1986
Psycho Killer
Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians
Element Of Light (Glass Fish Records MOIST 3) ****
by John Wilde
Oh, I can hear them from here: "This Hitchcock's one of those cranky cultish types. let's see what Wilde can make of his latest dip into the moonstruck puddles...."
Hitchcock's Soft Boys are a small smudge at the far corner of Legend of course. Erratic and deluded in their day, they set this man's solo career off to a greatly unbalanced start and that's where the man has rumbled and rambled since. After a crateful of Hitchcock releases between 1980 and 1985, Captain Sensible collaborations and such-like, he's disappeared for the optional loony artist hibernation period of 18 months and ambled back with these latest despatches from bedlam.
Element Of Light places the Hitchcock question neatly in the spotlight. Yup, there's all the usual scatty traits, some of the irregular Psycho Pop he's not famous for, all the megalomania and misfit ravings. All well and good, but where the hell is Hitchcock leaning? Does he care and should we care? God only knows, probably not, very possibly, respectively.
"Someone who has all the discretion and nerve to start a side of a record with a line like, 'It's a Raymond Chandler evening/At the end of someone's day/I'm standing in my pocket/I'm slowly turning grey', must have genius dripping out of his ears," you're thinking. Well, yeah. Then he can turn around and pop the bubble with a thought as fuddled as, "He'll never make love to a loaf of bread/Unless of course he found one in his bed". The latter is what that other wayward poet Saint Julian finds far-ish in Hitchcock. What he feels is contrived, Pythonesque screwball stuff. Cope is probably right, but Robyn Hitchcock's dizz-dazzling capacity is always close at hand.
On the waning "Airscape", for example, he bristles near to his best, exhibiting Stipe-like degrees of mood and muddled logic. All over Element Of Light in fact, he emerges less rusted and seemingly more lucid than he's been for years. After 1985's rather faint Fegmania!, this looms large and, get this, perfectly top-sided. Hitchcock's professional jerkiness can grow grinding, but this stays the right side of hysterical. Crack-brained convincing in fact.
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