The Boston Phoenix
October 22, 2000
Hitchcock & Phillips: Joined At The Hip
by Brett Milano
If Robyn Hitchcock and Grant-Lee Phillips had done nothing on stage but make fun of David Bowie, that alone would have been enough to make their collaborative tour worthwhile. As it was, they made fun of Bowie only during their encore at the Middle East Sunday night, but it was priceless: they began a medley with his "Sound And Vision", then segued into a bunch of ridiculous '70s hits with the same chords -- "Kung Fu Fighting", "When You're in Love with A Beautiful Woman", "Rock Your Baby" -- and sang them all as the wasted, intense Bowie of the Low-era would have. It was the kind of joke that only performers with an abiding love for Rock's back pages could bring off.
Although they were Warner Bros. label-mates for years, the pair haven't toured together before. Hitchcock said backstage that they were looking to recapture the informal atmosphere of the late-night Pop hootenannies at the Los Angeles club Largo. In fact, their set was a good deal more polished. The two songwriters alternated tunes through the set, but they always added something -- whether a guitar part, a harmony, or just friendly support -- to each other's numbers. And the best moments came when their voices met in Everly Brothers-style harmony -- a connection made explicit when they did the Everlys' oldie "All I Have To Do Is Dream".
The set wasn't quite the career retrospective one might have hoped for. Phillips did include the radio hits "Fuzzy" and "Mighty Joe Moon", and Hitchcock dug back to the early-'80s for the haunting "Flavour of Night". But both drew largely from the Internet-only albums they've released since leaving Warners. How well they get on was evident throughout the show. Hitchcock even sang, "Mr. Phillips and I, we're joined at the hip" in a song made up on-the-spot.
Whether by design or not, they wound up choosing songs that complemented each other: Hitchcock name-checked Gene Hackman in one song, and Phillips did the same for Clint Eastwood in another. The pair squared off on wide-eyed love songs (Phillips's "Heavenly", Hitchcock's "I Feel Beautiful") and dark and mysterious songs (Phillips's "St. Expedite", Hitchcock's "Dark Princess"). "Honey don't think, you're liable to figure me out" is the kind of chorus that you'd expect either might come up with, though Phillips was the one who did.
Always a master of verbal riffing, Hitchcock was in prime form. Early in the show he had a long dialogue with a wax Halloween pumpkin while Phillips looked on in amazement. And it's a short jump from talking to pumpkins to covering "I Am The Walrus", the last of the evening's borrowed tunes. The Beatles song was done absolutely faithfully -- to the point where Hitchcock recited the King Lear excerpt that plays over the Beatles' fadeout -- and unlike the Bowie bit, it wasn't really played for laughs. Instead it was evidence of an abstract Pop tradition that both men are proudly carrying on.
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