The Boston Globe
October 19, 2000
It's Classic Hitchcock Pop
by Jim Sullivan
Robyn Hitchcock, 47, is talking about how a Pop music concert can be many things -- serious, poignant, droll, whimsical, unpredictable -- but so rarely is these days, in the hands of acts that know just one or two tricks.
"As an artist," the rangy English singer-songwriter says, "you should be able to take people across the emotional spectrum. If you're a playwright you are expected to do that. The old showbiz greats like Hope and Crosby, Sinatra and Martin may have been cheesy at it; but they could do comedy, straight acting, or sing. But a new breed of entertainer arose who was supposed to be a, sort of, shaman: a feared philosopher-king, a precious loser -- whatever it was. But they certainly weren't supposed to come out and grin and go 'Love, love me do'."
Hitchcock, onetime leader of The Soft Boys (but longtime solo artist and free agent) has linked up with singer-guitarist Grant-Lee Phillips, ex of the band Grant Lee Buffalo, for a brief tour that takes the duo to the Middle East Downstairs on Sunday. You won't mistake Hitchcock and his partner for song-and-dance men, but you are likely to be suffused in a multidimensional musical bath.
The rub -- on paper anyway -- is that Hitchcock is very English and elliptical, a free-associating artist schooled in the Pop-Psychedelic mode of Syd Barrett (founder of Pink Floyd). Phillips is a student of American Pop, Folk, and Rock.
So when they join together? "It's much less of a clash than you might think," says Hitchcock. "Rock music is basically Anglo-American music," he adds, noting a history of cross-pollination.
He relishes the spontaneity of performing: "You should summon something up and you shouldn't know in advance what that is. And Grant is a hysterically funny performer. He's like Peter Sellers, with this blank deadpan look on his face. He's also a very good mimic. So, I'll be up there babbling away and suddenly I'll hear my own voice coming out when I stop speaking.
"We also both do a good David Bowie, which tends to come out at the end of the shows -- and we do a little dancing. We do a 45-on-45 medley: all those songs you've hoped would be dead and buried we have managed to exhume."
Hitchcock and Phillips share something else: they've both been bumped from Warner Bros.. Neither sold enough CDs to appease the corporate parent; both are selling new discs through websites. Hitchcock has no desire to re-enter the world of major-label music -- he's working on a novel and happy on the Pop fringes. Phillips, he says, might want to re-enter the fray, however cautiously.
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