Member Spotlight
| Type of post: | Barbershop news item |
| Sub-type: | No sub-type |
| Posted By: | Phil Gill |
| Status: | Current |
| Date Posted: | Thu, 5 Sep 2024 |
At the age of five, Rob started taking piano lessons from the mother of his best friend at school. Who could have guessed then how music would go on to be such an important theme in his life? However, within three years Rob was also playing the clarinet, followed later by the saxophone. By the time he left school, Rob had got to Grade 8 in all three instruments and achieved a diploma in the clarinet. Rob did find time for some other activities at school, including playing Rugby as a back row forward until around the age of 16 he realised that he was falling behind his team-mates in terms of height and weight and, wanting to protect his instrumentalists fingers, he called it a day.
Unsurprisingly, Rob chose to study music at university. In his first week at Manchester he met fellow music students James Gower-Smith, Ben Ferguson and Chris Langworthy, and the four young men went on to spend most of the next three years together. Rob recalls hearing barbershop at his first lecture when a quartet called ‘Encore’ sang to the newly-arrived class, with one of its members, Tom Jarvis, inviting people to try it for themselves at a rehearsal of Manchester University Barbershop Singers (MUBS) the following weekend. Rob and his friends decided to give it a go and, after singing tags in the stairwell, knew that barbershop was for them.
At the end of their first term, James and Ben resolved to form a quartet and asked Rob and Chris to join them. Thus ‘Tagline’ was born. Rob’s association with Hallmark started shortly afterwards, as he joined the first Project Horizon, with Ben and James, in 2012. This came about thanks to fellow student, Antoine Kaiserman who, through his friendship with Tim Briggs, was already involved with Hallmark.
Over the years that followed, Hallmark started to play a very important part in Rob’s life. He remembers Tagline’s first performance to a sizeable audience was at a Hallmark rehearsal in February 2012 and feeling incredibly nervous as someone with just six months’ barbershop experience in front of so many experienced and highly decorated singers. Looking back, Rob recognises how valuable it was getting to know more mature colleagues in Hallmark, as this helped him to develop both as a singer and as a human being. He sees this as instrumental in taking Tagline from an enthusiastic but inexperienced foursome in 2011 to BABS quartet champions in 2015, shedding any pretentions they may have had as music students along the way!
After Hallmark’s gold medal performance in 2014, Rob started attending weekly Hallmark rehearsals. This entailed leaving work early, dashing home for a bite, and then getting a train from Manchester to Stockport from where Andy Walker would give him a lift to Sheffield. Then, after rehearsal, Rob had to do the same journey in reverse, arriving home around midnight. Around this time, his potential as a musical leader was first recognised by Andy Allen who asked him to become bass section leader at the tender age of 21. In spite of the logistical difficulties of getting to and from Sheffield, Rob cherished his time with Hallmark because, along with Tagline, it kept him going through a dispiriting phase of his work career.
Having decided as a student that becoming a professional musician was not for him, Rob sought opportunities in the TV industry, initially hoping to get into audio post-production. Sadly, opportunities, particularly outside London, were few and far between and there was a lot of competition for jobs. Rob picked up odd days as a TV runner (general production assistant), often working on programmes that didn’t play to his strengths, and he served as a production intern for MTV for a while in 2016, before going on to become a freelancer. In 2018 the growing demands of his work led Rob to conclude that he did not have space to continue with Project Horizon.
His work became so difficult that the enforced suspension of activities due to Covid in 2020 came as a huge relief to him. Lockdown also gave Rob an opportunity to combine his professional experience in TV production with his hobby when BABS asked him to develop and produce BABS Live 2020, as a replacement for the cancelled convention. He drew on his experience from working on music award shows to come up with a concept that was so well-received that it was repeated the following year.
As TV work picked up again, Rob found himself back in a difficult place and decided to take a proper break in 2022, travelling for two months in Europe. Then, over time, things started to fall into place for Rob, with some great projects at work, and a hugely enjoyable BABS convention in 2023. Six weeks later, Rob set off on his travels again, this time to Australia and New Zealand. During his time in Wellington, NZ, Rob was lucky enough to get to know the chair and music director of Vocal FX. There were long conversations about different ways to do things, making Rob question a lot of things about barbershop that he and many others had taken for granted.
Time spent abroad allowed Rob to reflect, and it became increasingly clear to him that his future lay in returning to Sheffield and, in particular, Hallmark. Consequently, Rob came back to the city and moved in with his partner Becca, another keen barbershopper and member of the Sharrow Vale Blues, Steel City Voices and many other groups. Hallmark welcomed him back to Tuesday evening rehearsals in January 2024, since when Rob has been keen to share with the chorus much of the wisdom he encountered on his travels. However, he stresses that these new ideas align perfectly with Hallmark’s existing philosophy of excellence through fun and fun through excellence. As Rob steps up to the role of Music Director, he is confident that, together with his Music Team colleagues, he can give a new energy to Hallmark to do what it does best, innovating, spreading joy, showing leadership, and appealing to future generations of barbershop singers. In other words, being the chorus that he has loved since he first sung with us in 2012.
