How would you describe your music for people who don’t know you?
Honesty + passion ÷ UK charm x funky guitars & bass + groove
+ tea
x10
Add in the beautiful harmonies…
= Robbie Sea.
It’s something like that. The real formula is actually top secret.
Your covers have been getting a LOT of hits on YouTube – how does this make you feel?
Yeah man, it’s awesome. I read all the comments and reply to a lot of them! It’s nice to get feedback! The whole point of doing the covers is to try and reach new people, so when that happens, it’s great. It’s especially nice because I literally sit in a window-less DIY garage studio at my parents house, all day & night, working on originals, covers, learning how to use video software to make the YouTube vids etc, so it makes all the hours worthwhile. Instead of getting paid in pounds I get paid in views/likes/retweets haha! The dude at the bank doesn’t approve of this though, which is quite unfortunate for me.
What made you get into music?
Well, my mum is a secondary school music teacher, so right from day one I was always surrounded by music, instruments, musicals, etc! We’ve got footage on VHS somewhere of me aged five dancing around and singing along to Me Ol’ Bamboo from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! So I was kind of just born into a musical environment and that’s what made me get into it I guess!
What’s the best thing about playing live?
Standing in front of a room full of strangers & telling them how I feel. Sometimes it’s hard to get stuff off your chest even to your best friend or girlfriend, but when I’m singing about how I feel, everyone in the world could be standing there & it wouldn’t matter. It’s a weird & unexplainable feeling. And that’s exactly why I refuse to succumb to a 9-5 routine that provides no good feeling, or feeling in general, whatsoever.
What would you like to do before the end of 2012?
I really want to show people that mainstream pop music isn’t all about bullshit manufactured puppets, there’s more to it than that if you just dig a little deeper. Too many people are caught up in this talent show-driven manufactured pop world and they need help snapping out of it! By the end of 2012 I want to have saved at least a million people from a life of dull, meaningless music, that’s where I want to be!
On a serious note though, there are far too many good musicians and songwriters that get swept under the carpet to make way for that next Pop Idol or that next person with the X Factor and it’s all a load of crap. It’s just a big money-making campaign that almost everyone seems to buy into. There’s no passion or meaning to any of it. Just the other day I saw a bit of that show The Voice; you know, the show they sold to us as being all about ‘the voice’, not the appearance? Yeah, that one. Well, it was a showdown between some girl that had been all over the press all week for whatever stupid reason and some other dude. The guy was clearly a far better singer but he didn’t exactly fit the ‘typical’ popstar image criteria, but that’s cool, because this show isn’t about image, remembers? Then, the most hypocritical comment I’ve heard of late – our expert judge Danny, live on the show, goes and says, “I’m going to make my decision based on who I think will break into the industry best and who will sell the most records.” …Wait a minute, WHAT? Who do you think he chose? What a joke. So yeah, basically I want to change all that and get people listening to real music. That was the point I was trying to make!
Which song do you wish you had written?
Return Of The Jedi by a band called Reuben.
What’s your weirdest music-related experience – it could be on tour, in the studio, a random encounter with a fan, anything!
Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit told me he was in the mood for a fight one night, so I told him I’d fight him, thinking ‘sweet, this will be one hell of a story’, but then when I rolled my sleeve up and he felt my bicep/gun, he backed down and said he’d changed his mind! What a pussy.