Creem
March, 1987
One Night In November With Robyn Hitchcock
by John Kordosh
At Schoolkids Records in Ann Arbor, Bill Holdship, Robyn Hitchcock and myself are looking through the records. It's the evening of the day the Bruce Springsteen five-record boxed set has been released.
"We came to do an in-store signing here earlier and couldn't get in," says Hitchcock. "It was full of people buying Bruce records. So I grabbed a couple of boxes and autographed them anyway." Hitchcock and I are both holding Bruce's record and looking at Bruce's picture.
"He looks like Rambo, doesn't he?" says Hitchcock. I say that I think he does.
"God, I hope I never come to represent that," says Hitchcock.
And later on, I keep wondering whether he meant Rambo or Bruce Springsteen. I guess I really should've asked.
A thumbnail sketch of Robyn Hitchcock: he's a very tall, very polite 33-year-old British musician who -- along with bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor -- comprise Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians. All three are original members of The Soft Boys, a decidedly psychopathic group Hitchcock fronted in the late-'70s. (Of The Soft Boys, Hitchcock says: "The idea was to set something up, then undermine it and put something else in -- just chop away whatever expectations you had. Eventually it became too bewildering and too demanding of people.") He's intensely private, extremely humorous and a conversationalist of the first order. He's a songwriter by trade, and his songs are remarkable -- for their structure, melody and lyrics. He's become a cult unto himself. In America, his records are distributed by Relativity, an independent label, and it is his last three -- Fegmania!, Gotta Let This Hen Out! and the latest, Element Of Light -- that have raised his profile considerably. Little else is known about the man, and what is can be found in the March, 1986 issue of this magazine, in an article Bill Holdship wrote called "God Walks Among Us". Hyperbole...or maybe not.
Holdship and I are longtime Hitchcock partisans, and occasionally wonder if he wants to become a star. That is to say, if ever there was a mold broken, it was his.
Hitchcock laughs. "I think when you see what happens to people who become stars -- the life that grows around them -- they just seem to be unilaterally screwed. I can't really see the point in it, you're putting yourself up for an impossible task." Then, as is his wont, he waxes morbid on the concept.
"Sometimes they pay because they want to see you drop dead onstage. It's a lottery. They think, 'Well, these guys are bound to die at one of these gigs. There's 12 shows, we'll buy six tickets and we've got a 50/50 chance of watching him peter out'."
This from a man who opens his set that very evening with his own "Sounds Great When You're Dead".
And, indeed, Hitchcock is morbid -- not pathologically, but rather like an incessant child. If there's one grand metaphor in his work, it's death: be it the riders of "Brenda's Iron Sledge" (who "hit a tree -- and disintegrate!"), the narrator of "Ye Sleeping Knights Of Jesus" (who resignedly observes you'll be "Fried to death in seconds by the Russians/Or if you're lucky, just a sudden stroke") or the neurotic who can't distinguish between "My Wife And My Dead Wife", death is never far from the Hitchcockian view. In fact, in several songs -- "The Bones In The Ground", and, especially, "Only The Stones Remain", the ultimate slate-wiping of all human endeavor is practically celebrated.
It's a metaphor Hitchcock's saddled himself with, as he readily admits. But he isn't totally enraptured with death: lyrically, he's as identifiable with insects (who lay eggs under people's skin and stuff) and fish. Especially fish. On his Groovy Decay album he sang, "You've got everything a girl could wish/The only thing is, I haven't seen any fish", but on Element Of Light he truly outdoes himself with "Bass", an ingenious listing of obscure fishes and seabirds in an uptempo milieu.
"I like fish because they represent a lot of things," Hitchcock declares. "There's a spiritual representation: the early Christians used the sign of the fish. They're also quite funny -- people generally laugh about fish. And they're very sexual, they're very phallic. And they're also very beautiful to look at, or very hideous -- they're very evocative. They're also intuitive: it's like the piscean symbol of the fish going in two opposite directions at once, sort of, symbolizing the perversity of things. And the truth is perverse; our brains aren't designed to deal with reality at all. We're built to see the horizon as flat, but in fact we find out the horizon is curved." Which is six good reasons fish are cool -- plus some bonus philosophy.
Despite "Bass", Hitchcock's stock-in-trade imagery seems to be expanding on Element Of Light. "If I was trying to do anything, it would be to make the album warmer rather than colder," he says of his latest release. "As I get older, I'm more concerned about not bringing people down. I'm just trying to get more texture into it, more light and shade. You know, you should, as an artist, be able to convey a variety of moods."
Which is exactly what Element does. Musically, it's an astonishingly eclectic offering, from the psychedelic "Airscape" to the wistful "Winchester" to the absolutely-perfect-John-Lennon-rep-circa-Plastic-Ono, "Somewhere Apart". Hitchcock himself worries that the thing might be too damned eclectic.
