Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2015 | Page 33

INTERVIEW Putting on your Sunday Best I t’s been an incredible 12 years since Bestival burst onto the Island scene with its unique, fun-loving mix of music and entertainment. With the 2015 event now in the pipeline, and promising such crowd-pulling names as Missy Elliott, Duran Duran and the Chemical Brothers, we caught up with founder and legendary DJ Rob da Bank for an insight into his background and early musical influences. Exclusive interview by James Falconbridge. Playing trumpet in your dad’s brass band was probably not the coolest thing to be doing as a youngster growing up in Portsmouth and Southampton in the 1980s – but for Rob da Bank, it was just one of the building blocks in what turned out to be an eclectic musical education. Rob – known back then as Robert John Gorham – also took piano lessons, and his most prized possession was an old record player which rang out with the sounds of everything from the Beatles to jazz and classical music, and then, as he got into his teens, the Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets and Stone Roses. “All that gave me an amazing grounding in music” he says. “Playing in the brass band meant that I could read and write music from the age of nine, and then at about 14 or 15, I got into John Peel on the radio, and started buying records at Our Price in Southampton and Portsmouth”. Looking back, he reckons that he grew up in a “golden era of music” in the late 80’s and early 90’s. He had his first set of decks at the age of 16, and landed his first DJ gig at www.visitilife.com 33