Robin and Richard started working with the Flaming Monkeys on a weekly basis, co writing songs and developing their musical abilities and live performance skills, and eventually managed the band. In November 2005 the band entered a prestigious competition where school bands covered a classic rock song and battled it out for a support slot at Brixton Academy with chart toppers, ‘The Kaiser Chiefs’. The competition was called ‘Rock School’, run by popular London based radio station XFM. By mid December the four boys emerged victorious out of 190 bands from the South of England.
In 2006 Realistic Rock Academy started to grow and as well as teaching private students from home, youth centre workshops and Epsom Playhouse, the brothers still found time to work with the Flaming Monkeys each week. The Flaming Monkeys went on to play live on BBC’s Blue Peter and Xchange programmes. They continued their success by being invited on a drugs awareness campaign for school children in Scotland playing in arenas in Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, to up to 10,000 people. Also on the tour after a single that charted at 13 was all girl pop, rock sensation ‘The Faders’, signed to Polydor. The brothers kept in touch with The Faders and Toy Valentine joined the Realistic Rock team in 2008.
Under the guidance of Robin and Richard, The Flaming Monkeys went on to win best Live unsigned band at the Vodafone Live Music Awards in 2007 and Best Unsigned bands at the Kerrademy awards (Kerrang Radio) in Jan 2008.
Realistic Rock moved into its current premises at East Street, Epsom in October 2007 and followed up their success with another Realistic Rock formed band, ‘Black and White’ who also went on to win XFM’s Rock School in December 2007, supporting Bloc Party at Brixton Academy to over 5000 people.