The Toronto Star
June 16, 1989
Hitchcock Prefers Buck Over Bucks
by Mitch Potter
The idea was an interview, but with giddy British rockoid Robyn Hitchcock one settles for what one gets.
Founder of the now-defunct Soft Boys and onetime lyricist for Captain Sensible, the wordy, worldly and profoundly odd Hitchcock knows the main reason for calling is to trumpet the fact that he and his Egyptians will make a second-ever Toronto appearance Thursday at the Diamond.
The show will be a surrealistic pillow fight, he predicts: a lean, raucous version of the aural blueprint that is his latest record, Queen Elvis.
A collaboration with longtime pal, R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, Hitchcock's new album weaves shades of absurd Psychedelia within the context of his habitually provocative, clever lyrics.
"Oh, not the great lyric tag," Hitchcock, 36, groans from a location near a nuclear power plant between Miami and Maine ("I won't say where, but everything here glows in the dark").
"I don't know how its evolved, but I seem to be one of the prime targets for the media label 'great lyricist'. Well, that's great -- except that the music isn't just a tease.
"People seem to brush past the music as if it's secondary. But believe me, if the lyrics were the main thing, I'd just read them out as poems and not bother with music. And I write better poems than this."
Hitchcock suggests it's the profusion of empty words in 1980s Pop that makes his musings stand out.
"Let's face it, most lyrics have actually bowed their head and gone to stand in line. Most lyrics are now content to be time-servers to the music. The words are just there for the money."
For emphasis, Hitchcock extends the theme by humming a spontaneous ditty.
"First verse goes like this: '50 cents, Two dollars, Twenty dollars'. Then halfway through the song, the band sings '1,700 dollars'. The chorus comes around and they go '5,000 dollars!'.
"And then the big finale: 'Oooh baby, half a million/Oooh baby, half a millionnnnnn!'.
"That's all most lyrics are about -- and mind you, I'm not going to object if I get that money. But I don't write lyrics for the dollar or the pound."
Queen Elvis was titled in deference to the eternal collision between British and American music -- and of course, his positive musical combustion with fellow guitarist Buck.
"The Queen is to Britain what Elvis is to The States. They're both on postage stamps, both national figureheads. And the two lands do mesh in terms of Rock.
"I found myself interested in R.E.M. because of the way they'd been influenced by British acts like Gang Of Four, Wire, and what I was doing years ago in The Soft Boys.
"Peter and I hit if off when he came across and borrowed a cat from me for the entire tour. It wasn't that he loved cats: he was insecure and wanted something to remind him of home.
"He wanted to hire the cat, but I just lent it out. In the end the cat came back -- which was a good job because it wasn't mine to lend -- and we grew to be friends."
Hitchcock, who opened three weeks of R.E.M.'s current tour with his odd, sinister musical vision, says The Egyptians live are as phantasmic as his most outside lyric.
"We have a disembodied keyboard which is now in the drums. We had a keyboardist who's now trapped -- vanished from the human eye -- wandering around in a series of MIDI leads."
Hitchcock naturally rejoices in any suggestion that his imagination is tantamount to that of a child. That conclusion fits adroitly into his favorite hypothesis on mankind.
"A child? Exactly! I've always felt that children are the real thing, and adults exist simply to breed them. The clock stopped for me at about age 14.
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