1991
Robyn Hitchcock
Ultra Believable
by Brian O'Connor
Slowly, surely (and not altogether surprisingly), the Robyn Hitchcock we've come to know over the last decade is disappearing from sight. Over the course of 12 years -- five as leader of the psychedelic revivalist Soft Boys, the balance spent intermittently with The Egyptians and on solo projects -- Hitchcock has thoroughly mastered the melodic, wide-eyed Pop form and punctuated it with an inimitable lyric style that borders on the positively absured; psychobabble inspired by everyone's favorite chemically induced, lovable loon Syd Barrett. As a consequence, Hitchcock has secured a firm position on the outer fringe of widespread acceptance; an English Pop oddity just too weird to be allowed into the mainstream. But Perspex Island, Hitchocck And The Egyptians' latest A&M release, sheds the verbal eccentricities and willingly concedes to the market forces that have shut him out for so long. It's hardly a shock, really -- ask the sober Paul Westerberg or the recovering aphasiac Michael Stipe about annoyingly anti-commercial conduct. Call it maturity, or capitulation to the notion that you can't be too weird too long in this business if you want to stick around, but Hitchcock's finally acknowledged his humanity. In effect, Perspex Island achieves distinction not for what it is, but what it isn't. For Hitchcock, that's perfectly fine.
"I think I got trapped in my own foliage," admits a brutally honest Hitchcock of his bizarre lyrical tendencies ("The Man With The Lightbulb Head", "Balloon Man"?). "I think the vegetation was crawling around my legs. I was becoming an old statue in an overgrown garden -- eventually if you don't see the sun, you fade away. In the past a lot of my songs existed for their own sake. I'm not going to un-write my old songs, but I find some of them infuriatingly unfinished -- like I've had a few good lines but haven't bothered to get some other ones. On this album my concerns were different. I'm not on the quest for the exotic. I just wanted to be straight about things. I wanted to know how I really felt about things. I've deliberately made things as precise as possible and I've tried to erase lines I thought might be embarrassing later -- often I write something that I think is a good idea, only to listen to it a year later and wish I'd never done it. So this time I revised the lyrics a bit harder. The ideas were more concise, simpler. I'm glad. I hoped they would be and they are. It's like wishing for a bicycle for Christmas and getting one -- rather than, say, a steamshovel."
So concise are the ideas, in fact, that Hitchcock's no longer being promoted as an Alternative artist (although, ironically, "So You Think You're In Love", the single, has topped the college radio charts for a solid month). Still, despite the new approach, Hitchcock will always be judged in the shadow of Barrett. "You can't wear a suit unless it fits you," says Hitchcock of the comparisons to the cult figure. "So if I didn't have those inclinations to begin with I don't think I would have been able to adopt that Barrett persona. I didn't sit around and say, "Man, I'm gonna totally ape this guy," but I thought he was totally brilliant -- and I'm surprised he's not revered, that there aren't more people heavily influenced by him. But then again, I was always surprised that guys like Captain Beefheart weren't as big as Led Zeppelin. I think Syd Barrett and I were quite similar in some ways, with perhaps similar English, middle-class problems. Only I didn't become a star when I was 21 and I didn't take enormous quantities of acid. I didn't have that crucial destabilizing at that point. Seeing what happened to him made me a lot more cautious about things. I didn't get involved with LSD, and I never pursued stardom. I've always been more interested in keeping out of the way and doing what I wanted."
"But I got pretty fed up with being thought of as the high priest of the Syd Barrett cult," Hitchcock continues. "I guess that was because we were doing his songs at a time when nobody else was doing them. After it got to be too much, I had to stop doing his songs. That's how fed up I was -- probably because I realized they were accurate. It doesn't bother me so much now because I think I've outlasted my influences. But I'm sure every so often you'll find traces of his stuff in my work. He's like my Chuck Berry. There would have been no Robyn Hitchcock if it weren't for Syd Barrett."
If anything, Perspex Island is at once Hitchcock's loss of identity and declaration of independence: a departure from trip, carnivalesque wordplay and a confrontation with real emotions. At the same point in time the Hitchcock with whom we've become acquainted disappears, the real one emerges.
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