If you’d stopped me when I was a teenage technical apprentice back in the early 1970s and told me I’d one day be writing about running a rock venue for 26 years, I wouldn’t have believed you.

In fact, if you’d told me that when I was a project engineer at GKN Sankey for ten years, from 1975-1985, or when I was indulging my passion as a drummer in my bands Ocean, Ocean Boulevard and Sub Zero, I’d have thought you were off your trolley.

But here I am in 2018, doing precisely that after a chance conversation last year with a journalist friend who is helping me with the quest.

Opening The Robin R’n’B Club at The Robin Hood in Brierley Hill as I have said many times was a fluke. I had nothing planned. It was just the sort a golden opportunity that comes along once in a lifetime. I grasped it with both hands and It changed my life completely.

I have had no formal training in anything I have done for the past 26 years. I’ve just made it up as I’ve gone along and learned everything the hard way by all the mistakes I have made. I did it my way, which in a way I think makes us different from every other venue.

As everyone who works around me we will tell you I am always busy, I am always planning the next 12 months ahead and I have never had time to look back at what has been achieved.

Working on this book has given me time to look back and recollect all those wonderful moments. I’ve been able to reflect on the amazing shows that have taken place.

I have to say I had totally forgotten about many of them: they were tucked away in my brain cells. But writing this book has helped the memories to come flooding back. My friends have also been a source of inspiration. They were there along the way and it’s been great to reconnect.

The whole experience has been very uplifting and I hope you enjoy reading my story and reminiscing in your own memories of the Robin 1 and 2.

I hope the book will help take some of the hundreds of thousands of customers that have attended gigs at The Robin 1 and Robin 2 over the past 26 years to some of the special moments in their life.

So here it is. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. But most of all, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for your relentless support. It’s meant the world to me and I’m grateful.