“Ok……. jump” and everyone did if they weren’t already jumping. It’s the close-out of Southampton’s Rob Clamp’s recent hometown gig. The place is rammed, the audience is bouncing. The energy coming off the stage is visible. The set is a mix of album tracks and new songs, the Ashmen provide tight and varied backing to his songs. Obviously loving every minute up there with his easy stage presence and rapport, Rob Clamp has a lot of family, friends and fans in this city.
Unusual for a live gig these days, at one point you could hear a pin drop. Maybe the lyrics of Rob’s ‘The rules of the gig’ – “I’m sure you want to enjoy yourselves, but please don’t ruin it for everyone else” played a part. The group gathered around a single mic – “We’ve never tried this before” – to sing ‘My confession’, a new song finished only a couple of weeks ago, with five part vocals.
The Ashmen are all multi-instrumentalists, banjo and drums, electric and double bass, keyboard and mandolin, violin and harmonica, while Rob plays acoustic and foot percussion. With such a line-up, their sound sits comfortably across folk-rock and americana – reflecting Rob’s British and American influences. While he still gigs by himself – he’s off to Europe again soon where the logistics and finances of a band are too difficult, he likes playing with the band. Apart from collaborating on the music, it’s the bounce after the gig.
“Playing on your own, You come off and if the show’s gone really well, you have nobody to turn around to and go like, wow, wasn’t that great? Which is a really sad thing, because you’re not experiencing the highs with other people. So it doesn’t feel like it lasts as long. With the band you come off and you can all turn around and just bounce off each other for the next couple of days.”
Rob is still bouncing when we meet a couple of days later at Santo Lounge in Shirley, and given his philosophy about developing as an artist, its not surprising. In his terms, he smashed it. He wants Southampton to be his biggest fanbase – its where he has gigged tirelessly around local venues and open mics as he developed as a musician; its where he lives, and where his family and friends are; where his community is. The Brook was the first night of his current tour, he felt he hadn’t done a gig in the city for a while and wanted the send-off. Some time up ahead, he sees Southampton becoming the closing gig of a tour, a homecoming celebration.
Both Rob and his support act, Matt Owen – founding member of Noah and the Whale, emphasised how appreciative the were of the audience, the people who go out to see live music, support local musicians and local venues.
Performing live, the interaction with the audience, the storytelling, the buzz afterwards – that’s what Rob gets a kick out of. “If I look at people like Martyn Joseph, who’s amazing; he’s been gigging for years, tells stories, and plays the music like he means it. Listening online is great, but I get more of a full feeling from experiencing it for real, hearing his musicianship, and being with him in person for three hours.”
It took a while for Rob to decide to become a full-time musician. Although he played local gigs and battle-of-the-band nights at the Joiners, Winchester’s Railway, and the Talking Heads when he was seventeen, and some busking to raise money when he went to Australia for a year, he imagined a career in something else, although he didn’t know what, went to university in Aberystwyth, and came back to do various jobs locally.
It was the acoustic music scene when he moved to Cornwall that that got him playing shows that people came out to see, and thinking that he could become a musician. On a trip to Thailand on a year out, playing in hostels with friends, he decided that he wouldn’t go travelling again unless he was doing it as a musician. So he came back to Southampton and worked at it.
“I realised that I was better at that than anything else I’d tried to do, but I’d actually given other things a try, so its not a normal music career.”
He says that starting out later in the business than many people had made him determined, and persistent. He’s always songwriting, he says – the Brook gig contained six songs that the band hadn’t played before, and he’s continually dropping new ones on the band.
The current tour around the country is called the Running out of steam tour, named after the band’s latest single. But Rob says it’s slightly sarcastic as well. Despite having had times over the last two years with as many as six gigs a week, gigs in Europe in the autumn and an album out in November he certainly isn’t running out of steam! The current UK tour, then some solo dates in Germany, Austria and Bulgaria, before rounding off the UK part with the band, “probably an autumn tour, and spring next year, and then if the funding is right we’ll do another album.”
It is tiring just to hear the plans and feel the energy that Rob exudes. “I’m quite used to gigging all the time. I’d like to think that maybe some people could not like what I do. That’s fine. But at least they know I work hard!”
As well as songwriting and performing, Rob books the gigs and tours, and sorts all the logistics. It’s got him to where he is now, and he’s happy like that. He’s taken the opportunities that have arisen – a friend who can get him a gig in Germany, a festival in Bulgaria, work on a cruise ship, building a network of contacts and a community around himself. He’s thought about agents and managers, but is content keeping things as they are and seeing where it takes him, although he is conscious of the pressure that trying to make a career and living as a musician beings.
Before the Brook gig, Rob set himself a challenge to raise money for charity by running a kilometre for every ticket sold. The £500 he raised through his running has gone to the Samaritans. Many people in the music industry struggle with their mental health, and Rob talks about people he knows who have taken their own lives.
The band is committed to doing more for charity and supporting the music community – they have a festival gig later in the year for a charity, and one that provides music support for people with mental health issues. “This is our community and we want to do things right. It’s more meaningful when it does pay off if you do things right. We have no idea what we are doing really, but if it does all go to shit, then at least we have saved someone’s life and raised some money. “
That sums up a lot of what Rob Clamp is about.
He says that publicising how the ticket sales were going helped emphasise the importance of live music and the precarious nature of trying to make a living from music, particularly in these days of online platforms.
He considers that putting energy into promoting himself and his gigs is more useful than trying to get onto playlists, where the financial return is so small, and the conversion rate from online playlist to live ticket sales is unproven. Building a fanbase through gigs is proving more fruitful.
To prove his point, right on cue as we leave Santo Lounge, a woman comes up to us beaming: “That was a fantastic gig on Saturday, Rob. We loved it, good luck with the tour.”
Rob Clamp on Spotify: The Lost Souls album
Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/robclampmusic
Website: https://www.robclampmusic.com/
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