December, 1987
Robyn Hitchcock
by Robyn Hitchcock
Imagine that you are swimming through a dark tide, a tide of swirling black undercurrent with miniature chrome seahorses that are purely two-dimensional and disappear when they turn to face you. Imagine swimming through a blood-temperature darkness, orbiting a somber-but-luminous globe, inside which delicate membranes pulse in thought. Then, helplessly, you are squeezed out of the blackness like an orange pip between two slippery fingers. You are jerked into blinding white light, unbearably free from pressure, and held upside down by the legs.
This is called being born, and it happened to me in the early 1950s. My parents married -- and I was conceived -- in black and white, but that gave way to a grainy colour as the decade wore on and my eyesight developed. When I was six months old, I saw a herring nailed to a tree top. When I was two, I saw white things hanging in the sky, like slow explosions. "What's that?" I asked. "Clouds," I was told. Instantly they became duller.
We grew up in the South of England and still live there. Everyone wears a hat and rides through the mist on dime horses with lanterns hanging around their necks. Occasionally gangs of wild young people with chequered clothes scream around the corner in mini-cars listening to Rock music, then vanish towards the east. Under the bridge, dead Russians smile and an old lady rocks back and forth on a cardboard box, wiping her dirty face with asparagus. It has been like this since 1965, except there are more people under the bridge now.
My friends and family are all "Artists". I have never met an ordinary person. But I am English and so not very exotic from a distance -- like a minesweeper full of fruit and fireworks. I'm six foot two inches tall and made entirely of dead sea creatures. I have never wanted to be anything but a singer, although I'm basically a draughtsman. My songs are simply pictures. A song has no opinion. I want the pictures to be as intense as positive -- ideally one glimpse would detonate the spectator permanently. But, inevitably, things are lost in translation, or there is a delayed re-action. I have no ambition but I am very persistent. The great thing about human beings is that they can walk and eat at the same time.
Robyn Hitchcock, Dec '87
A&M Records
Press Department
595 Madison Avenue
New York, New York
(212) 826-0477
Robyn Hitchcock
Hitch Is Stranger Than Fiction
Born London, March 3, 1953
Infectious amnesia has made details of his early life murky at best...
1972 -- First public performance in a group posthumously referred to as The Beetles. Robyn was John and George simultaneously; The Walrus was Paul. They could never quite figure how Jim Morrison got in the group. One member went on to become a California jam salesman. The Beetles didn't last long...
1975 -- Hitchcock went on to join B.B. Blackberry And The Swelterettes, followed by the infamous Maureen And The Meatpackers. The latter recorded an album of material deigned so abominable that it will never be released.
1976 -- At the same time, Hitchcock formed The Soft Boys with Morris Windsor, Andy Metcalfe (later with Squeeze), and a future computer analyst, making their first record, Wading Through A Ventilator, a year later.
1978 -- The Soft Boys recorded their first LP A Can Of Bees, with a new member, Kimberley Rew, who would later join Katrina And The Waves, bringing their densely mind-expanding sound to fruition and decay.
1979 -- Invisible Hits, recorded after Metcalfe left the band, featured experimental gems "He's A Reptile", and "The Asking Tree", finally released in 1983.
1980 -- Underwater Moonlight released.
1981 -- Soft Boys crack and dissolve, synchronous with the recording of Hitchcock's first solo album, Black Snake Diamond Role.
1982 -- Groovy Decay, produced by Art Rock maven Steve Hillage, is released. Quoth Robyn, "It's terrible." The demos for the album are later released, appropriately enough, as Groovy Decoy.
1982/3 -- Hitchcock does not exist...musically.
1984 -- A solo-acoustic work, I Often Dream Of Trains, lays Robyn's songwriting bare. Descritpion: "It's like wanting to see what you're like when you take everything away."
1985 -- Fegmania!, Hitchcock's first album with The Egyptians, is released. It is Robyn's first album out Stateside, on Slash/WB. A video is made for "The Man With The Lightbulb Head", featuring a Ken doll with a GE screwed into his socket.
1985 -- Gotta Let This Hen Out!, a live album and concert-length video is recorded at The Marquee in London, and released on relativity in the U.S..
1986 -- Element Of Light, a new studio LP, is embraced heartily by press and Alternative radio alike, holding the #1 position on the college media journal chart for six weeks. Hitch graces the cover of Creem and is made much of in the music press. Robert Christgau dubs Robyn "a minor artist". Elsewhere there are debates as to Hitchcock's position as deity.
1986 -- Invisible Hitchcock, a compilation of unreleased post-Soft Boys ('82-'85) material, is released. Cover shot: Robyn, pictured clutching radishes to his brow.
February 2, 1988 -- Globe Of Frogs is a reality. Produced by Robyn And The Egyptians, it features plangent guitar work by Pete Buck on two tracks, and backing vocals by Glenn Tillbrook on one. First track released: "Balloon Man" on amphibian green vinyl.
To be continued....