Chicago Sun-Times
November 11, 1999
Robyn Hitchcock At Metro
by Jim DeRogatis
"Breaking off, flaking off, crumbled and cracking/Time will destroy you like a Mexican god", Robyn Hitchcock sang in the opening moments of a long set before a packed house Wednesday night at Metro.
It was the sort of funny, Dadaist lyric that the English cult hero is famous for. But even at his funniest and most surreal, there is usually some nugget of sobering truth in a Hitchcock song.
The lead track on his most recent album Jewels for Sophia, "Mexican God" can be interpreted as the artist ruminating about his place in the world -- as a middle-aged man, as a singer-songwriter in an era that isn't particularly fond of them, and as an aging English cult hero famous for funny, Dadaist lyrics.
This reflective mood carried through the entire performance, which consisted of 22 songs spanning Hitchcock's long and varied career.
In itself, this wasn't a bad thing: any set that includes gems such as "Queen Elvis", "My Wife And My Dead Wife", "Sleeping With Your Devil Mask", and "I Often Dream Of Trains" is a treat for Hitchcock's fans. But we had reason to hope for more life and energy on this night.
For the first time since splitting with his longtime backing group The Egyptians, Hitchcock was playing with a real Rock band, albeit a timid one: Departure Lounge, the group fronted by his sometime sideman, Tim Keegan.
More significantly, Hitchcock was reuniting with Kimberley Rew, a chum from his earliest adventures in Cambridge, and the lead guitarist with his first, legendary band, The Soft Boys.
Rew hasn't been heard from since he scored a hit in the mid-'80s with "Walking on Sunshine" by his post-Soft Boys outfit Katrina And The Waves. But he showed that he's lost none of his boyish, mop-topped charm or his ability to craft buzzing, dissonant, yet wonderfully catchy guitar lines -- sounds that Hitchcock once likened to a can of bees.
With Rew passionately throwing himself into the solos on "The Cheese Alarm" and "Madonna of the Wasps", this fan wished for Hitchcock to respond with equal enthusiasm -- and for the band to ratchet things up even more, in the tradition of former Soft Boys and Egyptians Morris Windsor and Andy Metcalfe.
Unfortunately, it never happened. Hitchcock seemed plagued by a sore throat, and the band just wasn't up to the task. During their own opening set, Departure Lounge was monochromatic, mid-tempo and highly derivative of Nick Drake. With Hitchcock and Rew, they were simply negligible.
It's no exaggeration to say that Hitchcock ranks with Bob Dylan for the depth and accomplishment of his catalog and the ability to continually reinterpret it. Right now he is caught between his acoustic troubadour act (the acoustic guitar and Departure Lounge) and the desire to rock out again (hello, Kimberley Rew).
Hey, Robyn: turn it up! Some of us miss that can of bees.
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