The Washington Post
May 20, 1993
Hitchcock's Homey Cooking
by Mark Jenkins
"We're just folksingers," Robyn Hitchcock told the Gaston Hall audience. And he and The Egyptians did emphasize the informal, mostly acoustic format of their latest album, Respect, at their always-engaging and sometimes inspiring Monday concert. That didn't stop the trio, however, from offering a near-metal version of "When I Was Dead" or a Funk arrangement of "Only the Stones Remain", a song from their Soft Boys days, amid the numbers arranged for acoustic guitar, intricate three-part harmonies, and such household percussion instruments as a cheese grater.
Indeed, aside from playing nearly all of their latest album, Hitchcock and company did little predictable Rock-band stuff. The singer-songwriter followed a campy "Wafflehead" with a soaring "The Wreck Of The Arthur Lee", encored with a recipe for Moussaka (featuring textured vegetable protein), and turned his customary eccentric raps into oddball dialogues with bassist-keyboardist Andy Metcalfe, who griped that, "What we need is a cheese-grater radio-headset thing like Madonna has." In this context, the band's ultimate song, an a capella version of "Kung Fu Fighting", seemed about right.
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