The Boston Globe
October 5, 1990
Inside Robyn Hitchcock's Mind
by Jim Sullivan
Admittedly, "What's on your mind?" sounds like a rather lazy way to begin an interview. A little vague, you know?
It is, however, perhaps the sort of thing that would engage the mind of Robyn Hitchcock -- he sings about balloon men, a man with a lightbulb head, talking fish and shapes between us that turn us into animals. Sample lyric from "Unsettled": "Mental dungheap flurry overshot the sun you breeze/In a hollow shoe, the mincemeat seethes for you". A lot of odd things go on up there in Hitch's noggin.
"I'm interested in Arnold Schwarzenegger, mainly," says the 38-year-old Brit. "I've got a feeling I could fit completely into one of his limbs and my girlfriend could fit into the other -- and we wonder which of us would be which limb. I'm also interested in why he seems vulnerable -- whether it's because he doesn't seem very intelligent, or because he seems so powerful it's surprising there's still a human head on top of it."
That's what's on Hitchcock's mind.
At his elbow, however, is Buggo. Buggo is an invisible dog. "Ow, bloody hell!" yells Hitchcock, interrupting this phone chat -- ostensibly about his upcoming gig and latest record, the mostly acoustic Eye. "Down! Bad dog! You're not going for the tuna fish!"
Hitchcock, a Syd Barrett for our times, plays delightfully fractured, Psychedelic Pop, and he's at Nightstage Monday and Tuesday nights.
"He doesn't do much," says Hitchcock (back to Buggo), "but he comes out on tour with us. He's discreet except at the worst possible moments. Like, we're in a restaurant and we've chosen linguine and shrimp and Buggo sees feta salad and oysters on another table, and Buggo rushes off and gets us a sample. He brings it back in his saliva-encrusted jaws and generally has a good time."
Does, perhaps, Buggo ever get blamed for things Robyn does?
"Um, yes," says Hitchcock, laughing. "Some people thought he wrote the last album."
Finally, a bit about Eye, which boasts the straightforward (for him) Pop love song, "Beautiful Girl". Although signed to A&M, this disc was licensed to TwinTone, as Hitchcock says A&M's reaction was thus: "They groaned and said, 'Do we really have to put this out? This won't make it easier to sell your stuff to the reps in Omaha.'"
Hitchcock wraps up this tour and then...has no plans. A need for money and an inability to keep silent may force him back to work. But he insists he and his regular band, The Egyptians, have nothing concrete in the offing.
Who, then, is the real Hitchcock?
"There isn't a real me," he says. "I'm a series of facades. If you remove them all, you're back with the one you started with. Like shuffling a deck (but you can never see the end of it)."
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