Biography
Robert John Gorham was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, UK, and was raised in Warsash, Hampshire, England, UK. He played trombone in brass bands as his father listened to The Beatles. Moving to London in the early 1990s, Rob enrolled on a BA French Studies and History of Art at Goldsmiths and started playing hip-hop and funk in the city's clubs under the DJ pseudonym Rob da Bank.
Rob started his weekend club night Sunday Best in 1994 at the Tea Room des Artistes in Clapham- a night that quickly gained cult status and is credited with helping develop bar-based music culture, as opposed to "club culture".
Rob and his girlfriend Josie had visited the Glastonbury festival every year since they met at Goldsmiths University of London. Rob proposed to Josie at the Glastonbury Festival in 2000. Four years later they launched Bestival on the Isle of Wight, an annual music festival that regularly picks up 'Best UK Festival' awards. Held in late summer, the first event attracted some 10,000 music lovers, growing to 50,000 in just a few years.
Initially described as "boutique", Bestival was a pioneer in the small to medium festival scene.
Graduating in 1995, Rob began a career as both a music journalist and, later, a presenter of BBC's Radio One's chilled-out Blue Room programme. He also hosted the station's One Music Show on Thursday nights, and filled in on the John Peel Show after the DJ's death in 2004.
Until 2014, Rob hosted a Friday-night BBC Radio 1 show focused on left-field electronics, then joined BBC Radio 6, has a show on Spotify, and set up a music supervision company Earworm Music, to create original music for television, film and computer games. Bestival now has a home in Toronto, and the Da Bank's also had a metropolitan festival called "Common People" in both Southampton and Oxford.
