The Seattle Times
March 24, 1986
Bland, Not Bizarre
Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians And Grapes Of Wrath Saturday Night At The Moore Theater
by Patrick MacDonald
Rock's latest eccentric wasn't so eccentric after all Saturday night at the Moore Theater.
Robyn Hitchcock, a young-looking 32-year-old British singer-guitarist who has a preoccupation with unpleasant subjects like death, disease, and pests, was less bizarre than his advance billing indicated. He wasn't a passive performer (like he said in an interview with The Times last week) and his songs weren't all that weird. In fact, most of them were pretty bland.
The audience of about 350 wasn't exactly fired up by Hitchcock and his three-man band, The Egyptians. Some stood and cheered during the one-hour set, but most sat and watched, applauding politely.
Hitchcock, wearing a bright, multi-colored shirt (the same one he's wearing on the back cover of the Gotta Let This Hen Out! album) and looking like a harder version of Paul McCartney, bounced around the stage as he played guitar and even smiled once in a while.
He looked like your ordinary Rock guitarist.
Although he sang songs such as "My Wife and My Dead Wife", "Sounds Great When You're Dead", and "The Man With the Lightbulb Head"; the most bizarre thing he did was introduce a few songs with long, rambling explanations, complete with nutty voices -- like something out of Monty Python:
"This is about a woman who was contracted to play just a few too many all-night parties, and her husband's being wrapped up in a bit of damp sacking in the attic (which is what we normally do in England after a party: we wrap people up and put them in old ancestral pots and we cover them with leaves and mulch and compost and dig them up in the spring on St. Vital's Day)."
The introductions got the most laughs and the only spontaneous applause of the night.
Most of the songs in the show came from Hitchcock's two American albums (Hen Out! and Fegmania!), but he also did "Kingdom of Love", a tune from his late-1970s band, the psychedelic-influenced New Wave group, The Soft Boys. ("All I want to be is your creature", went the song's opening line.)
Among other songs he did were "Brenda's Iron Sledge", which grinds up insects; "Uncorrected Personality Traits", about sexual deviation, sung a cappella by the four as an encore; "I Often Dream of Trains", both awake and asleep; and "Heaven", a straight-ahead Pop song that either is a parody of, or is intended for, the Top 40.
The best thing about the show was the pumping keyboard-work of Roger Jackson, who made his little electric Yamaha sound like an organ, a marimba, a piano and even a Farfisa (the high-pitched synthesizer popular in the 1960s). Jackson enjoyed himself, dancing wildly as he played.
Two other former Soft Boys completed the band: Andy Metcalfe on bass and Morris Windsor on drums (the remaining Soft Boy, Kimberley Rew, formed the popular group Katrina And The Waves.)
The show was opened by Grapes of Wrath, a young Vancouver, BC, trio that played melodic, bouncy, contemporary tunes.
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