Amuznet
July, 2000
Robyn Hitchcock
Rock's Oddball Iron Man
by Alex Green
With a sage-like wisdom, a dazzling sense of humor, and a quick and clever tongue, Robyn Hitchcock is hard to match. With a career that has spanned twenty-five years, yielding over twenty albums, tours that have found him playing with the likes of R.E.M. and Billy Bragg, and a Jonathan Demme-directed feature film, Storefront Hitchcock, Robyn Hitchcock has proven himself to be Rock's oddball iron man. Able to muse about beautiful girls, the shapes of the things emerging from the dirt in his back garden, and where we go when it looks like it's over, all in the span of a three minute and thirty-four second Pop song, Hitchcock is quite possibly the greatest living songwriter. On his new album Jewels For Sophia, Hitchcock continues his lyrical obsessions, traversing a familiar world of insects, sad royalty, and women who might-but-probably-won't. Like its name suggests, Jewels For Sophia is loaded with women; from the enigmatic "Elizabeth Jade" to the Audrey Hepburn-like subject of "Antwoman", to "Dark Princess" -- whose main character is an elusive princess who hides in the shadows -- the album is a collage of women who slip through our lustful hands. Combining the wit of Oscar Wilde, the impending doom of Woody Allen, and the Pop sensibility of The Beatles, Hitchcock knows how to make even the morbid, sad, and peculiar deeply appealing. On his new disc, Hitchcock offers a discursive setlist: There's an Ogden Nash-inspired tune ("The Cheese Alarm"), a broken-hearted ode to Seattle that wonders aloud what happens to a city when it loses its best son ("Viva Sea-Tac"), and the simplest of love songs ("I Feel Beautiful", that finds its narrator confessing he feels
beautiful simply because the object of his affection loves him right back). From his home in West London in early May, Hitchcock discussed the themes of
his new disc, and our ongoing mission in the ephemeral world.
It's great to be a Hitchcock fan because there's such a wealth of material. Can you be stopped?
There's always been quite a lot -- it just gets released in uneven bursts. I was actually working on this album while the Storefront project was going on. Some of these songs were recorded two years ago, but it all got delayed waiting for Storefront to come out.
There are women all over this new album. From Sophia, to Elizabeth, to Sally. Does a beautiful girl still inspire a great Pop song?
Well, that was one of the things that Pop songs were going to be about...always were about when the whole thing was very simple. Some of my stuff has always been that way. But more people usually pick up on the fact that I don't usually write about beautiful girls. They claim that I write about beautiful insects, or beautiful trams, or beautiful planes, or beautiful spheres, or whatever. I generally try to write about beauty in some form. Certainly as I've gotten older, I've found it harder to dwell on horror, I suppose.
But if it's an insect, or a plane, or a tram, isn't the sentiment fairly similar?
Well it's a positive sentiment, yeah. It's turning your faith towards the light, in that respect. It's a sentiment you can warm yourself on. But I wouldn't say that all these things are interchangeable. I suppose there's probably more songs on the new record about women, or inspired by different women. It seems to be headed that way. But songs have always been that in a way -- for centuries. You know: love poems, that kind of thing.
I could certainly see the lyrical "Elizabeth Jade" somewhere in the Norton Anthology in between Browning and Byron.
Well, thank you.
What about all these female figures running around Jewels For Sophia? Is it hard to distinguish them from each other.
They're all very distinct people. I can definitely tell them all apart.
Every album you've done has some very distinct characters. Do you find yourself to be really close to your subjects?
I think in the end the characters are always an excuse for a song. Some of the characters exist in the outside world, and some of them are my own creations -- my own hybrids, if you like. But in the end the songs all need to be written, and I think they just find people to be written about. I'm a great believer in thinking that the feeling is there, and therefore you just find something to hang the feeling on. Maybe you want to feel depressed by something, so you find some cause to be depressed. Or you want to be uplifted -- in terms of a mood, in terms of writing -- and you find an excuse to be up or down. And then that gives your song some identity. It's like you need to have a name. When a child is born and you don't have a name within about a week, you're in trouble. Songs need titles first or nothing happens.
Is it easier to amplify the outside world, or mythologize the internal world?
That's a very good question. I think in the end the two become interchangeable. I think you ingest the outside world, then probably mythologize it, make it your own, and send it back out again. It's rather like, matter cannot be created or destroyed -- that's what we're told by science. All of the atoms and molecules simply get re-jigged around, and come back in different forms. So what is a piece of toast today actually was Napoleon two centuries ago. And most of Julius Caesar is a fire hydrant. Maybe it's the dominatrix in the artist that insists that it can dominate the outside world by re-creating it in a, sort of, miniature version which it then feeds back. Maybe it's the ego just trying to say to life, "Listen: I can do what you do."
So then, do we spend our lives being fooled by matter?
I don't think we get completely fooled by matter. It's a nice thought. Maybe we're fooled by how we perceive matter. I don't think matter cares what we think either way. I don't think it's out there to hoodwink us.
