Rockpool
January 24, 1986
Henmania!
Robyn Hitchcock's Train Of Thought As Followed by Anne Clark
by Anne Clark
Truly memorable performers are distinguished not only by musical ability, but by a strong creative vision. Robyn Hitchcock is making an impact precisely because he does combine exciting music with vividly imaginative lyrics. After establishing his reputation with The Soft Boys, Hitchcock heightened the curiosity about him by seeming to go into retirement after the solo LP Groovy Decay. He summed up that period by saying he was "just out of the way for two or three years."
In the past year his output has made up for the lost time. In addition to touring, he has released I Often Dream Of Trains, The Bells Of Rhymney, Fegmania!, and Gotta Let This Hen Out!. Making the shift from being out of the public eye to a flurry of activity wasn't difficult for Hitchcock. "It was just right. There was a lot of old material, all obscurely distributed. I think it gave people a chance to catch up on a lot of that material before I unleashed the next lot (which I was preparing under cover of darkness). Now it's unleashed. But, again, we'll have to have a break because we put out too much stuff. We'll have to, sort of, go away and think about it for a bit."
I Often Dream Of Trains, the record that marked his return to the musical world was a solo-acoustic album. "It was a way of clearing everything out of my system," Hitchcock said. "I wanted to see what I was like uninfluenced by anyone else. No so-called producers, no other musicians, no friends hanging around saying, 'I think you should do it this way.' I just wanted to have all the blame for it -- or all the credit. I just wanted to be undiluted me for a bit. Having done that, it was time to get diluted again."
That dilution is known as The Egyptians. Though keyboardist Roger Jackson is new, bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor have worked with Hitchcock before. As soon as he got into the studio with them, Hitchcock knew they were the right choice. "It was me and Andy and Morris back together again and -- kapow! They'd do songs they'd never heard before in a day's rehearsal, and then staight on to tape the next day."
The Egyptians worked with Hitchcock on Fegmania! and embarked on a tour. His summertime American tour, however, was cut short by illness, and it took Hitchcock a while to recover his strength. By late-fall he and The Egyptains were able to complete a three-week tour in America. "I think after what I put my body through in the last few weeks, I must be completely recovered," said Hitchcock. "Either that or I'm going to drop dead in England."
Though touring takes a lot out of Hitchcock, he noted that fellow Soft Boy Kimberley Rew -- now of Katrina And The Waves -- was just the opposite. "Kimberley did love touring," he said. "Kimberley will play everywhere. He'd play on the space shuttle if he got the chance. He'd play on, sort of, lifeless planets where there was nothing except corroded stone. I prefer to stay home. I just do this stuff occasionally." The two former Soft Boys do maintain some contact. "Kimberley sent me a postcard of someone buying a lobster in Denmark," he said with a smile. "He's been on tour five months, so I haven't seen him. Kimberley's a very quiet person anyway, except when he plays the guitar. His guitar speaks for him. (Well, his guitar doesn't ring me up and scream down the phone, or anything.)"
Kimberley Rew went off to do other things, but Pat Collier of The Vibrators has been doing production work for Hitchcock since the days of The Soft Boys. "Every time I've been sent off with someone expensive, it's a disaster," Hitchcock said. "And whenever I've done stuff cheaply, with Pat just, sort of, twiddling knobs, it turns out well. So, it's just a question of how much money we get given to waste. Another thing about Pat is he's quite fast. He's very modest. He doesn't really 'produce', as such. And even when he does, he always puts his name in tiny letters."
Hitchcock has also stuck by the same recording studio. "Pat still hangs around Alaska, which is a really seedy recording studio in London that we use. It's by Waterloo Station. It's where you get the electric trains to where my parents live. I've been using Waterloo Station for 25 years now. It's kind of my home-station in London. Ironically, Alaska Studios is right underneath the railway line. If you're recording a guitar solo, you have to face a certain way, otherwise your guitar hums. It's deeply saturated in trains. I recorded I Often Dream Of Trains there. It's all very appropriate."
The way Hitchcock latches on to certain images, like trains, is one thing that sets his lyrics apart. But the writer of songs like "The Man With The Lightbulb Head" and "Eaten By Her Own Dinner" doesn't think his lyrics are all that unusual. "Boys are always meeting girls in my songs, just like everywhere else," insisted Hitchcock. "It's just there's lots of other things going on as well. There's lots of romantic songs, but people pick up on the flesh and the fowl and the fish."
The Hitchcock imagination has produced lyrics for Captain Sensible, and Hitchcock can imagine other people using his material. "I would like to see Pat Benatar do 'I Wanna Destroy You', and I'd quite like to see Madonna doing 'The Fly'. People don't seem to pick up on me as an obvious source of covers. They will eventually."