"Commercially, that's probably bad," he says. "I think people like a sound they can identify with -- and I'm much too jumpy. I do a certain amount of style-hopping, too, which probably isn't a good thing. That Lennon thing is all right, but the album was originally in danger of being an exercise in style. I wanted to make a Folk record originally, but I didn't have quite enough stuff there. I wanted to write a whole bunch of songs and do them in a Folk Rock idiom, with an '80s sound -- but I didn't get around to it. You know, the only thing you can say about those songs is that they were all written in the last year."
That and that they're incredibly good.
"THIS IS A SONG BY THE BEATLES THAT I WROTE LAST MAY."
--Robyn Hitchcock introduces a song
If you've seen Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians perform live, it might surprise you to learn that very few writers have had anything to say about Hitchcock-as-guitarist, or -- for that matter -- The Egyptians-as-band. It appears that Hitchcock-as-Syd-Barrett is still the more vogueish theme.
The fact is that Hitchcock's an exceptionally good player. He's a friend of R.E.M.'s Peter Buck (who played on an unreleased Hitchcock song called "Flesh Number One"), and Buck has told me he considers Hitchcock to be a better guitarist than himself. (To which Hitchcock replies: "That's true -- but I've been playing longer than him.") On top of that, Andy Metcalfe, who co-produced Element with Hitchcock, is an accomplished bassist -- one of those unassuming British chaps who seem to take to the instrument naturally. And, on top of that, Morris Windsor not only plays drums with a flair, he adds some sublime backing vocals. It's a real kick to see them switch instruments -- Hitchcock to bass, Metcalfe to drums and Windsor to guitar -- for a rousing version of "Listening To The Higsons". For my money, all of Hitchcock's songs sound better when performed live, a point Hitchcock agrees on.
"We're basically a three-piece that's always had four members," says Hitchcock. "And that's been one of our problems." Indeed, the trio constitutes what Hitchcock calls the nuclear remains of The Soft Boys:
"If you think about it, it's ten years since Morris and Andy and I were in what was to become The Soft Boys. It's the 10th anniversary of The Soft Boys this month, and -- after all these years -- we've tried to get an extra person in. And, really, we don't need it."
They don't. The three ex-Soft Boys sound surprisingly full onstage. A listener might be even more surprised to overhear their soundcheck, though. Inevitably, they run through a Beatles song such as "Rain", or -- the night in question -- "Dr. Robert". Metcalfe recalls that, "We used to go to Robyn's house to practice and learn whole Beatles albums." And Hitchcock, whose respect for the mop-tops is well-documented, only shakes his head and says, "I wish I'd have written those songs." (A press release for Element Of Light had Hitchcock likening the album to Abbey Road. He says he'd been pressed for a comment and just said:
"The record reminds me of Abbey Road. At the time, I'd just listened to it. And I thought, 'Oh, yeah, Abbey Road. This means I'm going to split up'."
Despite his respect for The Beatles, it will be a rare listener who has a chance to hear The Egyptians do a Fab Four song -- or any songs besides Robyn Hitchcock's, for that matter.
"I think it's very bad to rely on covers," says Hitchcock. "When you start doing that, you get people who just want the cover tunes."
Which seems a little hard to believe in the case of Robyn Hitchcock, Celebrated Songwriter.
"Well, maybe it's just the residue of paranoia," he replies. "But my whole business is to establish myself as a songwriter. If not songs that Shirley Bassey can perform, that's tough -- but I'd like to see Tony Bennett singing them. Ideally, I think if Frank Sinatra was to sing 'The Man With The Lightbulb Head', then another chapter in music would be opened. Or at the next Republican nomination party, to have The Beach Boys (or what was left of the Beach Boys) singing 'Insect Mother'. I think it would be great. But the point is, I'm just trying to establish myself as a songwriter. And if I start shoving in covers by other people that I really like, I'd tend to attract too much attention that way. We still do 'Bells Of Rhymney', 'cause it's kind of an anthem."
And, as a songwriter, Hitchcock is rather coolly analytical about his own work: "Element comes off as quite a subdued album...Fegmania!'s a, sort of, party album. It's our version of a party album. Like Transformer: it's for the whole family. It's like, 'Here's Robyn Hitchcock The Entertainer and his little bag of songs.' You could play that to anyone. I mean, 'Fegmania' even sounds cute. It really does. We hadn't played live for several years when we did that, and the music hasn't got much attack. The voice doesn't have a lot of confidence -- it just trills away. In a way, I think Element sounds stronger. Although it's more subdued, I think the actual playing's stronger, because we were back into the process of playing."
He even has the equanimity to agree with the criticism that his songs are clever but evoke little emotion.
