Los Angeles Times
April 24, 1993
Camping At Pop's Pinnacle
Singer-Songwriter Robyn Hitchcock Puts An Absurdist Spin On The Issues That Haunt Him -- And Us
He Performs In San Juan Capistrano Tonight
by Mike Boehm
There are any number of Pop Rock singers with greater natural talent than Robyn Hitchcock -- although his thin, chesty-nasal voice is sufficient to get the job done (particularly with helpful harmony support from bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor, his confederates in Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians).
There also are better Rock songwriters than Hitchcock. But not many. At least not lately. In terms of melodiousness, philosophical resonance, breadth of imagination, and cohesiveness of vision few have outdone the British musician's most recent albums, Perspex Island (1991) and the newly released Respect.
It's as an extemporizer that Hitchcock stands at or near the pinnacle of Pop. In concert, his impromptu spoken riffs can be as entertaining as his catchy musical ones.
Playing the Coach House last summer, Hitchcock carried on in the tradition of one of his big influences, Monty Python's Flying Circus, spinning an absurdist tale about trying to save a whale beached in a pond of soapsuds (and somehow relating that to the Bosnian crisis). You had to be there.
Hitchcock will be back singing and -- if the mood strikes -- extemporizing at the Coach House tonight, and on Tuesday at The Palace in Hollywood. Speaking over the phone this week from a hotel in Dallas, it was clear that he hasn't lost his knack for fanciful, simile-strewn descriptions leading to offbeat conclusions.
Ask Hitchcock where he is, and he won't simply say "Dallas" or "a hotel room". He'll draw you a picture.
"I'm on the sixth floor of a hotel in Dallas, which looks out over a shopping mall. And there are people ice skating down below. It's like some huge, ghastly television set tuned to one channel, and it occupies the whole wall," he said of his vista. "There are huge, glass modules sliding silently up and down the walls: a vision of the obsolete future."
On his new album, Hitchcock imagines himself dead and departed from this world of shopping malls with glass elevators -- but still chattering away beyond the grave with his new acquaintances and prospective dinner partners: god and the devil.
Death has long been a favorite song topic for Hitchcock, who now has released 17 albums in a 15-year recording career. "My Wife And My Dead Wife", which dates from the mid-'80s, is one of his best: a comically imaginative (but also deeply poignant) song about a man haunted by a ghostly presence.
On that song -- and the others he wrote about death -- Hitchcock was drawing primarily on imagination. But he says that the songs on Respect were written last year while his father was dying -- the first time in the rocker's 40 years that death had intruded so personally.
The haunted protagonist of "Dead Wife" was fictional. But the haunted man in "Railway Shoes" is Hitchcock himself. "Then You're Dust", the album's penultimate song, is a dark contemplation of deathly finality that came to him while he was walking the grounds of his father's house. It's an unusual song for Hitchcock, who typically has written about death as one in a chain of magical transformations that repeatedly crop up in his songs.
Rather than end the album on such a bleak note, Hitchcock follows it with the comic novelty song "Wafflehead", a double-entendre-filled celebration of the sex drive -- which is, after all, organic life's fundamental response to the fact of death.
"When somebody dies, you're posed with this problem: how do you relate to somebody who isn't there? You're in a relationship with nothing suddenly. And that's what you have to come to terms with," Hitchcock said.
"People talk about grieving and letting go. The deceased has to change, and your relationship has to change, and you have to carry on somehow. That's the problem with the dead. They clutter up your life. There are people as-yet unborn in Northern Ireland who will kill each other because of the ghosts of their ancestors. The ghosts that keep the conflict going."
As for what lies in wait for us after death, Hitchcock entertains a hopeful vision: "In the afterlife it's very possible you review your whole life on a tickertape (or printout or floppy disk). You're judged not by the devil or god, but by yourself. It seems to me if you're judged by other people, the judgment is futile and you can't learn."
Hitchcock's interest in transformations of being has led to songs filled with fanciful creatures undergoing metamorphoses (although he has tried on recent albums to lock up his old menagerie of symbolic birds, fish and insects; and concentrate on more direct expression).
"I used to read a lot of Greek myths when I was young (and Roman and Norwegian). I never read the Egyptian ones until later. But I'm not intentionally mythologizing," Hitchcock said of his penchant for writing about things that change shape.
"I'm as influenced by The Flash and Green Lantern as by Shakespeare or Samuel Beckett. I was drenched in American comic books [as a boy]. I dreamed of coming to America just to buy comic books. Me and my mad cousin, Lawrence. I don't think he ever grew up.... Then The Beatles were happening -- and Bob Dylan. And the die was cast."
Hitchcock emerged with The Soft Boys, whose four-album catalogue from the late- 1970s and early-'80s was recently reissued on CD by the Rykodisc label (the band also included future Egyptians Windsor and Metcalfe).
He has continued in a classic Pop Rock style that borrows most directly from The Beatles, The Byrds and the psychedelic days of the Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd. On the new album, the arrangement and title of "The Wreck Of The Arthur Lee" pay tribute to Love, while "Serpent At The Gates Of Wisdom" affectionately recalls The Band.
Nowadays, Hitchcock is thinking about setting aside all that Pop acumen and exploring other artistic interests.
"I wrote 40 songs for Perspex Island and 40 for Respect. I'm just written out. So I'm not even trying" to write more, he said. "We have absolutely no plans whatsoever as regards to recording. But I do have plans for an art exhibition sometime in the fall of '94."
Hitchcock said that Jefferson Holt, manager of R.E.M., is helping him to arrange showings for his surrealistic paintings (R.E.M. has cited Hitchcock as an influence and a favorite, and both Peter Buck and Michael Stipe appeared on Perspex Island).
"I've been painting now fairly consistently for the last seven years, but I've never done anything professionally with it," Hitchcock said. "I do it when I'm fed up with writing songs (or if I need a painting for an album cover). I'm also working on a cartoon for Details magazine," and talking to comic-book publishers about placing his work.
Hitchcock-the-raconteur will also be represented in this summer's Lollapalooza tour, contributing a sequence to a video display of spoken-word performances to be shown on the festival midway.
"I'm just going to exercise my other skills," said Hitchcock, who lives in Washington with his American girlfriend. His 17-year-old daughter lives in London, and he has a 20-year-old stepson who attends Oxford.
"In the future there will be fewer shows. I would like [The Egyptians] to always be able to play together, and I would like to play on my own. It all depends where the money is. The final, brutal truth -- whether you're Paul McCartney or me -- is that if you can make money on tour, you do it rather than having to work in a grocer's shop. If I could support myself out of my other activities, I'd do far less touring as the years go by. And fewer records as well. It's not as if we haven't made enough."
If he were to plunge into another album, Hitchcock said, "Right now the songs I would like to write would be very, very sad. But I don't really have the armory to do it. There are ways I limit myself emotionally, because I'm a comedian."
He cited a saying: "'Life is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.' I've been on the thinking side. But what I really like are songs that make me cry. John Lennon, Van Morrison. That's what it's about, not how many species of flora and fauna you can namecheck in a song.
"I guess I'd like to write stuff that was just emotionally devastating," he said. "People would put it on and they'd really feel something. Or else I'd produce a record that makes people intensely happy. But it's very hard to be upbeat."
Instead, Hitchcock is left with thoughtful music that is hardly devoid of emotion -- even if it incorporates intellectual abstractions rather than paring expression down to the primal cry of a Lennon, or the spiritual flights of a Morrison.
"What comes off is a shuffling, 'Yes, I'll get on with it'" attitude about life, he said of his work. "Most of them turn out, kind of, shrugging their shoulders in self-defense and getting on the best they can."
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