Robb Johnson

Robb Johnson first began playing guitar and writing songs as a teenager in your average teenage rock band in the mid-seventies. Discovering folk music at Sussex University, where he helped run the folk club for a couple of years, he continued to perform both in folk clubs and rock pubs. In the mid-eighties he was part of an acoustic agit-prop trio, The Ministry of Humour, and he has continued to work with a variety of bands and formats, Robb steadily gained a reputation as a solo performer and one of England’s leading   contemporary songwriters and his songs have become part of the repertoire of a wide variety of musicians. Roy Bailey in particular has done much to popularise Robb’s writing.

He has performed in clubs, pubs, arts centres and festivals, pavements, pickets and benefits, school fetes and dances, on Belgian radio and Nicaraguan TV; he was asked to write a suite of songs about his grandfathers and the First World War, for the 1997 Paschendaele Peace Concert. The concerts and the resultant double CD “Gentle Men” received unanimous critical acclaim; Folk Roots praised the “sustained vision from the songwriter”, and Mojo made the CD their “Album of the Month”. An album of his own material “The Triumph of Hope Over Experience” received widespread critical acclaim, while his label Irregular Records has facilitated releases by a variety of song-orientated artists, and also enabled Robb to complete a number of other successful projects.

Robb was born and has spent most of his life in Hounslow in West London, where he worked for 16 years as a primary school teacher, before resigning in 1997 to allow more time to pursue his musical career.