In Memoriam-Robin Lumley and John Giblin

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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.

 

Walls/Obstructions: The Walls Came Down

The Call: The Walls Came Down
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If we were playing a game where I asked you to guess what band I was talking about, and the clues were: This band released their first album in the early 1980s. They wrote powerful rock anthems, with meaningful lyrics, sometimes with Christian themes, and performed them passionately and well, you very well might think I was talking about U2, which went on to become one of the biggest, most successful bands of all time. But of course, you saw the picture and read the title, so you know that I am talking about The Call, which, despite some success, did not go on to become one of the biggest, most successful bands of all time. 

OK, were they as good as U2? Not in my mind. But were they better than a lot of their contemporaries who went on to more fame and fortune? Definitely. 

The Call was formed in 1980 in Santa Cruz, and the leader and lead singer was Michael Been, who was born in Oklahoma, but moved to Chicago after high school. A performer from an early age, Been entered the Illinois state comedy competition (who knew that was a thing), coming in second, ahead of his friend John Belushi. 

After attending the University of Illinois in Chicago and playing in local bands, Been moved to the Los Angeles area in 1972, played in some bands, was a session musician, including on some Christian music albums, before relocating to Santa Cruz and, eventually forming The Call. Their first, self-titled, album was on a major label, was produced by Hugh Padgham, and had the Band’s Garth Hudson on a few tracks. I remember liking it a lot, and playing some tracks from it on WPRB. I wasn’t the only one. Peter Gabriel referred to the band as “the future of American music,” and recruited them to open for him. Gabriel later played on The Call’s third album, as did Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr and Robbie Robertson, and Bono appeared on their 1990 album Red Moon, as did T-Bone Burnett. Martin Scorsese cast Been in The Last Temptation of Christ, as the apostle John. Despite this appreciation, their success was limited and fleeting. 

The second album, Modern Romans, was released after I graduated from college, but I listened to it often, and loved our featured song, “The Walls Came Down.” A stridently anti-war song, it was inspired when Been saw the idealism of the '60s give way to more materialistic and militaristic mindsets of the Reagan years, including the Grenada and Lebanon conflicts. It uses the biblical imagery of Jericho’s walls coming down (without ever mentioning Jericho), and ends, though with the modern sentiment: 

I don't think there are any Russians
And there ain't no Yanks
Just corporate criminals
Playin' with tanks 

The band broke up after releasing Red Moon in 1990, and put out a reunion album in 1997, but that was it. Been played as a sideman for others, including Harry Dean Stanton, but for years acted as a sound engineer for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, which featured his son, singer and bassist Robert Levon Been. (I haven’t been able to determine whether he was named in honor of two members of The Band, but it certainly makes sense). Been died of a heart attack in 2010, backstage at a music festival in Belgium, where BRMC was appearing. 

So, why did The Call not reach even half of U2’s fame? Were they too strident and angry? Was front man Been’s lack of classical good looks part of the issue? Read some of the tributes to Been and The Call here, and you get a sense that they were one of those bands that should have been bigger, but just never got there, and no one can really explain why.