"I think that early on that was probably true. I listen to stuff I did ten years ago, and they're just witty little songs with a lot of chords in them. And then there was this, kind of, psycho period. I mean, there was that side to it. The other side of it is there's no point in being intentionally stupid. You'd be amazed: during the whole early-New Wave period, stupidity was the key, I think. Why think with your brain if you can think with your feet? But I would say there's more emotion in my songs as they come out. I'd say these [on Element Of Light] have got more emotion in them than most of them. The idea, ultimately, is to achieve something very pure, where you hardly need any chords at all. You might need just an E chord going all the way through -- then you'd have this beautiful melody weaving in and out of it. But you'd never modulate it. You'd never have to go anywhere at all. That would be the great thing to do with a song -- and it wouldn't matter if it was being listened to by an Arab or a Latvian or someone from Sri Lanka or even someone from London. People could just hear it and it would affect them straight away -- you'd just hit the notes, and they'd affect the brain.
"And that's what I'd like to work towards. I think a lot of the stuff on the Element record is simpler: being clever is often just having meaningless elaboration for its own sake. Rococo stuff. Sometimes it's fun because it's entertaining. But there's no substitute for emotional purity. And I certainly accept that criticism regarding cleverness. Whoever voiced it, I've felt it myself sometimes."
And later on, in reply to Bill Holdship's observation that the introduction to "The Man With The Lightbulb Head" sounds something like Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song", Robyn Hitchcock says: "I can definitively claim to be uninfluenced by Led Zeppelin."
I'd like to think we can all get behind this man.
"YOU COULD STEER THIS ANY WAY. YOU COULD SAY THAT I'M ACTUALLY A QUIET AGRICULTURAL TYPE AND ALL MY STUFF IS ABOUT GARDENING."
--Robyn Hitchcock makes an observation
"Have you heard Invisible Hitchcock yet?" asks Robyn Hitchcock.
"No. Is it out yet?" answers Bill Holdship.
"It shouldn't be. But there are some import copies around," he replies. "It's got some more stuff from that session Peter Buck is on -- lots of bits and pieces where people say, 'This is nice.'"
In 1985, Hitchcock did some sessions at the home of his friend, Chris Cox, who has an 8-track recorder. What resulted is what he terms effectively an album's worth of stuff with just upright bass," some of which will be on Relativity's Invisible Hitchcock album. One very important reason it's being released is because Robyn Hitchcock material is being bootlegged lately -- a serious concern to someone who sells to a select audience.
"I hang on to masses of material, but the trouble is that someone will bootleg it," Hitchcock says. "And I was disturbed by the rising number of bootlegs that were coming out. There's two at the moment -- a Soft Boys bootleg and a Hitchcock bootleg -- which are in the racks." It turned out they were right across the street, at Schoolkids Records. The Hitchcock bootleg contains no rare tracks and is, in fact, stuff taken straight off his albums. "I'm surprised they haven't sent you a review copy," Hitchcock notes, more bemused than annoyed.
He realizes, of course, that his veriest scrap of song is -- to his diehard fans -- of inestimable worth. "The thing about outtakes is that they're always good because they're outtakes," he says. "Especially if you've got one of the few existing copies. The reason The Basement Tapes worked so well was because they weren't good recordings. It was like the word of god come down on a very crumpled piece of notepaper."
The word of god...the very phrase used to praise -- and damn -- Robyn Hitchcock in the last year or so. But Hitchcock is careful to warn, as regards any of his songs: "You shouldn't read anything into it. It doesn't mean anything at all. I'm different from my songs the way you're different from your dreams. I mean, as a songwriter, all I'm doing is dreaming in public."
Robyn Hitchcock has plans to continue to dream in public: a skilled artist, he'd like to exhibit his work in New York and London. And he says he'd like to write a feature film (although he doesn't suppose that'll happen for another five years).
For the time being, he seems resigned to people trying to dissect him. "People do spend a lot of time actually trying to lift the top off my brain to find out what's going on in there," he says. "Whether they can scoop some up and take it out of there, or just take a bite...or they want to crawl into your head and, sort of, fall asleep. And you have to protect yourself -- inevitably, there's certain basic, internal areas you have to keep private. Whatever I am as a public figure is separate from me, just as my songs are separate from me.
Go ahead and try to dissect Robyn Hitchcock. It should be fun. He told Holdship and myself that he looked forward to getting home, but added: "I watched the sun go down behind a McDonald's sign in Cincinnati last night -- I knew, spiritually, I was at home. Not that you should be blase about these things."
"About which things?" I asked. "About being home?"
"No," Robyn Hitchcock said. "Keeping alive. People say, 'What are you planning to do, Robyn?' And I just say: 'Keep alive.' No grand scheme to subvert things. Just keep alive.
"It's harder than you might think."
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