The San Francisco Chronicle
April 25, 1993
Hitchcock Has A New Plot
by Michael Snyder
When you ask Robyn Hitchcock about his bizarre lyrics, he readily admits he's not a typical moon-June tunesmith. His song titles alone should tip you off: "Balloon Man", "My Wife And My Dead Wife", "The Yip Song", "Wafflehead".
"Rock lyrics are pretty bound up in the same subjects," said Hitchcock, the British singer and guitarist who headlines The Warfield on Wednesday night. "As a songwriter, you're encouraged not to stray from desire and rejection as your topics. But my songs are more like short stories, or films. They're not based on conventional, external reality like those of a Tom Waits."
Although he often creates the sort of fanciful English Folk Pop that The Beatles and Donovan toyed with in the '60s, Hitchcock's terrain is usually further out. Yet, Respect, Hitchcock's latest album, could be his most emotionally direct and accessible work. It is certainly not as willfully obscure or absurd as some of his earlier albums, which include his oddball paeans to unlikely subjects -- insects and marine life -- and fantastic conceits such as his song "The Man With The Lightbulb Head".
His fans include the members of R.E.M., who covered his song "Arms Of Love". It's a romantic number that might be one of his most reachable compositions. A version by Hitchcock himself can be found on Respect, which is his 18th album (if you include imports, compilations, and his reign in the '70s as leader of the unconventional Folk Rock band The Soft Boys).
Respect is dedicated to his late father, Raymond Hitchcock. A few of the songs on the album deal with death and dying, particularly "When I Was Dead" and "Then You're Dust". It turns out that Hitchcock's eccentricities may have been genetically determined.
"My father was a painter and a sculptor and an author," said Hitchcock in a phone interview last week. "I am my father's son. He had a number of books published. One was about Stonehenge being stolen and made invisible by MI5 (which is the British equivalent of the CIA). In another of his books, a woman gives birth to a rubber tire. There's one about Jonah being trapped in the belly of a spaceship.
"When a parent dies, a bit of you dies. One morning when he was in hospital and he couldn't walk anymore, I treaded around to the places he used to go. I was carrying my guitar and walking in his steps, singing 'Then You're Dust'. Sometimes, I go and sing where his body was laid out."
Hitchcock splits time between an apartment in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown district and his house on Great Britain's quaint Isle Of Wight -- where he wrote and recorded the majority of Respect. "The Isle Of Wight has been sliding serenely into the past for the past 100 years. There's hardly anyone living there who's under 50. There are no clubs or nightlife, except for the pubs. It's quite beautiful and quite desolate."
He's playing The Warfield with his band, The Egyptians -- which includes bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor. He also will do an in-store mini-concert at 4 p.m. Thursday at Rough Trade Records on Haight Street. It's kind of a homecoming for him.
"I used to visit San Francisco a lot," he said. "I wasn't really a resident. I just was in pursuit of various relationships -- like a mouse following cheese. What I like about San Francisco may cause me to ultimately move there: a, sort of, unhinged feeling. The idea that anything is possible."
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