TOPmagazine
April 1988
Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians
An Entertaining Slant On The Pop Tradition
by Fiona McWilliam
In a designer suit with stubble to match, Robyn Hitchcock, ex-Soft Boy, seems very relaxed. He has recently recorded, together with The Egyptians (Morris Windsor and Andy Metcalfe), an impressive new album. Titled, with true Hitchcockian idiosyncrasy, Globe Of Frogs, it's the band's debut release for A&M.
Hitchcock is content with the result: "It was recorded at Alaska Studios under the arches at Waterloo, where we recorded a lot of The Soft Boys stuff...side two is the best musical thing we've ever done, the best dynamics."
The music has retained the trademarks which we have come to expect. A melodic sense rooted firmly in the good bits of the '60s: semi-sung verses tumbling into irresisitible choruses, mildly flickering electricity becoming addictive through familiarity. Stndout tracks and individual star turns are eschewed in favour of the flow, but it would still be nice to see Hitchcock do "Balloon Man" on Top Of The Pops. R.E.M.'s Peter Buck strums a 12-string guitar on "Chinese Bones" and the intriguingly-titled "Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)" and Glenn Tillbrook of Squeeze provides harmonies on the latter track, but the record belongs to Hitchcock like a private possession.
Since forming in 1984 from the disbaded remnants of The Soft Boys, Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians have been stalwarts of British "Dippy Pop". It's apparently this "Britishness" which explains their cult status in the USA: "Maybe they like our stuff because it seems to them like an old Chippendale table or an old grandfather clock," explains Hitchcock.
"You know, a bit of pedigree English craftmanship like old Wilfrid Hyde-White out in Los Angeles. So, they wave it around and say, 'Oy, it's English.' The English aren't so sure because it doesn't -- it's not even desinged to -- fit. My big interest in life is things that don't work, things that are wrong."
In spite of this, Hitchcock is quick to establish his "normality": that is, his dislike of media pigeonholing. Musical nonconformist he may be, but weird, no. "People have to identify you by something. They've got to give you a line, and you can't escape that. I respect the Pop tradition enormously; and I came out of that. You know, I don't come out of...I wasn't spewed from the bowels of Pluto. I'm not of Transylvanian origin. I'm just another ordinary middle-class kid from the '60s. I like good stuff in the Pop tradition.
"There's a, sort of, herd mentality about Pop music which has probably always been there, but I think it's particularly crushing at the moment. The power to conform is getting very, very intense. There's that, kind of, insecurity that doesn't encourage people to expand. Things are so, kind of, colourless these days, it's as if people are using a political excuse to produce totalitarian, drab lyrics."
So, what inspires a man to write such bizarre and colourful -- he denies they're eccentric -- songs?
"I've never looked for a train of thought, they always find me. I don't think I've ever written a song from what I've seen in a newspaper or anything from TV. They just turn up, they just come wandering in like very old, very determined bloodhounds, and you can't get rid of them. Then they sit around and smell until you've fed them and they go away again. That's about the most accurate way I can describe my songs. They've nothing to do with me, really. I simply shape them. I decide what clothes the idea should be dressed in, and then send it back out again.
"Maybe you've got a title and you go from that -- and it does help to have a title. It's like having a name for a child before it's born: it gets things off to a positive footing. If you haven't got a title, you may write a song and find that the thing has no identity and you have to scrap it. I often abandon perfectly adequate songs because they've got no title, no purpose.
"Alternatively, I play the guitar and I start singing and then I know what sort of form it's going to have. I give it a code name for a title and the words evolve around the music. But the basic line, it all comes in one go. In the old days I used to write words and then set them to music. But now the basic thing comes in one job; five seconds ago it wasn't there and now it is. And this might be the greatest song. I mean, it probably won't," Robyn Hitchcock laughs. "I have been trying for years."
Their commercial "catches" may not equal George Michael's, but Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians are persistent with their music: "It gets the hype in America. That's nice because not many people get any hype as it's not an easy thing to get in the business, or to have a sustained career, as opposed to being a Pop idol for three years and then having to open a butcher's shop or spend the rest of your life trying to make comebacks. We're lucky, we've got a career, a, sort of, slow and steady thing."
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