[purchase Product]
Robin Lumley and John Giblin were members of Brand X at
various times. I’ve written before about Brand X, a jazz-rock fusion band probably best known for the contributions of
Phil Collins (who I’ve written about, too), but the band’s
membership was somewhat of a revolving door.
(And I wrote about another member, guitarist John Goodsall, for our 2021
In Memoriam theme.) Lumley was a
founding member of the band, on keyboards, and was involved from 1974-1980,
with a brief hiatus in 1978, while Giblin, a bass player, was a member in 1979,
although his recordings were released through 1982.
Robin Lumley was born on January 17, 1948, in Devonport,
England. Originally a drummer, he switched
to keyboards in the 1970s. In 1972, his
former neighbor, David Bowie, rang him up one day, to see if he would be
interested in replacing Bowie’s ill keyboard player, Matthew Fisher from Procol
Harum, starting the next day. He
was interested and joined the Spiders From Mars. After that, Lumley worked as a studio musician
and met Collins, which led to the formation of Brand X. Lumley also became interested in music
production. His hiatus from Brand X in
1978 was to work on production projects, including Rod Argent’s Moving Home,
and Bill Bruford’s Feels Good to Me, and he later produced records for
Orleans, Anthony Phillips and Isotope, among others.
In the 1980s, he formed a jazz-rock band that included Rod
Argent, Graeme Edge (of the Moody Blues), Morris Pert (of Brand X), and Gary
Brooker (of Procol Harum). Lumley later married an Australian and moved to
Australia. In 2001, he formed SETI with Graeme Edge, bassist Rob
Burns, and Rod McGrath (cellist for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra). He also composed and produced music for over
250 television and radio commercials for numerous television productions in the
US, UK and Australia.
Lumley died from heart failure in Plymouth, on March 9, 2023, at the age of 75.
***
John Giblin was born on February 26, 1952, in Bellshill, Scotland. He was best known as a studio musician, contributing bass to albums and performances by artists such as Peter Gabriel, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Kate Bush, Simple Minds, John Anderson, Phil Collins, Al Green, and Annie Lennox. Giblin was best known for his mastery of the fretless bass.
As noted above, Giblin recorded with Brand X in 1979, when the band was being pushed to make more commercial music. The surprising response to this pressure was to have two separate units record—one with bassist Percy Jones, keyboard player Peter Robinson, drummer Mike Clarke and Goodsall, and the other featuring, Lumley, Giblin, Collins and Goodsall. The output of these two groups were released, but no improvement in commercial success was achieved, leading to a band breakup.
More recently, Giblin was playing more acoustic bass, and was involved in projects with Peter Erskine of Weather Report and Alan Pasqua of Tony Williams Lifetime.
Giblin died of sepsis following a long illness on May 14, 2023 in Cheltenham, England, aged 71.
You can hear both men on the Brand X track in the video, “Algon (Where an Ordinary Cup of Drinking Chocolate Costs £8,000,000,000),” a title taken from a Monty Python sketch (in which the cup of chocolate only cost £4 million), from the Product album.
1 comments:
The information here is largely correct, but it bears repeating that Robin Lumley was a third of the shareholder/member/owner trio of Brand X along with fellow musicians Percy Jones and John Goodsall until the very end. Phil Collins, for his part, was the "star" that helped the band get a contract at Charisma Records where Genesis was housed, but Collins was not a shareholder member of Brand X. The band formed roughly a year before Collins joined and began as a 6-piece with two guitarists and a singer. Collins joined loaning himself out from his own company on the advice of his/their manager Tony Smith as a hired musician in Brand X and had no stake in their subsequent debt. When he got bored of playing with them, his agent, Tony Smith dumped Brand X as did the record company Charisma. Robin Lumley will be prominently featured in an upcoming documentary about Brand X which has been filmed over the last 10 years. It will feature performances of the band that were made especially for the film and include Robin Lumley. Not John Giblin, sadly.
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