Bryan Robinson has new music on the way, and if you haven’t heard that name in a while, that’s by design.
Music Authentic first covered Bryan in September 2020, during lockdown. The world was performing its anxiety online; Bryan was making porridge the traditional Scottish way, running eight miles on trails where he writes lyrics, and releasing songs called “Comfortable Silence” and “I Ain’t Got No Lockdown Blues.” He’d just put out Salvation Belle. He talked about music the way other people talk about oxygen — not as a career but as the thing that keeps him in his own body. When we asked what achievement through his art would matter most, he said: “Better to be understood by a few than appreciated by many.”
“Better to be understood by a few than appreciated by many.”
Then he went and lived that sentence for the next several years.
The career before the quiet tells you why the quiet makes sense. Born in Tamworth, Staffordshire — his father announced the home birth by shouting from the bedroom window to the neighbours, this being before mobile phones — Bryan started guitar at nine and got through Grade 8 classical within eighteen months, which by his own admission made him lazy about practising for years. He studied contemporary music and jazz at Leeds College of Music, moved to South London, built a home studio he has kept ever since, and from there the trajectory runs through every room a working musician can end up in: extensive travel and performing across the United States — California, Arizona, Utah, Florida, New York, and beyond; over a thousand weddings, birthdays, and funerals played without his voice giving out; a flamenco gig in a tiny Streatham Hill restaurant where a man called Spanish Tony wouldn’t take “I’m a classical guitarist” for an answer and Bryan played until his right hand bled while a punter compared the experience to a package holiday in Torremolinos; twenty-five years teaching music, business studies, and interview skills inside British prisons across every category from A to D; nine years with disadvantaged young people; three years in a mental health facility.
He once gave a tap-dancing lesson to a prison healthcare class. When a chaplain tried to block his women’s gospel choir from performing at a Christmas concert, the chaplain got transferred to a remote northern jail before the gig. Bryan credited God with the scheduling.
His guitar collection numbers about twenty — “but they’re all very different… OK!?” — anchored by a 1961 Hashimoto classical bought locally for £150, a guitar that records like a dream, built by a company that made wooden dashboards for kamikaze planes before they turned to instruments. His first concert was BB King at thirteen, his dream tour partner is Lady Gaga for the piano lessons on the downtime, and Miles Davis is his answer to which artist everyone should listen to — Davis left the split notes on A Kind of Blue knowing they were right even when they were technically wrong.
He knows that Karen Carpenter’s Neumann U87i was stuck in omnidirectional mode and that Peter Gabriel’s U47 had a major electrical fault, and that those broken microphones are part of why those records sound the way they do.
“She Used to be a Courtesan” came out in 2023, the melodic instinct intact, the production warm and unforced, and then the public-facing side of being a musician — the press, the promotion, the content calendar — went quiet again. His bio page sits Krishnamurti next to Clint Eastwood next to Monty Python the way his bookshelf probably sits Alan Watts next to whatever he’s reading about microphone circuitry, and the years since 2023 belong to that side of him — the side that runs trails and observes and lets the industry carry on without requiring his participation.
New music is on the way. We don’t have a title or a date. He is liked by our team — for the warmth, for the bone-dry wit, for the fact that his encouragement to the world, when we asked for one in 2020, was “Repeat after me, ten thousand times — ‘Oh yes I can'” — and for the complete absence of performance in everything he does when he’s not on stage.
We are looking forward to hearing what Bryan Robinson has been carrying in the quiet.
Follow and listen to Bryan Robinson:
Website: www.bryanrobinson.co.uk Spotify: Bryan Robinson on Spotify Bandcamp: bryanrobinson.bandcamp.com Apple Music: Bryan Robinson on Apple Music YouTube: Bryan Robinson on YouTube SoundCloud: Bryan Robinson on SoundCloud Instagram: @bryanrobinson69 X: @Bryan_Robinson_
Previous Music Authentic coverage: Bryan Robinson takes us to a better place (2020 interview)