The Trouser Press Guide
1991 Edition
Robyn Hitchcock
by Michael Pietsch
Robyn Hitchcock's entire body of work -- both as leader of The Soft Boys and as a solo performer -- remains one of the great undiscovered treasures of modern Pop music. Psychedelic Pop of the '60s provides the touchstone for his melodic, emotional compositions; but Hitchcock blends his own ideas with those of John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart, The Doors, and The Byrds to create music that advances the tradition rather than merely recapitulating
it.
Black Snake Diamond Role, his first solo salvo, opens with two jaunty music-hall ditties but quickly descends to Hitchcock's typical deranged concerns. He offers a sardonic knock at authority in "Do Policemen Sing?" (which feautres a chorus like a frenzied hail of blows) and a melodic, cracked-crystal ballad, "Acid Bird", whose mood and production could stand proud next to "Eight Miles High". Alternate takes on emotion -- "Meat" (all brash) and "Love" (all heart) -- finish off each side.
Groovy Decay, produced by Steve Hillage, has a smoother sound that somewhat undermines the dark emotion and irony that are Hitchcock's greatest strengths. Still, great songs gleam through the mix. "Fifty Two Stations" stunningly captures the alternation of rage, resignation, and hope that follows the failure of love, while "St. Petersburg" views only the black side. "Grooving On An Inner Plane" blends an arch Rap-styled vocal into a fluid groove (Sara Lee is the album's bassist) with stirring results.
In a surprising move four years later, Hitchcock did it his way by putting out the revisionist Groovy Decoy. With almost an identical set of songs, the entirely reordered Decoy uses only four of Decay's recordings, substituting simple but effective demos produced (and played on) by one-time Soft Boys bassist Matthew Seligman for the rest. The results are a bit rudimentary next to the original release, but Hitchcock fans will want to hear both.
After nearly two years of self-imposed retirement, Hitchcock returned in 1984 with a surprising, mostly acoustic album, I Often Dream Of Trains. Peforming nearly all the instruments and vocals himself, he echoed the solo work of his models - Barrett in the amiably slapdash production and Lennon on an aching ballad, "Flavour Of Night". The album features Hitchcock's usual balance of bitterness and weirdness in unusual settings, rounded off with piano nocturnes at the start and finish. Two bizarre a capella close-harmony essays -- "Uncorrected Personality Traits" (about difficult children when they grow up) and "Furry Green Atom Bowl" (about life's biological processes) -- make this one of the stranger outings in a career dedicated to strangeness.
Fegmania!, which features several old Soft Boy cronies in a new band, The Egyptians, shows Hitchcock polishing the best aspects of his craft to a new sheen, achieving a mature merger of lyric with melody (particularly on the morbidly catchy "My Wife And My Dead Wife" and the beautiful emotional study, "Glass") which sacrifices none of the urgency that brings his best songs to life. He has also continued to hone his sound, adding instruments to create a rich, ringing production that highlights his superb guitar textures and Andy Metcalfe's moody basslines amid a variety of settings.
Gotta Let This Hen Out! is an essential live album recorded April '85 at London's Marquee. Sampling all of his prior albums for items like "Brenda's Iron Sledge", "Heaven", "My Wife And My Dead Wife", and tossing in the acerbic "Listening To The Higsons" (a non-LP single that contains the live album's title, borrowed from a Higsons song), Hitchcock and the three Egyptians -- Metcalfe, Morris Windsor, and Roger Jackson -- do a fine job of putting the songs across in crisp, energetic fashion. A great introduction for neophytes, and a treat for fans. (Exploding In Silence, available only on picture disc, contains six live cuts, only half of them from the album.)
Except for a creeping trace of self-conscious weirdness-for-its-own-sake lyrics, the exceptionally melodic Element Of Light is another terrific addition to Hitchcock's oeuvre. The descending drama of "If You Were A Priest", the arcing delicacy of "Winchester" and "Airscape", as well as the moddy restraint of "Raymond Chandler Evening" put the well-rehearsed Egyptians (especially Metcalfe on fretless bass) to fine use; while still leaving Hitchcock's plain-but-appealing voice a clear field in which to operate. Most of the record is unmistakably Hitchcock, although it does include two eerie Lennon recreations: "Somewhere Apart" and "Ted, Woody And Junior".
Recycling a Soft Boys LP title, Invisible Hitchcock is a compilation of assorted outtakes dating from 1981-'85. A few songs (like "Grooving On An Inner Plane") had previously surfaced in different versions, but most are heard here for the first time. The simple recording quality and mostly non-electric performances with various assortments of sidemen are entirely adequate, if not strictly consistent. Invisible may not be crucial but it is certainly illuminating -- and a handful of rough gems ("All I Wanna Do Is Fall In Love", "Trash", "Give Me A Spanner, Ralph", "I Got A Message For You") make it a worthwhile purchase.
Thanks to the power of college radio and the music press, Hitchcock's growing popularity brought him a contract with A&M, which released his American major-label debut. Unfortunately, Hitchcock's obscurely lucid liner notes on Globe Of Frogs are more fascinating than the album, which neglects tuneful songwriting in favor of big beat exercises that would mask insubstantial content with busy production. "Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)" and "Chinese Bones" -- beautiful Pop confections featuring R.E.M. guitarist Pete Buck -- keep things from sinking. But "Balloon Man" and the title track, while both likably silly, underscore Hitchcock's annoying tendency to be self-consciously absurdist.
Queen Elvis is the nadir of Hitchcock's by now substantial body of work. The song structures are overly familiar, the weirdness seems forced and, worst of all, the emotions don't seem real. He seems to have tapped out the veins he'd mined so rewardingly for more than a decade.
Eye is Hitchcock's finest release since the first explosion of his post-Soft Boys career. Like I Often Dream Of Trains, this is a predominantly acoustic solo effort on which he casts off the influence of bandmates and producers to create a work of astonishing delicacy, beauty, honesty, and power. As if to underscore the improvement, "Queen Elvis" is easily superior to anything on the LP with which it shares only a title. "Linctus House" is a gorgeous meditation on flagging love with the achingly drawn-out chorus "I don't care anymore". "Executioner" teases the entrails of another failed romance ("I know how Judas felt/But he got paid"). But the record opens with the jaunty proclamation "I'm in love with a beautiful girl", so maybe things aren't so bad after all. In any case, Eye finds Hitchcock still playing complex guitar figures, bending song structures and laying bare his emotions as no one has since Barrett recorded his dementia-in-progress.
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