Robberriff

I was born some time during the winter months of 1975 and spent the first few years of my life shitting myself and learning to speak.

I got given an acoustic guitar when I was eight years old and couldn’t get on with it. It wasn’t until I was about 11 that I went on a guitar workshop with my parents and got inspired to play music.

I decided that I needed to learn more about technique so I took some lessons, six in all, to learn about chords. Then I decided to teach myself, getting books and playing music with a variety of friends and family. This eventually led to me playing a bad rendition of Purple Haze on stage in front of the whole high school when I was 13 (which I don’t think anyone recognized as Purple Haze anyway...). About a year later I played in a youth centre in a punk band called The Beserkers. This was a reasonably short-lived band as we were very young and into drinking.

Around a year later I formed a band called The Volcanic Skin Eruptions, playing mainly original hardcore punk and thrash tunes. We attacked the local circuit with all the best intentions but eventually fell apart due to excessive alcohol use.

I then joined a rock band called Mental Floss, learned their entire set in 2 days, before playing a gig at The Arts Centre in Norwich, UK. On the way back home from the gig, guitar case in hand, I promptly got arrested for a petty crime I didn't commit, which sobered me up a bit...

I really threw myself into practicing instruments, deciding to try my hand at bass some time in 1992. In 1993 I started jamming with a 6-piece funk band called Monkey Island, which had a progressive seventies psychedelic sound. We went down well doing gigs on the local party scene.

Monkey Island morphed into Green Monkey, a 7-piece consisting of, among others, a trumpet and a didgeree do player. One night we ended up playing two parties 40 miles apart, which was fun.

The Montana Realty Company was the next band that I formed in 1995, a 3-piece that gave me a taste for improvisation.

In 1995 I also began live improvised jam sessions at a local nightclub. The line-up would vary from week to week: sometimes a 3-piece, sometimes 4, sometimes a keyboard, sometimes a trumpet. It was a great way to meet local musicians.

It was there that I hooked up with a band called Casino in 1998 and started to write songs. We were joined by the drummer from The Montana Realty Company and began doing experimental funk. However, due to musical differences (and a dislike for the vocal-heavy direction the band was taking) the drummer and I decided to go back to jamming.

This 'jamming' gradually became Special Fried, an instrumental band with an added guitarist and keyboard player in the mix. It was around this time that I met up with one of my old punk friends…

I became bassist in my mate’s punk band Semtex and from then on split my time between funk bands and punk bands, until…

I joined a street-performing-wedding-playing-busking band in the spring of 2000 playing double-bass for a little extra cash. At the end of the season I went back to jamming with Special Fried, lining up a few gigs in London.

I continued to play on the circuit doing various themed nights including backing beat poets at poetry evenings.

Then in the autumn of 2002 I joined "The Longest Running UK Hip-Hop Group" Deftex, once again on bass. We played various gigs including, London, France, Bristol, and The Deadbeat Festival sharing the bill with Roots Manuva, DJ Yoda, Edan, Gwen McCrae and Amp Fiddler amongst others.

In 2005 I decided to leave the band to focus on creating my own music. Which lead me to now...

//Robberriff's Links

• www.myspace.com/robberriff

//Rupert Code

If you want to have your own Rupert The Robot with Robberriff's tracks just click here for the code to place in your website or myspace.

Remix Competition

All the votes have been counted and the winner for the Robberriff Remix Contest is:

Robberriff vs. Boka - Stringing Away Revisited (Boka Remix)

Boka aka Peter Bokor resides in Hungary and did a fantastic job of taking Stringing Away to an all new Drum And Bass level.

Please feel free to continue downloading the remixes here: download all tracks (ZIP File).

Perspective

This 'Perspective' mix comes fresh from the head of Robberriff.

All tracks feature are written and mixed by the man himself and are arranged as follows;
1. Am.Be.Enty
2. Electroniker
3. Anolog
4. Are You Feeling Me?

Un-mixed versions and other brand-spanking new tracks can be heard on his myspace page