The Hartford Courant
February 6, 1992
Eccentric Hitchcock Mixes Surreal Soliloquy With Song
by Roger Catlin
As eccentric as his lyrics are, it was probably no surprise that Robyn Hitchcock and his band -- The Egyptians -- left the stage at Toad's Place in New Haven after only 40 minutes Tuesday.
He began the show, after all, with a long-winded soliloquy on the birth of the East Coast -- how the whole of The United States was blown up from a kernel right here in Connecticut (and how "Jack Nicholson" was originally a city in Utah).
It didn't make much literal sense, but the Englishman's adoring audience loved the surrealistic speeches as much as they did the splendid three-piece Rock of Hitchcock and his singing compatriots -- bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor.
But just a 40-minute set?
Hitchcock, master of the unexpected, soothed their fears by coming back with an hour's worth of songs in two encores -- one acoustic and the other electric.
Long a cult favorite and Alternative Rock king, Hitchcock has come to grips with some sort of change of life lately -- so that his new songs are a little less weird than the ones he became known for (both as a solo act and as a member of Rhe Soft Boys, of which Metcalfe and Windsor were also members).
Not that any of these things would be mistaken for Paula Abdul.
If the imagery of songs like "Lysander" weren't strange enough by themselves, he would explain them (this one was about airmen in an obscure World War II English reconnaissance plane about to land behind the lines of occupied France, only to find themselves hovering over the floral dress of a huge woman who is about to swat the plane like a fly).
At any rate, the band played just about everything from his new Perspex Island. (Perspex is a British kind of plexiglass. The song "Birds in Perspex", which opened the set, concerns dead birds kept under glass that come alive -- this comes somewhat after the opening confession that "I was born with trousers on").
Armed with an electric Rickenbacker guitar most of the night, Hitchcock replicated the complicated Byrds-like playing from the album: from the irresistible Pop of "So You Think You're in Love" and "Ultra Unbelievable
Love" to the sweeping undertow of "Oceanside".
There was time for the well-chosen slections from the past. The most inspired was the three-part a cappella of "Uncorrected Personality Traits" (which, it goes on, though they might "seem whimsical in a child may prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult").
There were more old favorites in the "Unplugged" style of the first encore -- with "Lobsterman", a version of "Clean Steve" with new ad-libs that concerned lending a tape of Dylan at Toad's, and the usual sweep of "Madonna of the Wasps" and "One Long Pair of Eyes".
Hitchcock eschewed his guitar to become ersatz nightclub performer for a knees-on-the-ground version of "My Wife And My Dead Wife" before turning to more electric versions -- including one of "Balloon Man".
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