The Vancouver Sun
April 29, 1993
Vera Lynn, Yips, And Death Inspire Robyn Hitchcock
by John Mackie
In the past, Robyn Hitchcock has dazzled music fans by twisting '60s Pop into strange and wonderous new directions with songs like "The Man With The Lightbulb Head", "The Unpleasant Stain", "The Man Who Invented Himself", "My Wife And My Dead Wife", "The Chinese Insect Commercial", "Dancing On God's Thumb", "The Abandoned Brain", "Grooving On An Inner Plane", "Vegetable Man", "Balloon Man", "Mr. Deadly", "Sleeping With Your Devil Mask", "A Globe Of Frogs", "Rock 'n' Roll Toilet", and "Have a Heart, Betty (I'm Not Fireproof)".
So it really comes as no surprise that his latest long-player, Respect, adds a few more twists and turns to his legacy. Musicially, it's more acoustic than in the past -- no amplifiers and a minimum of electric instruments were used in the recording, which was done at Hitchcock's house on The Isle Of Wight. On the Barry White-meets-Captain Beefheart love rap "Wafflehead", there weren't any instruments at all: just Hitchcock and his band, The Egyptians, imitating instruments.
"I sang the bass drum on that," relates Hitchcock over the phone from Los Angeles. "[Producer] John Leckie then made it into a rather weird sound. He increased all the bass on it. And [drummer] Morris [Windsor] did some mooing like a cow, and got hold of a cheese grater. [Bassist] Andy [Metcalfe] poured water from one speaker to another -- a jug in stereo. In our own cautious way, it was a bit more experimental than our usual records."
"Wafflehead" aside, one of the recurring lyrical themes on the album is death. Hitchcock's father recently passed away, and the subject kept cropping up in his songs.
"I actually wrote most of the songs before he died," says Hitchcock, who appears at the Town Pump Monday. "They're more, sort of, me projecting myself into him saying goodbye than me saying goodbye to him as myself. I'm, kind of, following him into death, if you like. But it's pretty dark in there."
This being Robyn Hitchcock, there is a lot of black humor in said songs about death.
"The Yip Song" is the tale of a delirious World War II vet on an operating table, defying death while a crowd of people chant, "Yip! Yip! Yip!"
Speaking of which, what exactly is a "yip"? A tick that you get when you play golf? A sickness?
"No. It's just people going, 'Yip!'" says Hitchcock, laughing.
"I used to have a little black Scottie dog that used to go, 'Yip! Yip! Yip!' And there was another dog that my late ex-mother-in-law billeted on us for a week called 'Yipper'. It couldn't stand to be away from human company. It was very paranoid. It would come up to your bedside in the morning, and yip in your ear. It was a tradition of dogs going, 'Yip!'
"But the song has nothing to do with dogs at all. It has to do with a useless operation prolonging somebody's life for a few months. In his delirium, he sees Vera Lynn as a, kind of, nurse trying to ease his pain while these people in the background are calling, 'Yip! Yip! Yip!': get on with it. Get on with it. It's a pretty brutal song, really."
Vera Lynn was the sweetheart of the British forces in World War II. A lot of Hitchcock's lyrics have a distinctly British bent -- but he's has had far more success in North America than he has in his native England.
"The press have never trusted us in Britain," says Hitchcock.
"We have career of sorts over here -- although I think it's mutating. I'm still perceived as a, kind of, surrealist. A wacky Pop surrealist. A wacky College Pop surrealist. But our stuff's got nothing to do with what college-age people are listening to. They're listening to all that stuff where people have got shorts. And their hat's on backwards. And long hair and noisy guitars. That's nothing to do with us at all."
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