Los Angeles Times
July 9, 1992
Rock Like An Egyptian
There's An Adventurous Tilt To the Music Of Robyn Hitchcock And Alex Chilton
by Mike Boehm
Don't feel too out of touch if you're a rock fan who has never heard of Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians or Alex Chilton. Both acts are quintessential cult-Rock, college-radio items. But if your listening tastes sometimes tilt toward the adventurous, you might want to consider giving this all-acoustic double bill a tumble.
Hitchcock already has provided one of this year's most memorable Pop moments hereabouts. It happened at the Coach House in March, toward the end of an engaging-but-until-that-point-rather-reserved set by Hitchcock and his longtime backing duo, The Egyptians (bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor).
Hitchcock stopped playing and began to deliver a sermon about the need for sincerity and depth of feeling in music. It could have been the keynote speech at a songwriters' seminar -- except that, to deliver it the English rocker assumed the guise and patter-ridden cadences of that oiliest, most suspect and patently insincere creature of the entertainment depths: the American lounge singer.
Hitchcock's little performance piece raised all sorts of questions about meaning and subterfuge. Should we dismiss the idealistic message because the messenger is so obviously untrustworthy? Are we living in an age so fraught with irony and suspect motives that only somebody as clearly knave-ish and manipulative as a lounge slickster (or a family-values spouting politician) would try to get away with trumpeting idealistic blather about sincerity? In the best Hithcockian tradition, Robyn's bit of schtick was hilarious in a cracked sort of way. But it also made you think.
Hitchcock has been making records since 1977; when he teamed with Metcalfe, Windsor and future Katrina And The Waves member Kimberley Rew in The Soft Boys. Along with psychedelic revivalism inspired by The Beatles and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, Hitchcock became known for the strangeness of his conceits. His songs -- while sufficiently melodic and well-crafted to be accessible -- tended to be eccentric, humorous menageries populated by fish, fowl, and ghosts.
Shortly after doing his lounge-singer impersonation at the Coach House, Hitchcock launched into "My Wife And My Dead Wife", one of his oddest concoctions. What registered as he sang a slow, balladic rendering of the song wasn't its lunacy, but rather the very depth of feeling that Robyn-as-lounge-act had been so dubiously proclaiming. The song concerns the absurdity and confusion and danger that would result if your deceased ex- decided to haunt your happily reconstructed marital life. In Hitchcock's concert reading pain, loss, and enduring love overrode the song's oddities and laugh lines. When you lose someone that close, Hitchcock made clear, you never really get over it.
On their excellent 1991 album, Perspex Island, Hitchcock And The Egyptians seemed to be coming down on the side of openness and sincerity -- and trying to shed the layers of symbol and absurdity that had sometimes served as a fogging device.
On the fetching, jangly (that's R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, a Hitchcock fan from way back, joining in jangling) Pop-Rock-er, "So You Think You're In Love", Hitchcock urged against reticence and fear and suggested that lovers show their feelings as openly as possible. "Birds In Perspex" -- as beautiful a Rock song as the '90s have so far produced -- was a meditation on the things that keep us from unburdening our deepest emotions: barriers so difficult to surmount, they seem inborn.
Well I take off my clothes with you
But I'm not naked underneath
I was born with trousers on
Just about like everyone
Rather than leave those barriers up, Hitchcock clinches the song with a chorus of rising harmonies and affirmative rhythmic surge, as he declares (or perhaps pleads): "Birds in perspex, come alive" (perspex being a clear plastic suitable for encasing bird figurines and other inanimate objects). The same old quizzical Robyn, singing about fowl yet again? No, this time what he has in mind is wonderfully clear: a yearning for the clarity of naked feeling, with no need for layers of pretense and artifice.
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