The Washington Post
November 12, 1986
Softening His Delivery
Robyn Hitchcock Enjoys American Cult Status
by Mark Jenkins
The man who wrote "My Wife and My Dead Wife", "The Man With the Lightbulb Head", and "Furry Green Atom Bowl" actually seems quite sane.
As evidenced in both his lyrics and his published interviews, Robyn Hitchcock's wide-ranging powers of association can sometimes yield bewildering results, but by phone from his Chicago motel the English cult rocker is personable and coherent.
That's not to say, of course, that Hitchcock's style of expression is strictly comparable to that of more prosaic Pop performers. Analyzing the difference between his original band -- the mid-'70s Psychedelic Revisionist Soft Boys -- and his current solo career, the eccentric singer-songwriter-guitarist offers that the former was "psychotic, like a bunch of small, furry animals running around frantically in a box. Now we're like a seal or dolphin rising in slow motion out of the ocean. More like a hairspray ad, I suppose."
Few others might make the distinction in quite those terms, but it's true that The Soft Boys' records were more ragged and anarchic than such well-crafted recent Hitchcock work as Element of Light his just-released Relativity album. There are plenty of similarities between his earlier and later work, though: The fundamental Soft Boys sound, a mix of The Byrds' ringing Folk Rock with the melodic dementia of early Pink Floyd, is still prominent in Hitchcock's work. That sound also has been a crucial influence on many young American bands, from R.E.M. to "Paisley Underground" groups like Rain Parade. And ex-Soft Boy Kimberley Rew has even scaled the American charts with his subsequent outfit, Katrina And The Waves.
Hitchcock has had an American cult following for nearly a decade, but first performed live in this country just last year; his current American tour, which will bring him to the 9:30 Club tomorrow night, is only his second.
"We didn't know there was that much demand," he explains, though by some accounts The Soft Boys albums sold better as imports in this country than they did in Britain.
"I've always been rather nervous playing live," Hitchcock admits, and it didn't boost his confidence any when he nearly fainted onstage in Texas during his first Stateside tour, when he was still recuperating from an operation. He's fully recovered now, but not much more secure: "There's always reason to be nervous," he says.
"Actually, I wasn't playing live at all for some years," adds Hitchcock, who stopped performing and recording during the early-'80s, an era he calls "The Age Of The New Smoothies". "There was nothing else to do at that time," he says (though he did write some lyrics for ex-Damned drummer Captain Sensible during the period).
Hitchcock is something of a Rock classicist, with roots firmly set in the mid- to late-'60s. If he didn't like the superficial Glam Rock that followed Punk, he didn't much appreciate Punk either.
"The Sex Pistols put a big gash in things," complains Hitchcock, who thinks the Cambridge-based Soft Boys lost out in the uproar. "The music business is so dictatorial. Everybody had to be a Punk -- and we weren't, so we paid the price."
Hitchcock and his current band, bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor, are all veterans of The Soft Boys. But Hitchcock says he never wanted to reintroduce that moniker. "It's a very silly name," he says, "I regretted it as soon as I made it up. I didn't like being a Soft Boy very much."
Instead, Hitchcock has dubbed his backup musicians The Egyptians, "after the Egyptian gods, which I always liked." Pressed on the point, the singer offers a lengthy rundown of other Middle Eastern nationalities -- Palestinians, Iranians and so forth -- that would have been too controversial. "Egyptians seemed to be the only one that worked," he finishes, without explaining why he had to name his band after a Middle Eastern nationality at all.
Much the same logic is demonstrated in his songs, which are often Jabberwockian epics featuring fish, insects or death. "My Wife And My Dead Wife", for example, is about a man who has trouble telling his current spouse from the specter of his previous one. Though the narrator of that song is addressed as "Robyn", Hitchcock insists that his lyrics are works of imagination (Hitchcock has no wife, living or late), not autobiography or the product of natural or narcotic-inspired hallucination. (Unlike such heroes as John Lennon and Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett, Hitchcock says he never takes drugs.)
Thursday's performance will be the third 9:30 Club show in a little more than a year for the once-reclusive Hitchcock, but he seems no more enthusiastic about touring than before. "My manager gets us gigs and we go out and do the gigs, I suppose. It's a standard thing that lots of people do -- unless you're a plumber or something."
Nor does the higher profile indicate a new career-consciousness, says Hitchcock, who says that he's "just about" making a living as a musician. Comfortable with cult artist status, Hitchcock's goals are modest. "I just want to keep alive, basically," he says. "I don't want to get home and find out I'm dead."
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