Tape Op
May/June, 2000
Robyn Hitchcock
by Larry Crane
Robyn Hitchcock has long been one of my favorite artists. Whether it's the spastic Psychedelia of his former group The Soft Boys or one of his many solo records, there's always great songs with catchy melodies and Dadaesque lyrics. When an opportunity to interview Robyn came up, I decided I'd ask him about using lots of different studios, sessions, and musicians on his new CD, Jewels For Sophia, and get some facts about the recording of some of my favorite albums of his -- especially I Often Dream Of Trains and The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight. He was a charming itnerview, and the show he played -- with Tim Keegan's band and ex-Soft Boy/Katrina And The Waves guitarist Kimberley Rew -- was quite fun. Thanks to Lindsey Thrasher for accompanying me to the show!
I wanted to start by asking you about the new record. It was recorded in different places.
Three songs were done in Seattle, two were done in London [at Milo Studios], and the rest were done in Los Angeles.
I noticed in Moss Elixir too, that you also had a, kind of, pattern of going different places to record.
I've always liked moving from one place to another. It has nothing to do with the technical quality of the studio -- it's simply a psychological thing. I think if you get locked into doing a record for three months, you completely lose perspective of what you're doing. You drag your friends in and they say, "That's very nice, do you want to go out and have a pizza?" Or you take the tapes back home and you listen to them while you're blind drunk, and think it's great. You're too close to the project. For the last two A&M albums, there wasn't enough time between starting the thing and the final mixes to assess them. At the time, I thought they were great. But that's just because I became a part of the collective hypnosis of making a record. Prior to that (except for an album I did called Groovy Decay, which was similarly done in one, sort of, spate (and I also thought was disastrous)), I've always done things in bits and pieces -- right from The Soft Boys on up to Queen Elvis. We tended to only work in one studio in one town. We had certain haunts. But it was all in little bits; so you can listen to what you're doing, take it away, and live with it for a couple of months; and then go in and overdub and mix it. You really appreciate it.
Make sure it's the right basic take of the song.
Yeah. It's also like having hundreds of children: you can't focus when you have twelve songs running around your heels. You're just trying to get them in order. If you've got just three songs, you can cherish them more. It's just more exciting -- I appreciate the recording process so much more if it's broken up like that. With the most recent records, I know people in studios all over the place. I can't afford to fly the Young Fresh Fellow over to London, but I can afford to fly over and record with the Young Fresh Fellow, or go record with Grant-Lee [Phillips] and Jon Brion in L.A. for a week. It's just fun to have different people. I wouldn't have wanted to make this record with any one set of people. The whole thing, especially at this stage, should just be fun to make. I'm not looking for any other element -- if there's fun on tape, then it should come thorugh to the ears. I think this record is one of my enjoyable, confident records. It's not as somber. It may be the songs, but it's also just the fun of it.
I was surprised to hear a song like "Viva Sea-Tac". It feels like an exuberant, off-the-cuff Rock song. It's something that you can obviously do, but it doesn't always come out on your records.
I actually wrote that song in London, but it was obviously a good candidate for recording with them [Young Fresh Fellows] in Seattle [at Hanszek Studios].
I wanted to throw a few different names at you -- from different people you've worked with in the past. One of the most obvious would be Pat Collier.
Pat Collier sidled up to me in 1977 after a gig somewhere. I remember he came up to me in a club and said, "I saw your set, and I kind of like it." I thought, "This guy's very suspicious." It turns out that his father was a policeman. About two years later, we started working in his studio -- it was very cheap. He also understood how to make really great 4-track recordings by bouncing things down. He was a real student of the '60s. He wasn't part of this Steve Lillywhite 24-track thing. We were just scuttling away in this dank, sort of, archway beneath the railway line at Waterloo. There's this special kind of fungus that grows there, and if you take your guitar away...you can take it 6,000 miles away, unpack your guitar, and fungus comes wafting past your nostrils.
Was that Alaska?
