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1991
Earth Calling Robyn
He is the man for whom Peter Buck will drop everything, just to play guitar on one of his records.
He is the man whose band, The Egyptians, moonlight as Vic Reeves' rhythm section. He is the man who once expressed the heartfelt desire, in song, to be an anglepoise lamp.
He is the man who has made 15 albums, although it's very possible you'll have only heard of two or three of them.
He is the man who penned the ultimage surrealist anti-Thatcher song, "Brenda's Iron Sledge", the chorus of which went: "All aboard Brenda's iron sledge/Please don't call me Reg/It's not my name".
He is the man whose Syd Barrett fixation virtually got him crucified by a hostile media in the late-'70s when he came out of Cambridge with The Soft Boys to wind up punks.
He is the man whose teenage daughter would rather listen to Nine Inch Nails and Fields Of The Nephilim, quite frankly, than any of her dad's vinyl utterings. He is the man who lives on The Isle Of Wight and commutes to The States, where the bulk of his fanbase is. He is the man who's become good friends with Julian Cope and Billy Bragg on the basis that, y'know, if he doesn't, who will?
And his is the only artist on the planet who, when his stuff is played on the Select stereo, gets a unanimous cheer of approval.
He is Robyn Hitchcock. His new album, Perspex Island is out now.
Robyn Hitchcock's ludicrously long legs flank a table upon which rest a telephone, an ashtray, a cup of tea, an unwrapped bun, and a notepad. The notepad is particularly interesting. It's a mess of fiddly diagrams and jerky apercus with a headline that reads simply "Vic Reeves". The strange little madcap stories and dissolving dream-states that fuel Robyn's songs obviously extend to his sketching hand too.
"This country," he snarls excitingly, "is a mealy-minded, grotty, suburban, dingy, back-biting, hopelessly jealous, aimless, tail-swallowing void." He smirks, eyebrow well a-furrow. "It's great communting between California and The Isle Of Wight. Keeps my finger on the pulse of urban reality in Britain a treat."
The machinations that Robyn Hitchcock has to go through to get a record out over here are hilariously complex. In theory, A&M have him on a global contract, except that the UK branch have opted out of the agreement, citing his lack of chart action as the reason. Well, what with their Bryan Adams single only being number one for three months they're obviosly a bit strapped for cash down A&M way, so you can kind of sympathise.
Perspex Island is therefore going out over here on Go! Discs -- sponsors of Fulchester United in Viz and longtime stable to his mate Bragg. Both he and his Pal Of The Prominent Proboscis played short solo sets at this year's R.E.M. London acoustic shows. Peter Buck, moreover, plays guitar on eight of the eleven songs on Perspex Island. Robyn's genealogy is thus a tad tortured.
"Ah, yes. R.E.M.," sighs the Hitch. "We cross paths. They just seem to be there all the time. I met Peter years ago at a Mortuary Class For Beginners at Highgate Cemetery. And I met Stipe by chance in a toilet. He invited me back to his hotel and Peter was there. But of course this was the '80s, so we didn't 'jam 'til the small hours'.
"Those guys are dangerously famous," he twitches. "If I'd known they were going to be that famous I'd have worn gynaecological gloves when we shook hands, and been a bit more circumpsect. I really don't want to be known as the amiable loony who knows R.E.M.."
Not that his friendship with R.E.M. has been particularly helpful when it comes to selling out the world's arenas. This is an area he hopes the mustard-cuttingly vibrant grooves of Perspex Island will work on.
"How do I put all this in a tantalisingly positive light so that my 13 British fans can throw up? First of all, we do have a small but very fanatical British following, including some people called Laurence and Sally who follow us around and turn up to every show we do. That's how we know we've found the venue -- Laurence and Sally are waiting outside. Every single fragment of holiday they get is spent on going off to see our gigs. America, Sweden, it really doesn't pose too big a problem for them. Their life seems to consist of how many gigs they can go to. One of the reasons we're playing Britain again is to freak Laurence and Sally out, so they have to find something else to do with their holiday."
Is this kind of globetrotting worship something that he's comfortable with?
"Oh yeah," he says, looking uncomfortable, and goes off at an immediate tangent. "It's really music for people to vibrate internally to. It's very uptight. It's for people who are not sure how to express themselves. That's what's good about it. There are no loose spines in our group."
Like it or not, though, Hitchcock's surreal grasp of English, love of Captain Beefheart and Syd Barrett, and obsession with rapid growth tissues got him rubber-stamped a good while ago as someone a couple of "fnarr"s short of a Finbarr Saunders story.
"People always get it wrong," he laments patiently. "A lot of people think that because I'm not mad I must be a phoney. Or alternatively I must be on drugs. And if I'm not on drugs I must be pretending to be on drugs. Because of the lyrics I write and that whole Syd Barrett caucasian mother-fixated art school tradition to which I proudly subscribe, it's widely felt I must be some kind of loony," he laugh hollowly. "Y'know, as if some people were loonies and some weren't."
Plagued, however, by seriously problematical buggers who "grin at me knowingly at gigs 'cause they think they're inside my head already," doomed by the sceptics' bigoted view that his songs are naught but whimsical acid polemics, contemptuous of other people's need to take fistsful of drugs in order to see the things he sees as a matter of course; Robyn Hitchcock exists in a kind of no-win pharmaceutical limbo.
What, then, would he like people to think Robyn Hitchcock is for?
"Well, it's like, y'know, what's an air freshener for? An air freshener is there to purify the air. A Robyn Hitchcock is there to play the guitar and make songs up. Songs with harmonies and guitars. 'Retrodelic' (whatever you want to call it). It's a biological necessity for me to keep churning this stuff out. I will always write songs, even if no one's interested in hearing them. I've got hundreds of notebooks. Billions of cassettes. Every so often I burn the notebooks 'cause there just isn't space for them. There's just so much stuff. It's..." he laughs and shakes his head. "It's dreadful, really. But it's just metabolically essential for me to produce this stuff. It's like a spider building a web, or a bird building a nest.
"Anyway, it beats lying on the grass and waiting for the worms to eat me."
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