Chicago Tribune
November 1, 1996
Hitchcock, Bragg Tread Own Roads
by Greg Kot
Billy Bragg and Robyn Hitchcock know how to sell a song with a laugh. All the better to deliver highly personal music that would sound ridiculous coming from less-charming performers.
The two have long plied their singular paths on the outskirts of the British Pop scene, and the tour that brought them to the Vic on Wednesday suggested a tenuous affinity between these two mavericks. But the singer-songwriters inexplicably never collaborated, and the two hour-plus performances served only to accentuate their differences.
With his closely cropped hair and regular-lad Cockney accent, Bragg comes across as the Brit next door. Rudely strumming his electric guitar, Bragg still vaguely resembles the upstart who once thought of himself as a one-man Clash. If his newer songs sound a bit softer and fuzzier around the edges -- particularly the poignant farewell to possibility that is "The Space Race Is Over" -- he still can be a bit of a scold, his more strident political songs the equivalent of a rigid finger jabbing an unyielding sternum.
Of course, Bragg's every pronouncement was loudly cheered, and the concert at times took on the overtones of a Socialist solidarity rally. When he roared through "There is Power In A Union", his introductory remarks and vein-popping delivery were so passionate even a skeptic might have been tempted to storm the barricades behind this guitar-wielding believer. Although Bragg's between-songs proselytizing occasionally overstayed its welcome, his workingman's anthems suggested Woody Guthrie whoopin', hollerin', and organizin' in a vineyard of dispossessed laborers.
If Bragg is solidly grounded in an us-and-them worldview, Hitchcock is a good deal more ambiguous and fascinating performer. He was accompanied sporadically by Deni Bonet, whose violin skipped from dreamy strum to deep bass quake to waltz-time rhapsody to a snaking Eastern rhythm all within the few minutes it took to perform the lush "Beautiful Queen".
Hitchcock's highly underrated guitar playing, on both acoustic and electric, and subtly sophisticated vocal attack, which ranged from Grim Reaper rumble to falsetto flutter, kept the tunes moving briskly. In ranging back to his 1977 Soft Boys nightmare "The Face Of Death" through newer material such as the deceptively chirpy "DeChirico Street", Hitchcock submerged himself into a surreal world where images of death, decay, and the devil shadow his flirtations with contentment.
Like Bragg, the singer sheathes his music in humor. But there is no escaping the disquiet that ripples beneath the surface of Hitchcock's oddly poignant melodies and inescapably catchy Pop choruses. "Where do you go when you die?" Hitchcock wonders. In contrast to the sureness offered in Bragg's music, Hitchcock wrestles with the unanswerable.
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