The New York Times
August 18, 1996
A Wry Poet To The Devoted
by Anthony DeCurtis
Often when musicians are said to have cult followings, it simply means they don't sell many records. The British singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, however, is a cult artist in the truest sense. For nearly two decades his fans have displayed a loyalty rare in the fickle world of popular music.
In turn, he writes songs with immediately appealing melodies but with lyrics that read like letters from a faraway dreamscape -- exquisitely wrought bulletins from the farthest shores of his imagination. Entering the world of his music is like stepping into the looking glass. It's exciting, but a little frightening too. And it requires the sort of commitment that creates devotees rather than casual listeners.
It would be lovely to think that Mr. Hitchcock's new album, Moss Elixir (his first release since signing with Warner Brothers earlier this year), might significantly expand his audience. (His albums have tended to sell in the low six figures.) Even though the album ranks among the most satisfying work he has done, that prospect is far-fetched. The title itself reveals a couple of reasons why, betraying as it does Mr. Hitchcock's obsessions with surrealist punning and natural science. Not that the 44-year-old Mr. Hitchcock, who lives in London, has ever envisioned himself in the spotlight.
He seems almost to have been bred for his cult status. He and his two younger sisters -- reared, he says, in a "relatively wealthy" London environment by a father who wrote and painted, and a "pretty cosmic" mother -- "were brought up to be beautiful, precious creatures strolling around on the lawn."
Even when The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Syd Barrett (a founding member of Pink Floyd) led Mr. Hitchcock out of his hothouse background, inspiring him to form his first band, The Soft Boys, in the mid-'70s, he had modest expectations. "I didn't necessarily want to be the face of a generation or change the world," he says. "I was much too timid and inward-looking for that."
Lanky and shaggy, a look of perpetual puzzlement on his face, Mr. Hitchcock greets each moment of his life as if it were entirely new and entirely befuddling. His manner is that of an absent-minded professor, hipster genus. Offhand intimations of mortality litter Mr. Hitchcock's conversation, as well as his songwriting. And he has affected the music scene -- through his work with The Soft Boys and his former backing band, The Egyptians, as well as his solo albums. Peter Buck, R.E.M.'s guitarist, cites The Soft Boys -- whose albums rejected the Punk esthetic to move in a more eccentric direction -- as an influence on R.E.M.. Mr. Buck sees Mr. Hitchcock's songs as having a literary ancestry.
"It's like Edward Lear, the continuation of an English tradition," says Mr. Buck, who has frequently played guitar behind Mr. Hitchcock. "I also like it that one or two themes keep cropping up. Death is in there, fear of the body, sexual terror. It's as if sex -- like death and nature -- is just another part of this gaping maw of existence."
The director Jonathan Demme, a Hitchcock fan since the early-'80s, intends to make a film of a performance by Mr. Hitchcock. "There's a wonderful performance-art aspect to Robyn, with all the stories he tells between songs," Mr. Demme says. "It's like something between Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia and Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense."
The musical interplay Mr. Hitchcock sets in motion between his whimsical lyrics, chiming melodies derived from '60s Folk Rock, and a sense of dread inherited from Anglo-Celtic folklore persists on Moss Elixir. But this time, he has streamlined his sound, jettisoning his longstanding backup band, The Egyptians, while opting for the occasional violin, saxophone, and horn or rhythm section to support his own deft guitar playing and singing.
"The basic idea was to make something that only had what was necessary on it," he says. "I decided to go for the old-fashioned approach that Dylan used to have, where you build it all up around the voice and guitar."
That approach has brought with it a greater degree of accessibility. "Like a chandelier festooned with leeches" is still the sort of disturbing simile that springs naturally to Mr. Hitchcock's mind. But "The Speed of Things" is a powerfully compressed -- and moving -- meditation on the passing of time, while "This Is How It Feels" artlessly captures the accidental nature of love as "A sideways glance in a full-on world".
But it is seldom easy to pin down the meaning of Mr. Hitchcock's songs. Those meanings are as elusive as the beautiful birds, skittering insects, or slippery sea creatures that are among his most recurrent images. "I think very often my words get in the way," he admits. "Maybe it's because I'm not really using words to say anything. They're just the words that come to me when I have a certain feeling."
"If you'd just had an orgasm," he continues, "'There goes the fence' might come into your mind. You wouldn't necessarily know why. My words are just a reaction, rather than a way for me to hack my way through the jungle to tell the folks how I feel."
Mr. Hitchcock may be a cult figure, but he has something of a media assault underway. In addition to Moss Elixir, Warner Brothers will simultaneously release a vinyl-only companion piece for collectors. Titled Mossy Liquor (Outtakes And Prototypes), it consists of alternate versions of six of the songs on Moss Elixir, along with six additional tracks. In September, Hitchcock's former label, A&M, will release a compilation of his earlier work. And Rhino Records -- which has reissued the bulk of his extensive catalogue -- will release a compilation of its own next spring. In October, Mr. Hitchcock will begin his North American tour, and Mr. Demme will make his film that month as well for theatrical release next year.
So even if his audience is small by Pop music's inflated standard, Mr. Hitchcock takes the long view. "I think if you look back on it all in 50 or 100 years, my stuff will actually blend in very well with the late-20th century," he says. "It's pretty emotionally accurate about these times. Because I don't appear to be an overt commentator, I'm not seen that way. That means I'm not trendy. But it does give me longevity."
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