The Toronto Star
November 8, 1985
Wacko Singer Takes His Rock With A Bit Of Humor
by Greg Quill
"I've just been watching a load of videos and I must say I'm absolutely appalled by the lack of humor in most of them. Contemporary Rock bands are so god-awful serious, they're laughable."
Not that singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock isn't serious about his own work. Spread over eight years, two albums with British underground favorites The Soft Boys and four with The Egyptians, Hitchcock's songs resound with serious overtones, with oblique references to Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett, and the jangling, ponderous psychedelic Guitar Rock of the late-1960s. On his recently released Slash/WEA effort, Fegmania!, Hitchcock even conjures up a kind of angular British Zydeco music for one cut, "Strawberry Mind".
It just happens that Hitchcock, like sometime collaborator and kindred spirit Captain Sensible, likes singing about...uh, unusual things: his (imaginary) dead wife, his insect mother, a man with a lightbulb head. "I even made a short anti-promo movie to go with that song ["The Man With The Lightbulb Head"]," Hitchcock told me from New York this week. "It has lamps mating, lamps cavorting naked -- that kind of thing. It's an attempt to depict erotica in lightbulb terms."
Hitchcock, who brings his odd menagerie to Larry's Hideaway, 121 Carlton St., Tuesday, believes drugs destroyed Pop music's sense of humor in the 1960s and '70s. "Since then Pop musicians haven't been allowed to be humorous," he said. "Of course, the new lot doesn't find things funny anyway."
Despite the evidence, Hitchcock claims his work isn't deliberately irreverent. He's trying to make a point. Of course, what that point is, is anyone's guess. Perhaps, he hinted, there'll be a clue on his live album, Gotta Let This Hen Out!, released a couple of weeks ago but temporarily unavailable in Canada.
"We bring everything into perspective. We juxtapose old Egyptians favorites like 'Acid Bird', 'America', and 'Listening To The Higsons' with newer material."
Of course, Hitchcock relishes the notion that North Americans find him a tad eccentric. "All Englishmen are eccentric to Americans," he said. "'He's English,' they say, as if that entitles me to walk around with a wicked gleam in my eye.
"I don't mind what they think. They can call me what they like -- an Englishman, a grapefruit, a steamship -- as long as they can identify me."
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