The Washington Post
January 31, 1992
Winging It With Hitchcock
by Jeanne Cooper
"Did you ever hover in the distance?" asks Robyn Hitchcock on "Oceanside", the first track on the latest -- and most commercially successful -- album by the guitarist-singer-songwriter and his band, The Egyptians. "Did you ever swoop down from the sky?".
They're appropriate questions for a man who's made a career out of his fascination with not only birds, but all sorts of beasts and botany. (Song titles such as "Vegetable Friend", "Furry Green Atom Bowl", and "Madonna Of The Wasps" are standard fare.) But after 20 years of hovering in the cult-music distance, it appears the eagle has landed: a Number 1 college radio album (Perspex Island) and single ("So You Think You're in Love"). On Saturday, Hitchcock and company will swoop into Lisner Auditorium on a whirlwind college-town tour.
"These shows are going to be very different from last year," says the 39-year-old Englishman, calling from his home on The Isle Of Wight. "Those were very much like a college lecture with a few songs thrown in (or something). They had that aura. This is much more of a Rock show. I'm not going to be saying a lot because I'm going to be busy playing."
The songs performed by Hitchcock And The Egyptians -- bassist-keyboardist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor, his fellow former Soft Boys -- will also vary from those heard at his annual Birchmere and 9:30 club solo appearances.
"I think we've organized the show better. The songbook will be different. You won't have heard a lot of this. A lot of those old songs, when I was out last year, I, kind of, finished them off," Hitchcock says. "The oldest song is [1981's] 'Acid Bird'. But we don't do anything from The Soft Boys era (or anything), and half of it's Perspex Island. But there's a lot of stuff that we'll be doing differently (I hope), and acoustically.
"Don't walk out when we say goodnight: we don't really mean that," he warns. "We're going to clean up for a minute, catch our breath, and then there's an acoustic section of the show. The aim is really to try to get the best of both worlds: the Rock band and the, sort of, intimate, acoustic cabaret stuff."
You can hear Hitchcock's acoustic talents live on the new The Best of Mountain Stage, Vol. 2 (Blue Plate Records) -- along with Neo-Folk-Rock tracks by R.E.M., Michelle Shocked, and John Wesley Harding (among others). But it's the driving Melodic Rock of Perspex Island -- which features R.E.M.'s guitarist Peter Buck on several tracks -- that has garnered his widest audience yet.
"Our music is very traditional. It always has been," says Hitchcock. "In Britain we were never what you would call quote 'New Wave'. In The States they may have thought of us as that, but we certainly weren't."
In fact, The Byrds and The Beatles form a large part of The Egyptians' bestiary. It's a heritage shared with opening act Matthew Sweet, whose album Girlfriend has been dubbed "Beatlesque" almost as often as Lennonist-leaning Hitchcock has.
"'Beatlesque' means you play the guitar, you stand on two legs, and you sing in English. Just about anybody could be Beatlesque, I suppose," Hitchcock says with a touch of weariness. "It means you're not like 2 Live Crew. Tom Petty is Beatlesque, for chrissakes. It's one of our great Western traditions. But it's a bit like saying that somebody's got hair (or somebody's got skin)."
Despite the radio-friendly sound of "Ride" and "Ultra Unbelievable Love" -- the most recent singles -- Perspex Island is not without Hitchcock's trademark verbal weirdness. "I'd take off my clothes with you, but I'm not naked underneath/I was born with trousers on", he sings on the lushly melancholy "Birds in Perspex".
His quirky turns of phrase and desire for privacy (the quote's an apt description of his guardedness in interviews) have earned him the reputation of being somewhat eccentric -- a description he discounts with a laugh.
"I think I'm too self-conscious to be a genuine eccentric," he explains. "The picture of an eccentric is usually some kind of old person, struggling around as a tangent to how everybody else is, with a suitcase tied up in string (or walking through customs with a big cauliflower over their shoulder and a head scarf, or old people dressed in bright colors refusing to resign themselves to the dowdiness of old age, not looking like an English field in winter). For which you could equally read 'mad hippie' -- because they do those things as well.
"People are usually annoyed by them as well, because they seem to be defiantly at odds with the way that 'everyone' is supposed to act. There's something rather irritating about eccentrics. I don't think I'm particularly eccentric. I think everybody is different from everybody else -- and some people make their differences more apparent. By the same token, if everybody is different, everybody is all the same."
Hitchcock's originality is also displayed in his imaginative, creature-filled paintings and drawings (which crop up on many of his album covers (including Perspex Island) and sometimes T-shirts). But with six Egyptians albums in as many years -- and seven solo albums and an EP in the last 11 years -- he has limited time for his visual art.
"You obviously can't paint in the tour bus, because it bumps up and down. But I still take drawing materials with me. But you can't draw a lot because you just get into this distracted state. Because something's always happening every two-and-a-half minutes to distract your attention, you inevitably wind up drugged -- usually with the television."
The tour started Tuesday at Buck's 40-Watt Club in Athens, Georgia -- where Hitchcock began recording Perspex Island last Christmas with Buck and XTC producer Paul Fox. (R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe is also represented on the album and "Dark Green Energy", B-side to "Ultra Unbelievable Love".) But the location is insignificant to journeyman Hitchcock, who splits his time among The Isle Of Wight, San Francisco, and occasionally Annapolis -- home of his girlfriend's parents.
"We've started about three tours in Athens. I've no idea why. They just send us to Athens, and then we start going up. We're following the classic route," he says, and pauses. True to form, something furry comes to mind. "If we were, you know, blind skunks, we would just be able to navigate our way by now. We've left our trails all over the place."
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