The Hollywood Reporter
April 29, 1993
Robyn Hitchcock
The Palace Tuesday, April 27
by Darryl Morden
Robyn Hitchcock is an eclectic pleasure, alternating between sweetly quaint musings and surreal fable-like stories. His songs can be Beatlesque cuddly -- but watch out for those lyric cactus needles inside.
Backed by the two-man Egyptians -- drummer-percussionist Morris Windsor and
acoustic bass guitarist-keyboard player Andy Metcalfe -- Hitchcock stood between them -- playing acoustic and electric guitars -- drawing mostly from his last couple of A&M releases: Perspex Island and the new Respect.
With sunken, probing eyes; high cheekbones; and graying dark hair, Hitchcoock is a musical Dr. Who: a tune-lord taking the audience through the realm of the everyday with wonder, then whisking them off to imagined places. He really should do a children's book (for grownups, too, of course).
Catchy with quirks, songs ranged from the cascading and buoyant "Oceanside" to "The Wreck Of The Arthur Lee" (where love is a vessel of belief) to the ultimately odd and probably kinky "Wafflehead" (rapped-spoken in a voice that was a cross between Tom Waits and Darth Vader).
Introductions took off on amusing tangents -- and particularly funny was an exchange between Hitchcock and Metcalfe over the evolutionary links of dinosaurs, birds, and man before launching into "The Yip Song", a galloping ditty about life and death and the operating room.
The small-but-devoted audience -- filling perhaps half the club -- brought Hitchcock back for a couple of encores (which included a solo run before his mates joined him again for a wacky but word-perfect a cappella "Kung Fu
Fighting").
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