam Skeaping's one-man studio for an afternoon, bought a guitar on the way there, and put them onto a little quarter-inch tape. A record company said come back when you have a whole album, but I never wrote any more, other than little things for my children and nieces; I've written things for children's orchestras and beginner string quartets, too.

I had met Adam Skeaping as a viol player. He said I'd like Joni Mitchell, and indeed I do.