Yeah. He then sold Alaska to someone else. I still occasionally rehearse there, but... I had a guitar there, which had been there for a year, and it stunk so bad I left it somewhere. I actually gave it to Pat to keep at his house until the fumes went. He had a big phase in the late-'80s...he got quite trendy...doing people like The Darling Buds. I don't know what he's doing now, but he was always a really reliable guy to work with.
I put on [The Soft Boys'] Underwater Moonlight, and I was thinking of which songs were done on 4-track and 8-track. The fact is that you can't really tell, and some of the 4-track stuff sounds better than the 16-track. I think Pat did an amazing job, and I was curious about how you guys went about doing those kinds of sessions. What would you track first?
I think the bass and...well, the guitars wind up being in stereo, and then the bass and drums... He probably just recorded the whole thing in stereo, and then...it's a good question. I know that by the end of it there was very little flexibility. The more important thing was that he did get a terrific guitar sound.
It was an example to me -- when I first started recording -- that you don't need 24 tracks to do really good recordings. You just need some ears.
That's good to know that it seems that way. I think at the time people were just getting out of Punk, and they were starting to get high-tech again. People wanted expensive drum sounds, and all that. We couldn't afford it (and frankly, I didn't care anyway). I was more interested in the song than the sound -- which I know is a failing in making Pop music, but something about sound has always eluded me. Maybe I think it sounds okay, and I imagine the rest, and really I should put something else on that I'm imagining is there and it's not.
What do you find the difference is between working in a session producing yourself, or having an outside producer like John Leckie?
It depends on who they are. I'm very much at the mercy of other people's ideas. I don't go around telling everybody what to do. I, sort of, take the consensus of whoever is in the room. If there's nobody else, I have to make those decisions myself -- and sometimes it's very important to do that. On the whole, I can work with whoever is there, and get a good result. There are times when I feel like I've been steered by other people, and maybe I'm not happy with the result in the end. At the time, it seems like a good idea. It's not like anyone has ever highjacked me, and put a gun to my head. It's always been the kind of thing I've wanted. But maybe the approach is the consensus between the other musicians and the producer, and it gets swayed. It always winds up being by committee, and I like to -- every so often -- pull away from everyone else, and call all the shots myself. I think it's just partly my nature: I'll leave decision-making to other people, and that's a flaw. You've got to be able to make snap decisions, or the whole team will be machine-gunned.
Do you feel like there's people you've worked with who have made decisions that you have been very pleased with?
I enjoyed working with Jon Brion a lot, because we're both quite impatient. He throws an idea at the take, and if it doesn't stick , he lets it fall off. He doesn't sit there with an agenda: "Now, let me try my idea. This is really...what I want to do." Sometimes you talk to people, and you know they're not listening (because they've made up their mind that they're going to do it a certain way). They smoke pot, or something, and they don't listen to anybody anyway. I would say that I really don't like having drugs or alcohol around in a studio. I think that's one of the counterproductive things, especially if you're living with the music. I used to drink at recording sessions...the vocals on the first few Soft Boys sessions, I was drunk for all of those. I just thought that's what you do: you go to the pub, and then carry on. My heart sinks if I walk in and there's a bag of weed on the desk for the engineer. Some people can all get stoned and do lovely ambient...I guess my stuff isn't softer music. It's not drug music.
Not for the creating part of it, maybe. [laughter]
No, maybe not for the listening, either. I'm not an ambient person in that respect. I'm more concerned that the perfrormance is lodged well between your ears. The purpose, in a way, is to make people feel less lonely, not to give them a soundtrack. You've got to listen to what I do, or it'll annoy you. Like a baby crying in the background. I don't make good-time music, where you put it on and say, "Yeah, that's nice. Let's get some freinds, and have a couple of beers." The idea of being partied over is sort of insulting to me. People often put on their favorite records for the background, and I don't like doint it with mine.
One of the records that came up quite a bit with other engineers was I Often Dream Of Trains. It's not a party record by any means, but everyone voices it as being a real favorite of theirs. That record has some very heavy mood to it. Even the songs that are lighter -- like "Sometimes I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl" -- it still has that somber, late-night feel. When you were creating that record, was it anything like that?
