Stereo Review
November, 1991
Robyn Hitchcock, singer/songwriter, college-radio rock's premier surrealist, is sitting in A&M Records' New York offices talking about his home on The Isle Of Wight. "There's no one there in a leather jacket," he says. "No style victims...no groovers. There are only three people on the entire island who've ever heard of hair dye. It's my roost.
"Just imagine it pouring with rain. Green and damp and cold, lots of old people shivering on the beach eating nasty chips. Old cars bumbling around back lanes. Pubs with really nice beer. A lot of my songs were written down there.
"Airscape" is about the Isle of Wight. "Heaven", "Glass", even crummy songs like "Tropical Flesh Mandala" are about the beach."
The pastoral beauties of life along the English Channel may have inspired part of Hitchcock's latest album, Perspex Island, which critics are calling his best since his 1981 solo debut, Black Snake Diamond Role. But long-term fans will also notice a new tenderness in songs like "Birds In Perspex" -- the sound of a soul moved by something "so beautiful my heart should stop".
"My life has changed for the better," Hitchcock admits, turning to his fiancee, Cynthia Hunt, beside him. That's right, Robyn Hitchcock -- who once specialized in such grimly anti-romatic lines as, "I feel like making love to a photograph/Photographs don't smell" -- is in love. This is, to be sure, an unexpected development, especially surprising for those who've followed Hitchcock's career from its beginning at Cambridge University in 1977. Appearing at the onset of the punk boom, Hitchcock's sort-of-punk band The Soft Boys -- featuring Kimberley Rew, now of Katrina And The Waves, along with bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor, both in his current back-up, The Egyptians -- quickly became a Cambridge supergroup on the basis of their fabulous two-guitar wallop and Hitchcock's songs, which even then were fancifully spiky like no one else's. But the movement that made stars of The Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello proved confining for Hitchcock and company. "It was totalitarian in the same way that in 1967 everyone had to wear a caftan," he recalls. "So in 1977 everyone had to cut their hair short and spit."
The Soft Boys wound down after two official albums and a greatest-non-hits compilation, at which point Hitchcock began an initially ill-starred solo career. Black Snake Diamond Role drew critical raves for its well-burnished thumbnail portraits of Jim Morrison and Margaret Thatcher, but it wasn't released in The States (on Glass Fish) until the CD era was well underway. The follow-up, the now-deleted Groovy Decay (Albion) "was one of the things that just caused me to get rid of everybody," Hitchcock says. Another ex-Soft Boy, Matthew Seligman, produced the original sessions, then quit halfway through. Later, Hitchcock became unhappy with the second version, produced by Steve Hillage -- so unhappy that he reissued the album as Groovy
Decoy, substituting Seligman's demos for all but four of Hillage's tracks. "I felt I'd become the property of other people's whims," Hitchcock says. "I was being passed around like a shopping bag."
Hitchcock then quit music temporarily, re-emerging in 1984 with I Often Dream of Trains (on Glass Fish again), a stripped-bare vehicle for his voice, one or two overdubbed instruments, and deep lyrical introspection. Shortly afterwards, he reunited with his reliable Soft Boys rhythm section, recruited keyboard player Roger Jackson, and "hit the wide-open goodies of America" to promote 1985's Fegmania! (on Slash).
"It was fun because it was the first time the three of us had played together for five years," Hitchcock recalls, adding that he credits the longevity of his relationship with Metcalfe and Windsor to "a sense of destiny, a sense that something's there and we're going to get it, like blind people going shopping -- the discount baked beans must be somewhere. We're all timid, introverted people who are able to turn this inside-out for a performance. We represent a strain of English personality virus."
Fegmania! was welcomed (at least by the cult audience that bought it) as a triumphant return to form. It catapulted Hitchcock to college-radio stardom with songs like "My Wife And My Dead Wife" and set the stage for more albums and
tours. Invisible Hitchcock (Glass Fish, 1986) was a compilation of odd experiments recorded largely without The Egyptians, containing the now prophetic "All I Wanna Do Is Fall In Love" and "Raymond Chandler Evening", possibly his best ballad. "Half of it was recorded for free in people's houses," Hitchcock says. "People remember it fondly as our last independent album. That was the height of our trendiness."
Finally, Hitchcock hit major-label land with Globe of Frogs (1988) and Queen Elvis (1989), his first albums for A&M. Getting in bed with a big-time record company was not without its perils, of course, especially since Hitchcock has been blessed/plagued with comparisons to John Lennon, whom he resembles vocally, as well as Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett and The Byrds. "We sat around this very table," he says, laughing, "and I said, 'We don't want to be the new anything. We are us, that's it. Don't try to market us as somebody else.'
"In fact, there was not much change, but gradually, everything you said you'd never do, you do. If you're lucky, you get to shake hands with Arnold Schwarzenegger."
After the first two A&M albums came Eye on Twin/Tone, another album in the personal mode of Trains but even more solitary. "Every so often you wonder what it would be like if you weren't making decisions by committee," Hitchcock says of his brief detour back to a small label. "I just wanted to be on my own, as naked and simple as possible."
The new Perspex Island, produced by Paul Fox (who's also worked with XTC), goes to the other extreme with a thick stew of overdubbed guitars by Hitchcock and R.E.M.'s Peter Buck. "Paul helped tune us in to a good state," Hitchcock says. "He made us feel the songs were live performances rather than another dreary old studio backing track." The songs for Perspex Island were written when Hitchcock sat down at his kitchen table, after a six-month break from songwriting, and composed fifty new tunes in one burst, a process he calls "machismo through verbiage". Eleven were ultimately recorded.
"When they come, they come," he says of his songs. "It's like fishing. I was certainly in a better state writing than in the past. It's not quite the disgusted-animal-looking-down-at-its-own-body syndrome...not so much existential horror.
"
Actually, there are love songs of every description -- songs of longing ("If You Go Away"), songs of regret ("Earthly Paradise"), songs of giddiness ("Ultra Unbelievable Love"). They've all got their sell-by dates tattooed on their necks. [The song is] a miserable howl, basically."
Still, sure to be most astonishing to his core audience are the many moments of overt vulnerability, the sort of emotionalism other songwriters get rich on but Hitchcock has never even bothered to fake. "That's because in the early
Seventies everyone was so painfully sincere," Hitchcock explains. "Everyone ran out of steam and got really stoned and began feeling sorry for themselves, and I hated that. I couldn't stand that wimpy stuff, partly because I was afraid
of those same wimpy feelings in myself and partly because that music was genuinely dreary. Later I began to feel more compassion.
"I'm not trying to do the same thing I was doing with The Soft Boys," he says, summing up his current approach. "In those days we were trying to demolish cliches, demolish sentiment, demolish good, demolish all that yucky girly
long-winded pink stuff. And now I'm swanning around in a tutu, happy as ever."
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