There was nothing particularly punky about the Tom Robinson Band. But front man Tom’s fiery left-wing politics, his status as a gay man who proclaimed his sexuality in song, and his campaigning work to help found Rock Against Racism made him a welcome fellow addition to the circuit.

There’s nothing very punky about their first single either, but its stomping beat and shout-along chorus made it a hit.
Although it seems like a straightforward song about the freedom of the open road in a long tradition of rock’n’roll songs, it has since been claimed that 2-4-6-8 Motorway has a gay subtext.

I’ve looked hard and I suppose you could interpret its lyric as being metaphorical that way (“Well there ain’t no route you could choose to lose the two of us / Ain’t nobody know when you’re acting right or wrong / No one knows if a roadway’s leading nowhere / Gonna keep on driving home on the road I’m on”) but I’ve got to say that’s never occurred to me at any point since its release in 1977.

Tom had previously been in an acoustic trio called Cafe Society that flirted with fame, recording an album produced by Ray Davies of The Kinks, though they fell out over Davies’s poor timekeeping and lack of commitment, the album – on Davies’s own Konk label – selling a paltry 600 copies.

A year or two later Robinson spotted Davies in the audience at one of his own gigs and greeted him with a sarcastic rendition of a Kinks song called Tired Of Waiting For You – for which Davies, never knowingly likeable, later sought revenge by writing a song deriding Robinson as “Prince Of The Punks.”

All of which goes to show that boys will be boys – as Robinson would remind us with his next hit, Glad To Be Gay. Not to be confused with Davies’s song Lola, which proved that boys would sometimes be girls (and vice versa).