Anyone who has ever bought a Robyn Hitchcock record has surely noticed that, as an added bonus, you get his cartoon creations. The cover of Gotta Let This Hen Out! is one of his oil paintings. "That's one of my recent efforts. I did it after I collapsed in America. I'm quite proud of it. I did it while I was convalescing. As I got better, it got darker and more intense. It's very pale to start with, at the top. As my strength comes back, everything gets brighter."
Hitchcock draws a lot of satisfaction from his artwork. "I'd love to sell paintings. I love to do paintings," he said, "but I don't want to go into the art world, as it were. My father tried to take himself seriously as an artist -- and he wasn't. He was basically a cartoonist. I didn't want to fall into the same thing, so I blundered into the Rock world instead."
Even after his period of relative inactivity, the Rock world has been receptive to him. "I was quite surprised by the number of people who were into it when I started up again. I don't think our stuff is the sort you like, and then give up, and six months later you're listening to the Root Brothers (or whatever). I like to flatter myself and think it's more lasting. One of those things that's not confined by being young and beautiful."
When audiences contain new fans, there are often people that seem surprised by things like his unusual song-intros. "You often get blank stares. I don't mind that. It's the noisy stares I don't like -- people yelling, 'Spot, spot, spot,' all night long because they've had too much beer. But that's nothing compared to the Punk days in England, which was sort of like walking on glass. Spit and plastic glasses flying around. Thank god they were plastic. They hated us. They really hated us. Even if they had liked us, they'd have reacted the same way. They spat at you if they liked you, and spat at you if they hated you. I went up afterward and said, 'Were you spitting postively or netagively?' And they said, 'Fuck you.'"
"Once, toward the end of The Soft Boys, we were playing a place in Brighton. There were seven people there. Six were hippies, so we did an encore for that six. And a little punk was standing at the front saying, 'Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!' It was like shrimp being dipped in boiling oil: you could see the agony in his face."
Of late, the reaction has been a lot more positive. Not only the numbers, but they type of fan, has changed. "It's surprising how young they are," Hitchcock said. "For a long time, all we basically attracted were old men in beards. Guys who were incapable of forming relationships, and were almost catatonic. They just stood there vibraitng in the corner, quietly, while you played. And every so often, they'd come up to me with, sort of, a leering grin and go, 'Robyn!' as if I obviously knew them intimately, and that it was extremely funny that we were meeting. We never got any girls in the audience. Now, our audience is ten years younger than that. It's the sort of stuff I'd expect college students to understand."
What even Hitchcock himself can't understand is how his creative process works. "I usually do it when I'm by myself. It's like going to the bathroom: it's an activity that has to be solitary. Two or three times a year, I just cut myself off from everybody. It's like going to lay your eggs in the shrubs, or something. You just go off and lay your eggs while no one's watching, and then they hatch out," Hitchcock surmised. "I just go into a trance, to be honest. I play a few old songs, I sing bits of new songs, get the feel of the guitar or piano, and then this stuff comes out. I've no idea what it is, or why. Every so often you'll get a song where I know what I want to say. The 'Wife And My Dead Wife' song is an interesting idea, because I had the plot, and I went to a cafe and wrote the whole thing down. Then I put it aside for two months. When I opened the book again, I picked up a guitar and sang it straight through almost the way it is now."
"My Wife And My Dead Wife" is one of the highlights of Fegmania!, a strong song both musically and lyrically. "I think it's a well-constructed song. It doesn't repeat itself. It keeps meandering off in a different way, but coming back to the point," he said. "A lot of my songs are like a radio tuner, randomly wandering around the dial picking up whatever might be happening. That song is very focused: it's about one topic. I got all of it into three minutes, so I'm very pleased with it. But I haven't got a wife or a dead wife. So it would be good if people don't take it too literally and start sending me wreaths."
At this point, Hitchcock is back in England working on new material. Though he says he's more popular in America than England, it's hard to predict how many potential fans there are here. "I just met someone who said, 'You'll never make it big, your voice isn't right.' And I said, 'That's okay, I don't want to.' So that takes care of that," he asserted. "I'd like to make it to the point where you don't lose money on things. It's a hysterical business, because if you want to get anywhere you have to let yourself be exploited. You have to let people get their 20% out of you, and you have to let them have a bit of your flesh. If you're not prepared to be exploited, people aren't going to work for you and you won't get anywhere. So, anyone who turns up with dollar-signs in their eyes, and says, 'Yes, I'd like to be a star,' is always welcomed by the machinery. When we first arrived on the music scene, it was like, 'No, I don't particularly want to be a star. I just want to make a few good records.' And very quickly, the music business decided we weren't worth dealing with and left us out in a, kind of, independent void. I didn't say I didn't want to sell records, I just wasn't particularly interested in being a Pop star." Instead, Robyn Hitchcock can content himself with being everyone's favorite cult figure.
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