N.M.E.
November 9. 1985
Hitchcock's Half Hour
In His Metamorphosis From Soft Boy To Egyptian, Robyn Hitchcock Became Less Obsessed With Prawns. Jonathan Romney Finds The One-Time Pop Weirdo Has Even Written An Intelligible Song. But Plastic Lobster Collectors Should Read On.
by Jonathan Romney
Cynics warned me against interviewing Robyn Hitchcock. Why bother, they said, he'll just witter on about prawns for hours on end. My mind skips back eight bleak winters to a previous meeting with the then-leader of Cambridge's premier psychedelic explorers The Soft Boys when the conversation, as I recall, did indeed revolve largely around the topic of crustaceans.
Today, Hitchcock defends himself vehemently against the label of friendly neighbourhood windup artist. "I don't try and wind people up at all. Jesus wasn't winding people up! You didn't get people coming back from Jesus and saying, 'Blimey what a windup, messing about with seafood at his age!'"
Eight years ago, Robyn Hitchcock was the Man In Black, the Man Who Would Be Syd Barrett; now he's settled comfortably into a more amiable persona, and you'll find him these days on the Whistle Test, looking a trifle uneasy, talking about wrapping people's heads in tin foil, while jolly uncle Mark Ellen grins approvingly.
Hitchcock's role as village idiot seems to sell him short. He sees himself as "providing an alternative", making the disclaimer, "People don't have to buy it." This attitude, he admits, "obviously lacks moral fibre", and I suspect if anything's dogged his career, it's his unwillingness, at once self-effacing and insularly arrogant, to stake out his place in the scheme of things, to be more vociferous.
Or perhaps it's the way his mind works. Why won't he sit down and talk about the new album, man, like a good Pop star? Why will his mind insist on cranking itself up to High C like a runaway Dinky toy, as in the surreal rants that punctuate his live set, each one a miniature unpublishable novel?
"I'm not even a neurosurgeon, so it's very hard to tell. They're word solos. We have something like 52 thoughts a second going through our heads, and we select any one of them at any one time, and it keeps on bifurcating into more and more. But all you've got to do is start fiddling around with the receiver a bit, and you'll start getting Hilversum and Oalo.
"It all seems a lot more amiable. I seem to come over as a nice guy. I don't present so much of the Face Of Death. Maybe I thought that in order to be a Rock-star-type, you have to be paranoid, desructive, romp around in shades...."
So here we sit in a suitable haunt for an English humorist, the tea garden at Kenwood House, chatting politely about the Artist and his Role. The story I want to tell you today begins with Hitchcock's emergence from a lengthy bout of inertia, sleeping 16 hours a day, with breaks only to write lyrics for Captain Sensible and to record the polished, intimate acoustic LP I Often Dream Of Trains. He finally broke the grip of Morpheus with this year's cracking Fegmania! album and the return to operative status of what is effectively a new Soft Boys lineup, with Morris Windsor (drums), part-time Squeeze sideman Andy Metcalfe (bass), and new recruit Roger Jackson (keyboards), collectively The Egyptians.
The spur to reform was provided by the reissue of old Soft Boys material like the long-lost debut EP on Raw, Wading Through A Ventilator.
"Morris and Andy and I hadn't played together for five years when we started doing some of that stuff on Fegmania! and it was incredible how quickly it all came whizzing back. I think thse things should be preserved, like old buses and HMS Belfast and The House of Lords and The Face..."
The very first Soft Boys incarnation, featuring elusive guitarist Wangbo Trotter, was a sparkling anomaly whose brilliance was progressively diluted through the years that followed, in a progression of dodgy albums, erratic performances and ill-fated business moves. Not to mention the increasingly coarse-grained HM bombast of Kimberley Rew, who these days seems a happier man in Katrina And The Waves.
"I don't think we'll ever fulfil the promise of that first record, musically, because it just seemed so open. It seemed we could go in and out of any style and come up with anything. It was like a kid playing with lots of different Plasticene -- but the colours never getting muddy. But the colours did get muddy...."
The state of the Egyptian art is revealed on the new live album Gotta Let This Hen Out!, a gallery of sturdily rendered hits from the Hitchcock back-catalogue, ranging from the primaeval exhumation of "The Face Of Death" to the shiny new "My Wife And My Dead Wife". The latter ranks high in the man's canon, partly because it may well be the only entirely coherent song he's ever written, a fully extended imaginative flight unblocked by the usual intrusive meringue and dishes of slime that tend to set the listener's teeth gnashing.
And then there's "Listening To The Higsons", the prodding two-chord wonder that provides the album title.
"It was one night in November, I was listening to John Peel, and he was playing The Higsons, and I thought they were singing 'Extra, extra, gotta let this hen out' -- I was surprised that guys like this even have hens. I'd hate to be a hen in East Anglia. I've never met The Higsons, and I'm not planning to give them any royalties either."
Whether The Egyptians dynasty will establish itself in the UK is a moot point -- "To be appreciated, you have to be either dead or foreign, and we're working hard at both" -- but in the U.S., at least, Hitchcock's status approaches the legendary. Among admirers are R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, who joined the band onstage and on tape earlier this year; The Replacements, who courted Robyn's production services; and Beefheart's drummer Robert Williams, who fixed him a steely gaze and pronounced, "I think I can relate to where you're coming from."
The conversation dwells a while on plastic lobsters, of which I myself am an avid collector (keep them coming in, readers), before turning to the onstage faint in Austin, Texas that curtailed Robyn's American tour earlier this year, the result of an operation for something long and unpronounceable, "Which to you and me is a caterpillar in the abdomen."
Maybe Robyn Hitchcock is now on the verge of metamorphosing into a consummate English cabaret artiste. His future career may see him exploring the sort of turn he recently presented at The Electric Screen, an intimate acoustic evening with standup bass, tall tales, his paintings in the foyer, and who knows, perhaps a little Strindberg between sets to inject a little culture into the proceedings.
So, let me ask you a serious question. Why do a remarkably high proportion of your songs contain the word "mind"? Does this mean, perchance, you're an old hippie?
"No, it means I'm an old mind...I'm the last to hatch out from that generation. Everyone knows I'm 56 -- I just have a youthful complexion."
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