1985
Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians
Gotta Let This Hen Out!
(Relativity)
by J. Kordosh
In a little over a year -- and face it, that's not long -- Robyn Hitchcock's released three albums that, if not incredible, are at least excessively superior to anything anyone else has done. First off was I Often Dream Of Trains (solo, acoustic, this decade's finest LP), followed by Fegmania! (with The Egyptians, an obliquely hilarious state-of-the-songwriting record), and now the latest, Gotta Let This Hen Out!, an 11-song set culled from a live performance at London's Marquee last spring -- and every bit as exceptional as its immediate predecessors. That is to say, anyone with even the vaguest interest in how good music can be would be the veriest idiot to not own it immediately.
Gotta Let This Hen Out! has it all: Robyn-the-Warped ("My Wife And My Dead Wife", "Sometimes I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl" -- well, what the hell, practically everything applies); Robyn-the-Whimsical ("Listening To The Higsons", "Brenda's Iron Sledge"); and Robyn-the-Warm ("Heaven", possibly "America" -- although both are touched with whimsy). Robyns abound, all wielding a cunning insight and offhanded cracko bluntness.
What's most fascinating to the Hitchcock fan -- surely you've joined the ranks by this paragraph -- is the endless minutiae this album generates, as behooves the great live recording. Hitchcock singing "Sometimes I wish I was a pretty girl/So I could wreck myself in the shower", subbing "wreck" for the original -- and yes, better -- "ooof". (Of course, the original original working verb, before the track was recorded, was "stab", so...uh...I don't know, make of it what you will. For the record, he's never used the word "rape" in the song.) The absurd ad-libs, making already non-sequitur lines ("Brenda's iron sledge/Please don't call me Reg/It's not my name") all-the-more delighful ("It's not my name...not yet!"). Hitchcock, by the way, actually explained that aside in a recent interview with this magazine: "Well, it might eventually be Reg. I don't know." (Is this guy -- as Tom Verlaine once said about something else -- too too-too, or what?) Roger Jackson getting his Yamaha DX-7 to sound like a Farfisa, adding the necessary creep-show effect to "My Wife And My Dead Wife". The strange choice of material, including a B-side (albeit a killer B-side) like "Listening To The Higsons" in lieu of Fegmania!'s "Egyptian Cream", "Strawberry Mind", or "The Man With The Lightbulb Head", which you know -- if you've been fortunate enough to catch the Egytpians' American tour -- sound even greater live. (Not to mention the omission of classics from Trains -- "Sounds Great When You're Dead" and "Uncorrected Personality Traits" -- that've lost nothing in translation to live-and-onstage.)
If this all sounds like nitpicking, well, it is. It's the kind of nitpicking you can't do with 99% of the records in the world because, frankly, who cares? With Hitchcock (who answers why he'd write a song about listening to an unremarkable British band called The Higsons thusly: "Uh, why do I write about anything, really?"), it's a joy. The guy's clearly a genius, the heir-apparent to the songwriting geniuses of the '60s. He's active, he's forward-looking, and if you ask him if he can discuss U2, he'll answer, "Not seriously." What rampant sanity have we here?
That his stuff plays as well (and sometimes better) onstage is an interesting sidelight, and extra incentive to pick up on Hen!. There were, Hitchcock admits, some repairs. "Towards the end of the LP, the vocals were overdubbed. 'Heaven' is actually studio vocals with a live track -- which I think is a great way to record."
Obviously. To be blunt, the mere existence of this record (and the records from which it was derived) should scare the living hell out of anyone with a contract to record music. "Bloody red bats," they might well murmur upon listening.
Fortunately, for the consumer, however, Hen! is the happiest of events. Don't let it throw you when Hitchcock describes a song as being written "before most of you were born, and a long time after the rest of you were dead." When Hitchcock sings of death, I, for one, hear life. And these songs will not only sound great when you're dead, they'll sound greater when you're deader.
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