John Robb is a kind of cultural witness who turns up at the right place and right time. From glam rock beginnings in Blackpool through to the first rupture of punk, and into the fault-lines that shaped British guitar music.

He was there early, forming The Membranes and later Goldblade, carrying the raw voltage of punk into forgotten towns and less fashionable cities. At the same time, Robb was documenting music culture as it happened. As a writer, he carved out a parallel path, producing definitive accounts of Oasis and The Stone Roses that focused on the politics, class, and cultural shifts surrounding them. Robb even coined the term Britpop while writing for Sounds, a small act that would help define the future.

Speaking ahead of his appearance in Edinburgh next month, Robb is still circling those same questions about culture and class, and who gets heard in his new memoir, Punk Rock Ruined My Life. The story spans Britain and beyond, featuring sections on Belfast during the Troubles, the shifting tides of the Manchester scene, and an American journey to meet the fledgling Nirvana. Robb’s early story and sense of identity are rooted in Scotland. His mother is from Selkirk; his grandparents, Edinburgh and Leith; his grandmother was raised on the Duke of Buccleuch’s estate where the family worked on the land. “It’s like a different world,” he says. “My mum’s still got a Scottish accent to this day,” he laughs. “And she’s so passionately Scottish; when the rugby is on, and Scotland beat England, she goes on about it for weeks.”

Robb explains the importance of the Sounds weekly paper, perhaps echoing the famous line from Ian Brown of The Stone Roses, amplified at the time: “It’s not where you’re from; it’s where you’re at”. “NME had good writers, a lot more money, and it had a much better layout than Sounds did,” he says. “But Sounds was much more, for want of a better word, street. It was about live reviews and being at gigs.” The Stone Roses first garnered attention in Scotland outside of Manchester. Sounds was important in that it helped bands outside London gain a wider platform. “You could write about the Stone Roses and nobody had ever heard of them,” he says, “and Sounds wouldn’t say, ‘Well, no one’s ever heard of them, it’s not a London thing.’ They just wanted you to write about it. What’s really weird is over the years, the NME sort of turned into Sounds”.

His first encounters with Nirvana came long before anyone had heard of Smells Like Teen Spirit and the arrival of Nevermind in 1991. He recognised something early and conducted what would become Kurt Cobain’s first press interview at his mother’s house, and later found himself travelling to New York to meet the band. “We got there, and they said, ‘There is no hotel.’”
“We didn’t even have sleeping bags with us,” he adds. “So I had to sleep underneath my jacket with my rucksack as my pillow on the kitchen floor.”
“Tad and Nirvana were in one room,” he says. “Tad were massive guys, they took up most of the space. Kurt was sort of squashed into the corner, and me and Ian (the photographer) were in the kitchen.” Robb admits now “it’s a great story”, and his book has many, but at the time he adds: “We were thinking, ‘What a drag,’” he laughs. “We were absolutely knackered.” It takes graft and uncomfortable situations to find bands like this, as Robb did with those who would come to define the late 80s and 90s. Of Nirvana, he adds: “There was no inkling they were going to be the biggest band of the ’90s, none at all.”

Kurt Cobain’s death in April 1994 remains a shocking moment in pop culture history. His face on the cover of NME’s April 16th edition has become one of the most iconic images of the era. Flick to the back pages of that paper and there’s an advert for a new band called Oasis, who are just about to release their debut single, Supersonic. “It’s the same week,” adds Robb. “I did think there was a slight overlap and that they might have met,” he says. “And then I realised there is no overlap.” While Oasis and Nirvana shared different world views, both acts dealt in euphoric melodies, something Chrissie Hynde recently noted is missing from radio these days. “Oasis wouldn’t be on Kurt Cobain’s radar,” he says. “But Noel’s a big fan of Nirvana,” Robb says. “It’s the Pistols and the Beatles thing. Brilliant melodies; both bands had that, and music being the only way out,” he says of that generation. “That doesn’t really exist so much nowadays.”

In terms of aesthetic and attitude, The Stone Roses, in particular, offered a look that inspired Oasis. Robb remembers seeing the Roses at Glasgow Green in June 1990, a show that now exists on bootlegs and online fragments that never come close to the day itself. “It was the greatest ever Stone Roses gig,” says Robb of witnessing a band stretching beyond themselves before a five-year hiatus. “They got quite heavy in sound. They had that Sex Pistols thing. John Squire sounded like Steve Jones; it was powerful. It was like Oasis before Oasis. They still had all the delicacy of those beautiful guitar lines, but they were playing heavier.”

Robb will be joined by Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai to reflect on a life lived outside the mainstream, one that kicked against cultural gatekeepers to document bands before they were absorbed into the industry machine. Punk Rock Ruined My Life is the story of a restless musician and writer who moved across cities, scenes and generations. Music is not just a background soundtrack but a way of life. One of journalism’s true outsiders, still standing strong, still curious and still on the hunt for what’s happening on the outside.

John Robb with Stuart Braithwaite (of Mogwai), Sat 9 May 2026, 7pm, The Voodoo Rooms.

For more information visit www.thevoodoorooms.com