Spin
September, 1991
Robyn Hitchcock & The Egytpians
Perspex Island
by Ivan Kreilkamp
Robyn Hitchcock's art-punk rock band The Soft Boys (the name a cut-and-paste
job on two William Burroughs novels, The Soft Machine and The Wild Boys) posed the question, "Why just be a young man with a guitar and a Syd Barrett obsession -- why not be a pretty girl in the shower scene from Psycho, or an Anglepoise lamp (whatever that was)?" Although his song "Human Music" was made into a manifesto when Homestead Records borrowed the title for a label compilation a couple years ago, Hitchcock actually found it difficult to be human, and liked to fantasize about other possibilities. In "The Man Who nvented Himself", Hitchcock pronounced himself a David Bowie Pop role-player or an alternate universe. At a time when he had no reason to believe the world knew he existed, Hitchcock abused the rock song as a format for personality transfiguration: he was a star, albeit one with "invisible hits."
As he left his band and became something like a real star (among white college students, anyway), Hitchcock's music increasingly revealed a dangerous preference for self-expression over communication. The Soft Boys' success had been sustained by Hitchcock's very talented bandmates, and apart from their dazzling context his eccentricity started to seem too much the point. Hitchcock's best early songs weren't shaggy-dog stories -- they sprang from primordially strong emotions: the desire to become ("(I Wanna
Be An) Anglepoise Lamp"), the impulse to annihilate ("I Wanna Destroy You"). Surreal imagery counts for little if it's free-floating apart from any real feeling, and too much of Hitchcock's solo career has been spent cultivating an affected personality.
Fortunately, Perspex Island hints at Hitchcock's healthy disenchantment with his own wacky persona (although there are a few annoying moments, like the
weird background vocals on "Child of the Universe"). On "Ride", Hitchcock looks back with a shrug at a "long hard decade" and shuffles into the next one, amiably inviting the listener along. Several songs evoke those heady moments of wanting to be or destroy someone else, while recognizing that one tends to be stuck with oneself: no more will Hitchcock transmogrify before our eyes. "She Does't Exist" is the confession of a man cursed with pathological solipsism: "I tell myself it would be different now/I wouldn't treat her that way/I wouldn't be me if she wasn't her/And it's far too late anyway/She doesn't exist anymore". What sounds at first like glib wordplay says something true about a pattern of emotional failure.
Perspex Island ends stunningly with "Earthly Paradise", a long dreamy ballad with steel-guitar shadings. The song unexpectedly terminates with these lines, conveying real bitterness of mysterious origin: "The bastards that destroy our lives are sometimes just ourselves/But mostly they're invisible/I hope they fry in hell". That final invective floats up like a bubble in the
langorous music, proving that Hitchcock still has something left he cares about
enough to despise.
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