Robert was a founding member of Funboy Five:
“We were very sorry to hear of Robert’s death. I (Mick) first met him in 1978 and soon after he, as a drummer, became a founding member of our band, the Funboy Five. We recorded a demo and subsequently a session for the John Peel Show. We rated Robert highly as a drummer but, presumably due to nerves, he played the songs for the Peel session at a much, much faster pace than usual, making them almost unplayable and unsingable for the rest of us. Fortunately he calmed down after a few takes.
As a pre-requisite of the session, we had to give our full names. We didn’t know what Robert’s surname was and it was evidently misheard as ‘Radhall’. This mistaken name stuck and, as the band attained a much more recent a measure of very low-key fame, continued into the present, not least with the retrospective vinyl album, Landmarks Ruins and Memories, issued by an Italian record label last year, on which Robert plays on all six tracks and appears on the cover photo (https://avephoenixrecords.
Here’s the full Peel session on Youtube – no visuals but with John Peel’s commentary. Robert plays on all four of the tracks:
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psbujoEgnm8[/embedyt]
For reasons we never fathomed, Robert left the band soon after the Peel session although we used to see him from time to time around Hemel Hempstead and occasionally on the train to London, we basically lost contact.
Particular memories of Robert include his fondness for we called ‘flared at the waist’ trousers, designed for very rotund men with short legs (although I don’t recall Robert ever dared wear a pair), and our ‘tour’ that took in Canterbury and Brighton, and found the three of us, plus Robert’s drum kit and an organ, stuffed into a 1966 Austin 1100 (an old and small car) travelling between venues.
The band was never the same without Robert and it came to end a year or so after his departure. We revived it however in 2014 and would have invited to Robert to re-join had we known his whereabouts, which may of course have been easier had we known his actual name.
Robert once loaned me a copy of Sonny Rollins’ East Broadway Run Down. Very (very) loosely based on this, we’ve composed an instrumental tribute, The Radmall Rundown, which we like to think Robert would have liked: https://funboyfive.bandcamp.
And we’ve created this Youtube video for The Radmall Rundown using some old Funboy Five pics and quite a few from Robert’s subsequent band that Mike provided: https://youtu.be/X9B-WvK5fRA
Mick Sinclair and John McRae.
Funboy Five’s tribute page to Robert: www.funboyfive.co.uk/robrad.ht
If you would like to add your remembrances or pictures of Robert to this website, please email them to Tom: [email protected].