Robyn Hitchcock, Post-Egyptians, Comes Of Age




The Hartford Courant


April 5, 1995

Robyn Hitchcock, Post-Egyptians, Comes Of Age

by Roger Catlin



When delving into Robyn Hitchcock's massive output from the 1980s -- just reissued on nine discs -- even the singer suggests, "It's best taken in small doses."

Everything from 1981's Black Snake Diamond Role to Eye in 1990 has been released in the past two months on Rhino Records. The series' latest offering is You & Oblivion, a disc of 21 songs from that period that were never released.

"Bear in mind, I haven't listened to it at all," Hitchcock said over the phone the other day from Philadelphia -- on a tour that brings him to Toad's Place in New Haven tonight. "I couldn't even get through You & Oblivion. There's just so much of it."

The comprehensive reissue program (which ignores Hitchcock's commercial work on A&M Records from 1986 to '89, including Globe of Frogs, Queen Elvis, and Perspex Island) follows a similarly rigorous reissue campaign of his late-'70s and early-'80s work with The Soft Boys, which Rykodisc released in 1992.

Not all the work is particularly worthy, the artist says. "Some of them sound a bit childish," Hitchcock says. "The trouble is, if you don't re-release them, people complain. We withheld some of the low-grade Soft Boys stuff when we reissued the Soft Boys on CD, and people came up and complained and said, 'Why don't you put it out?' They've got it already on vinyl. I don't know why they bother.

"So we put out everything and more from my catalog."

Hitchcock's current tour has nothing to do with promoting the solo reissues, he says. "It just coincides with the reissue program," he says.

More to the point is his modest new output -- a 7-inch single on the small label K Records, out of Olympia, Washington.

"I wanted to put something out quite fast and on vinyl," he says of the single, which can be hard to find. "Because vinyl over here is getting a bit like steam engines in Britain: they were abolished, but now they're back in a small but vigorous way."

A full album is due out early next year -- with luck, on a larger label.

Oddly, Hitchcock's renewed activity comes at a time when the kind of music he has been known for -- twisted tales with flecks of Psychedelia -- is now doing well as "Alternative" music.

But he is still odd man out.

"That whole thing when Nirvana and everything broke...a new generation was born, and the whole thing was hijacked by big amplifiers," says Hitchcock, formerly of The Egyptians. "My reaction was to strip the band down and get quieter. Now I'm totally alone.

"I'm probably a lapsed Alternative artist," he laments. "I think my stuff is as irrelevant now as it was 10 years ago."

Of the newly released material from 1981-87 on You & Oblivion, Hitchcock says, "They were literally lost. I didn't realize I had them. A lot of them were done at a friend's house on eight-track. But we hadn't kept cassettes of all of them, and my cassette of one of them broke. And another one I'd lost (or something). So there were quite a few songs I'd just forgotten about completely."

Back then, the dazzlingly prolific Hitchcock would produce about 40 songs for a 12-song album. But, he adds, "If a song is more than a couple of years old and it hasn't been recorded, I tend to abandon it."

Not that they're all secondary. "So there's quite a few songs I might have meant to record with The Egyptians (or put on one of my solo records) and never did," he says. "They're fine. But they're past their 'sell-by' date."

It's strange to hear things he had written but completely forgot about, Hitchcock says.

"I hear something I might have done 14 years ago, and think how many skin cells I've shed since then," he says, lapsing into the surreal side that has served him so well. "And how much food and drink have passed through me. How much I've digested, metabolized. Supposedly, we replace our cells every seven years. I've replaced myself twice since I played those licks and sang those notes!"

It gets stranger:

"On one song, I was actually harmonizing with myself from 10 years ago, which was odd. I don't know if it showed, but there's a couple of songs where I drop in, suddenly, and I'm 10 years older."

Hitchcock's current tour is his first since he played with The Egyptians, when "the whole thing was coming to an end," Hitchcock recalls. "I felt very menopausal and autumnal. I felt like it was all over, really."

And it was, in many ways. "The Egyptians burned out, [the record contract with] A&M burned out, and I burned out to quite a large extent. So I've been recharging for the past couple of years."

In fact, he didn't write songs for the full year he subsequently spent in Washington living with a girlfriend, although "I'd done a lot of painting in D.C.."

"I think I was getting worried," he says. "I mean, you're only as good as your last song, no matter how prolific you are. I got back to Britain and started writing again.

"Now, I'm ready to go wherever it is I'm going," he says.

And where is he going?

"I'm going out of my cocoon a bit," he says. "I think I'm just coming out as Robyn Hitchcock, rather than Robyn Hitchcock in The Egyptians; or Robyn Hitchcock, the quirky British songwriter compared to John Lennon and Syd Barrett.

"I think what we have now, at 42, is me -- as much as I'm ever going to be me," he says. "I think my songs are strong enough to carry themselves without a band."

Although he does have violinist Deni Bonet accompany his electric guitar. "As I get older, I feel like I need less disguise. Less protection, if you like," Hitchcock says. "Whatever my career is now, it's my own."



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