Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
November 5, 1999
Robyn Hitchcock Tries To Hold His Ground As '90s Pop Is Smashed To Pieces
Robyn Hitchcock, A Singer-Songwriter Who Wields His Imagery Like A Rock 'n' Roll Dali, Has No Surrealistic Way Out Of The Question Posed To Him: He's Playing In Pittsburgh The Same Night As His Greatest Musical Inspiration, Bob Dylan; Who Should People Go See?
by Scott Mervis
"Oh, no," he says dejectedly. "Really?"
With that news, he recalls an incident earlier this year when he and Dylan were both touring in Spain (speaking of Dali), and he had a couple gigs canceled because the promoter didn't want to book another singer-songwriter within a hundred miles. Nor does Hitchcock want to be within a hundred miles of Dylan.
"I think Dylan's show is better," Hitchcock says, finally addressing the question.
"But," he adds, "I did see him in England a few years ago, and I think it was one of the worst gigs I've ever seen. I was horrified at the way he was just honking and bleating his way through his old songs. He's lost interest in those songs, but he obviously does them because he thinks the audience wants to hear them. It's so authentic when he sings his new songs in that, sort of, growling voice. There's nothing to touch it. You put on any other album after that -- including me -- and it just doesn't ring quite as true. But I hate to hear him do those old songs. I can say that I play my old songs with a lot more respect."
Hitchcock will readily profess to putting on a quality performance of a well-made set of songs. He'll stop short, though, at making any claims of being an artist that is relevant to the '90s.
He started his career more than two decades ago with The Soft Boys, but it was in the mid-'80s that Hitchcock, with his jangly guitar sound, terse melodies, and warped sense of irony became a staple of college radio right along with R.E.M. and Billy Bragg. For a while, he even captured the interest of MTV with one of his more novelty hits, "Balloon Man". But in the end he's been too quirky for most tastes.
His latest effort, Jewels For Sophia, is another collection of offbeat and irresistibly catchy songs probing dreamlike territory that other songwriters don't usually enter. Take "The Cheese Alarm", a song that seems to be all nonsense, but is slyly using fancy cheeses as a symbol of social injustices. Recording in Seattle with members of the Young Fresh Fellows and R.E.M.'s Peter Buck inspired the exuberant and hilarious rocker "Viva Sea-Tac", celebrating the town for having "the best computers and coffee and smack".
Though he's taken slightly different approaches to recording -- sometimes more acoustic, sometimes more complicated, sometimes working in a storefront (as he did for the Jonathan Demme live film Storefront Hitchcock) -- Hitchcock has never tried, even as much as, say, R.E.M., to adapt his style to what is happening in the Pop market.
"I'm almost extinct," he says. "I've always sort of done what I've done and it goes in and out of fashion. To me, this is another year from the 1960s -- nineteen-sixty-thirty-nine, or whatever it is. I never turned that corner into the '70s, at heart, and all the developments that have happened since then -- Punk and Funk and Junk and Reggae and Hardcore and Softcore and Thrashcore and Jungle and Garage and Speed Metal. My stuff...just call it 'Roots' now. It's Folk 'n' Roll, whatever."
With Hip-Hop, Metal and these various "cores" ruling the day, Hitchcock doesn't listen to as much music as he once did -- and isn't as likely to be pioneering any new hyphenated genres. What he looks for in music, above all else, is a feeling of personality.
"So much stuff seems to be either bland or almost psychotically violent," he says. "There's no feeling that there's actually a character in there.
"One of the things that's happened in the '90s is (because we've raced through the previous four decades of youth culture), everything's been digested without being digested properly," he says. "So it's all being brought back and, kind of, smashed with a hammer, and then fed back to us in sound bites and samples -- both sound and visual. So kids will have the TV on and they'll channel surf. And while they're channel-surfing they're watching shows that look like they're channel-surfing. So there will be a little clip of Laurel and Hardy, a bit of William Shatner, and a little piece of the Beatles and then there will be MC Hammer from MTV, and then there will be a commercial. That's just on one station. And they're listening to music that's filled with soundbites and samples -- all held together with some kind of repetitive groove (otherwise they'd go completely insane). The groove keeps you going, and on the groove is borne the wreckage -- the flop sound of the last four decades of youth culture -- all spiraling around before their eyes before it goes down the toilet forever.
"I see it," he adds flatly. "It doesn't move me."
Making the life of a singer-songwriter who limits his gimmickry to the lyrics even more complicated is that he's competing for Rock fans right along with everyone from Bob Dylan to Limp Bizkit.
"I don't know what to seek out in music. The old stuff seems like it hasn't gone away, and the new stuff keeps pouring in. The cake hasn't gotten any bigger, but there's more and more people wanting a slice. The Rolling Stones still want their 12 percent of the world market or something. And there's me, Richard Thompson, and Bob Dylan all targeting Pittsburgh [this weekend], hoping to come away with enough money to keep us in the styles with which we're accustomed. So, this is a roundabout way of saying that I don't listen to much music today. I don't think my music is relevant to what's happening today -- but I still think it's good. Whether my approach comes into fashion -- or whether it becomes totally extinct -- the least I can do is keep it going as long as it can. Like one of the last stores to close. 'Oh, that guy Hitchcock's still open. He's not a Wal-Mart.'"
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