The New York Times
August 2, 1985
Three Visiting Rockers On The Frontiers Of Pop
by John Pareles
To many people, a Pop song equals four catchy minutes of truisms about love. Since the 1960s, however, many songwriters have decided to circumvent the cliches. Dark lyrics with light tunes, character studies from bizarre points of view, irony, alienation, paradox and the whole Pandora's box of literary distancing devices have moved into Pop -- and that's not to mention the musical twists. Formula songwriting isn't dead, but it's no longer the only game in town.
This weekend brings three songwriters to New York who have private agendas for this most public of forms. Graham Parker, who will lead his band, The Shot, tomorrow at Pier 84, channels political and personal outrage into songs about, among other things, religious zealots and nuclear holocaust. The East German singer Nina Hagen, who will perform tomorrow at the Beacon Theater, tears into songs with a multifarious voice and a willingness to throw just about anything into the mix. And the British songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, who is returning tonight to Irving Plaza, writes snappy little fantasies about insects, people with "lightbulb heads" and other aberrant images -- all encapsulated in formally perfect Pop songs.
Mr. Hitchcock wrote songs for an acclaimed British band, The Soft Boys; the group's other songwriter, Kimberley Rew, now writes optimistic Garage Rock songs for Katrina And The Waves, while Mr. Hitchcock has regrouped The Soft Boys under the name The Egyptians. His songs are both odd and ingenious, with music that hints at Indian ragas and Balkan dances alongside British music hall tunes and Bob Dylan; nevertheless, they fulfill Pop's first prerequisite, which is to stick in the ear.
"I'm not a musician at all by nature," Mr. Hitchcock said. "I studied art and blundered into music because of the times I grew up in. During the 1960s, if you had anything in you at all, that's what you did; if I grew up now, maybe I'd design clothes. Before I wrote songs, I used to do writing on walls; even then, I wrote the same kinds of lyrics, which some people define as 'peculiar'. I try to be as straightforward as I can, but I don't really see things as straightforward, apart from basic human reactions like sex and politics."
How does he write songs? "I rebuild things inside my own castle," Mr. Hitchcock said. "I open the portcullis and go out in the night and step over the moat, as all the mosquitos fly into the air. Then I steal bits of the landscape and bring them back inside the castle. I rearrange things so that they look good, and make sense in a, kind of, visual way."
The imagery in Mr. Hitchcock's lyrics often suggests a skewed universe; since his days with The Soft Boys, he has been tagged as a psychedelic revivalist, although The Egyptians are less likely to jam than to rocket through songs at Punk Rock tempos. "It doesn't matter to me because the terms are always redefined by what they're defining," Mr. Hitchcock said. "If people associate me with Psychedelia, eventually they'll associate Psychedelia with me.
"I don't usually write about actual things, although there's a lot of things that need writing about," he added. "I'd love to come up with a great tune that makes it immediately apparent that the arms race should be ended immediately, that the differences between the Administration and the Soviets should be ended, and that all the armaments in the world should be melted into candle wax. But the last person I've heard who did that was Bob Dylan."
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