No. I wanted to make a record that cost less than a thousand pounds, and I wanted to do it within four days. I recruited Pat [Collier], because I hadn't worked with him in three years, and I had a rahter...the Groovy Decay sessions had been really difficult, because they were done late at night, by committee, and often not in a very sober state -- but not in a happy state, either. It was a party atmosphere. It wasn't a healthy atmosphere (and I don't blame Steve [Hillage, the producer], but it was just a combination of people). I wanted to make I Often Dream Of Trains really simple -- get away from anyone who had been influencing me. I trusted Pat wouldn't try to peddle anything: "You could be great if you did this!" I wanted to make something very un-state-of-the-art -- not whatever was going on (like The Thompson Twins, Frankie Goes To Hollywood). I was listening to it (I don't listen to the radio now, but back then I still did). I knew what was happening, but I wanted to stay completely away from it. I think that's the secret of its success: there wasn't any attempt to please anybody but myself. Songwriting...you know, James Taylor, Lou Reed, Gene Clark, Leonard Cohen -- it's all dark stuff. In a way, I'm not sure that I want to produce that kind of thing anymore. I think (being some reasonably successful white middle-class person), "What the fuck have I got to complain about?" [Laughter] I can find things, but I'm trying to get out of adolescent self-pity. When I made Trains, I was 31 -- and I was still very adolescent. It's my ultimate teenage record, which is probably why people like it.
It's easy to connect to.
Yeah. It was this feeling isolated: earth, humanity, and then there's me.
How were the sessions?
They were great. They were sober, daylight sessions with Pat Collier.
You demo-ed those songs too.
I did some on 3-track in a barn, and some on a 4-track in my house. My only technical information I can give you: The Fostex X15. I bouth it for 300 quid, and it was a revelation. It was very simple to operate, and that was as technical as I've ever gotten. I had a microphone, and I borrowed a friend's spring reverb. I just sat there writing, making up songs with the headphones on, singing through the reverb. By then, Pat Collier had gone 24-track. Alaska would still do it cheap, and 24-tracks were dirt cheap. I Often Dream Of Trains had much more technology than Underwater Moonlight [by The Soft Boys] did. Again, I think it was the simplicity of it that worked.
I wanted to ask you about the Dub Narcotic sessions that you did...the single with Calvin [Johnson].
How is he?
He's doing good. He's got a new space, and he bought a 16-track 2". But compared to a lot of your recording exploits in the same time frame, that sounded like a pretty different trip: going to Calvin's basement.
It was lovely. We started upstairs, and then they wanted to make supper, so we moved down into the basement. I think he had an 8-track. As we mixed the tracks, we went out ot the car, and listened to them on cassette to see if they were all right. It was only a day, but by the end of it, we had been very close to the songs because it was impossible for us to lose focus. I really enjoyed it, because it was quick. There was none of this, "Well, I think we might need to send out for a few XK16s," or something like that. Or, "Another pair of JBLs to check it." I suppose I'm impatient. I just don't want to be held up by machinery. I really enjoyed those sessions with Calvin Johnson, and I'm so glad it came out on 7".
And on the album.
Yeah. I should have left that off. I should've put "Trilobite" on that album. I should have left the Dub Narcotic thing as an intact unit. I was a little swayed by an A&R person to put that on. I knew it was a mistake.
Another one of my favorite recordings was The Kershaw Sessions CD, which is kind of knocked out too....
That's it, you see? That's great. The Egyptians were always much better live, I think. There was a tension there, and there was an intensity. We played very well off each other without needing to overdub. In The Kershaw Sessions there was no time to overdub. Whereas, I think the studio efforts were all attempts to recapture ideas that had been worked out before. I never felt the studio records were more than blueprints. I thought the live three-piece was excellent. I agree: I thought The Kershaw Sessions was definitely the best. Some of it was actually done in Andy Kershaw's kitchen. Our soundman had an 8-track mixer, and it just went straight to it. Andy Kershaw was having a party in the next room, and we just did it.
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