That's tricky stuff.
Yeah, but the alternative is anti-matter, which has to be kept away from matter. I don't think there's any way we can conceive of it, but we can't really do much else. I've often wondered if it was possible to think a certain thought and it would kill you. A thought that kills, and all you have to do is think it and it will wipe you off the map. All they need for the ultimate weapon is to just make people have this thought and it will just kill them, it will release some kind of poison into the system. So maybe, conversely, there's a thought that's salvation, a thought that would enlighten you -- if you like -- and free you from the cycle of mortality and birth.
That kind of puts a spin on the notion of quiet time....
Yeah, but I don't know what quiet time does.
How do you handle recurring images in your writing?
If you find that you've compared someone to an ant for the fifth time, maybe it's time to find a different metaphor. You have to let the brain come up with its own stuff, and then you're entitled to censor or control it. You can present it any way you want. It depends how much you think your power of association is true, honest, and the most valleyed function of your creative mind. Boy, that sounds dry, doesn't it?
No, not at all.
In other words, if you think that what you come up with first is the real thing, then you should never censor what you do. You should just say it. Not when you talk to people in real life, but as a writer. But if you find that you keep coming up with the same images over and over, then you might need to broaden it. Maybe you need to get an encyclopedia and look at some old engravings of steam engines, or the cellular division of the frog, or nineteenth century weaving apparatus; and you'll find some other stuff.
But if you've written ten songs about one person, should you stop when you think you feel you're going to hit eleven?
I think if you're really going to write ten songs about a person, then writing an eleventh wouldn't be that much harder because they've obviously bitten you pretty hard, and the teeth marks are still in you in some way -- and you can write any number of songs. Although a song may be mostly inspired by a particular person, there's usually something else in there (which is why I feel that the song wants to happen anyway, and it just finds that person to hang -- or wrap -- itself around). The song becomes a cloak around a particular person, and then that particular person disappears and you're left with the outline. And that's the song.
I love the song "I Feel Beautiful" because the message is so simple and pure. The narrator describes love as being the thing that makes him feel handsome and imbued with a, kind of, sudden beauty. It's a very romantic notion.
I think I have always been romantic underneath it all. But romantic always seemed unrealistic, so my tolerance for reality was very low and I probably couldn't celebrate or mourn what was going on in the real outside world. So I would be writing songs to people who had either never existed, or were long gone. I'm always trying to make this stuff more emotional. The most important thing about music is the overwhelming emotional effect it has on people. That's why I went to music.
So when time destroys us, does it also destroy itself?
I think you've got to assume that linear time will stop, and once you are outside of life you might even be back where you were before you were born. You have pure soul -- which is independence of matter. One thing's for sure is we couldn't possibly survive heaven because it would be so incredibly dull -- there would be no threat. I don't know if you could stand basking in the joy for all eternity banging a tambourine. Our whole idea of heaven and hell is that they both seem to be timeless, and there seems to be a big assumption that there will not be any linear time -- which is why it's so important you position yourself properly, because it's almost as if you'd be frozen in an eternal tableau. Whether it's a hellish or a beatific tableau...either would be unbearable.
But looking at literature, isn't hell always more interesting?
Hell is always more interesting, and most of the things depicted in hell are not far off from what could be in heaven. In the same way most of the pleasures in life are so close to being obscene. The line between obscenity and beauty is very thin. In fifty years' time a beautiful person will look obscene, a beautiful fruit is going to go rotten, sex acts that are sublime to adults would be disgusting to children. What turns you on is probably what would turn you off a few years earlier or a few years later, which is why people push it too far when they're looking for release.
In "No, I Don't Remember Guildford", you say "No, I don't remember Jenner Road/Even though we lived there". What does this album suggest about memories? Do they vanish?
Memories replenish themselves. The more you remember something the more areas of your brain are occupied. So you don't just remember something, but you remember remembering it -- it re-seeds itself. Time inevitably will frame things and make things seem more important. Especially the ones in heavy rotation. They're given a drama all of their own.
Throughout your career you've explored the idea of death. And in "Mexican God" -- the leadoff track for the new album -- you make the assertion that "Time will destroy you". You've made no secret about your fascination
on the topic. But at this point in your life, how do you now feel about death?
It's still scheduled. I don't think death is any less relevant than it always has been. It just depends where you look at it from. It's quite possible that everything that has died looks back on life as some kind of primitive aberration -- like being in elementary school. That what we've been doing as incarnate beings is primitive, old fashioned, and crude; and the advanced soul is dead. This plays into the idea that the afterlife is something far better than what we have here. The other side of it is that we have no knowledge when we're alive of what is happening afterwards. All we know is this. We have all eternity in which not to exist. The time we are here is a brief flare of the match. Our existence is such a glimpse -- or a flash. And that's what makes it all-the-more precious whether what comes is better, or what has been before was better. It makes this all-the-more miraculous that this is happening at all. Life is a form of magic, and human beings are all crippled magicians who haven't learned how to control their wands yet.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE