1981
Robyn's Quest
Adam Sweeting Hooks Robyn Hitchcock In Holland
by Adam Sweeting
My first meeting with Robyn Hitchcock is in a gloomy hotel room in Amsterdam. He's perched uncomfortably on the side of the bed with a book open beside him. There's an empty brandy bottle next to the basin, the room is swimming in a haze of Marlboro smoke and the ashtray could use some help. We shake hands.
It's the penultimate day of a brief tour of a small part of Le Continong by bus. Hitchcock, former lynchpin of The Soft Boys, released his first solo LP in May, which was called Black Snake Diamond Role. Both he and his more-or-less manager Richard Bishop would like the record to sell more copies, and of course this is why Hitchcock and his band have undergone The Ordeal By Sealink.
Reaction from both Belgians and Dutch has been encouraging, say Robyn, who tends to rivet you to your seat with a pair of eyes which burn from a long face framed by dark ratty hair. The previous night had found the Hitchcock crew playing The Milky Way, conveniently situated a few yards from the hotel.
Hitchcock is devoutly eccentric, unashamedly devoted to '60s Pop and Psychedelia, and a sporadically impressive songwriter. Black Snake features duff songs like "I Watch The Cars" and "Brenda's Iron Sledge", and killers like "Acid Bird" and "Out Of The Picture".
When we met, N.M.E. had just published a review of the record (four months after its release) which showed the sort of sympathy you'd expect from "The Hammer" McNee towards a black rioter who's been caught kicking one of his constables in the groin.
Hitchcock treats this with whimsical detachment. He's been called a psychedelic has-been so often that it doesn't really dent him now. "Sometimes," he sighs, "I just feel like saying 'Okay, I am Syd Barrett. Now leave me alone.'"
You either take Hitchcock on his terms or you don't take him at all. It's inevitable that we get to talk about musical fashion, something Hitchcock's innocent of unless you really want to tout him as the spearhead of the New Psychedelia.
"People have been making Rock music now for 25 years at least -- 27 years or something -- so there's all those things to delve back into. But the trouble with the nature of fashion is that it's got to find something new, and so styles get discarded before they've been fully explored.
"There's always things to re-explore, which is really fun. It just means it's harder work to do it."
He reflects on The Soft Boys, the group he formed in 1976 and which had its share of vintage moments -- "I Wanna Destroy You" from the fine Underwater Moonlight album, to name but one. "I think probably of the people around in the last couple of years we've been the most...er...accurate in recreating the, sort of, sound of the '60s.
"And people would get very defensive about that -- 'What are you doing this for? Does this imply there is no progress? Are you stuck in the past? How do you mean this? Is this just a tribute?' And it's just nothing -- it just happens to be, y'know, a style that I'm deeply influenced by, and out it pops again.
"I guess I must have been very saturated in those things. There's a hell of a lot more I could do. Maybe I should spend about six weeks just listening to hundreds of thousands of records. Maybe I don't think about music enough -- I mean, I don't listen to anything, I listen to the radio..."
It's possible Hitchcock's feeling a little insecure without the comforting crucible of The Soft Boys to work within. His Eurovisit finds him surrounded by Anthony Thistlethwaite on guitar and sax, Rod Johnson on drums and stand-in bassman Bill Wainwright. They're professional enough, but lack the sympathy Hitchcock has been used to receiving from old cohorts like Matthew Seligman (now a Thompson Twin) on bass and Kimberley Rew on guitar.
The tour itself is a ragged affair. Some confusion over customs documents means that the group have to make a tour of border crossings in order to travel from Holland to Belgium (or was it the other way 'round?). They were refused admission the first couple of times, then luckily managed to find a customs post with no customs officials in it.
After Amsterdam it's on to a place called Apeldoorn, the sort of prefab hick town that would look quite natural sitting next to a Hornby model railway. It has no distinguishing features whatsoever.
As the crew set up the gear, Hitchcock disappears into the dressing room alone and reads a book. He looks up as I walk in and doesn't seem to mind losing his page, so I suggest we do The Interview. We go outside and sit in the tour bus.
For someone who disclaims all knowledge of trends and the latest hot property, Hitchcock has a pretty good grasp of the general map. "Broadly speaking," he begins, "music now began in 1976. The classic example of that is Siouxsie And The Banshees, who couldn't play when they started and now do pretty slick, well-produced records that gradually will even start filtering across the Atlantic, and all sorts of people will start to like them.
"So it's five years on, and by now anyone who's musical has developed, and the same with the 2-Tone bands. It's quite amusing, people like the Thompson Twins and The Teardrops are using the sitar now, which The Soft Boys put on Underwater Moonlight.
"But I don't think you can break the same taboos. That's why stylistically there might be a psychedelic revival, but spiritually there won't because you can't go around saying, 'Hey, I can have free sex and grow my hair and plant trees in Oxford Street -- I'm going to fight you with flowers and take LSD.'
"Now those things have been absorbed, you're not changing things in any way at all. All you're doing is slowing yourself down."
Of the songs on Black Snake Diamond Role, Hitchcock is oblingingly explicit. Is (I ask) "Brenda's Iron Sledge" about Mrs. Thatcher?
"Well, her and the ruling class generally," responds Robyn. "The idea is that it's a huge great cast-iron sled going down a slushy hill in the middle of winter with some really nasty trees poking out, and there's no shock abosrbers: there's just a mass of people at the bottom. And it's a, sort of, pyramid, and at the top sit Brenda and her cronies, y'know, munching legs of chicken and dill pickles out of hampers, and sort of cracking the whip.
"And the ruling class is protected from what is happening by this wedge of people underneath them. And if they really wanna do something with a riot they should do them in Knightsbridge and South Kensington and Hampstead, you know? As long as they can keep things at a distance, then that's how it works.
"So I suppose world communism is the logical answer," he adds with a humourless chuckle.
For the record, "The Man Who Invented Himself" is about hero figures -- "I think it's about Dylan actually" -- while "Do Policemen Sing?" is about law and order and "The Lizard" is about Jim Morrison. Actually, Hitchcock isn't telling me anything at all.
The Apeldoorn show is frankly dismal, with Hitchcock muffled and flat in front of an audience which looked as though it was pining for "Jeux Sans Frontieres" (and I don't mean the song). Afterwards, we do an overngiht drive to Zeebrugge to catch the ferry and nobody talks about the gig. Hitchcock wakes me up and demands to be interviewed some more, so I let him talk to my tape recorder for a while.
A parting thought: "I mean, obviously any sane person in the modern world has a right to be mad, but I think in music there's gotta be a faith in something -- that's what it's there for, even if everyone's about to be exterminated."
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