Seattle Post-Intelligencer
April 30, 1993
Robyn Hitchcock Respects Simpler Sounds
by Gene Stout
English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock remembers his last Seattle concert as a strange, surreal experience.
The show -- at the University of Washington's HUB Ballroom in February, 1992 -- was just two days before his father, painter and poet Raymond Hitchcock, died of cancer.
"What was really odd is that some of the people were dressed up as characters from my songs, which threw me for a loop. There was somebody dressed as the devil, and some other people dressed as coachmen."
"My father was about to die, so I was getting spooked. It was all very odd."
Hitchcock And The Egyptians are back on tour with their seventh album, Respect. The group performs tomorrow and Sunday at 9 p.m. at the Backstage.
Respect -- which features Hitchcock's carefully crafted melodies, Beatlesesque arrangements, and intriguing imagery -- was recorded at Hitchcock's home on England's Isle Of Wight using a 40-foot-long mobile recording truck rented from the BBC. Producer was John Leckie, who has done albums with Mott The Hoople, XTC, and Seattle's The Posies (Dear 23).
"We were trying to get it to sound as natural as possible," Hitchcock said. "We wanted to be sitting around at the kitchen table playing the guitar and bongos like we do at rehearsal. The idea was to stick a microphone in a bowl of fruit, and capture it.
"It didn't actually happen like that. It ended up being the usual formal thing -- with overdubs."
Leckie took a typically low-key approach to producing.
"He's not overpowering, but he does make suggestions," Hitchcock said. "But, you see, he doesn't play anything. He goes for the sound. He'll say, 'Why don't you play some guitar here,' and you say, 'Okay, what?' And he'll say, 'I don't know. Just play some.' I quite like that. He has ideas, but he doesn't intrude or try to tell you what notes you should play."
Recording at home was in keeping with Hitchcock's newfound respect for simpler sounds.
"We've really sworn off amplifiers," he said. "In fact, I haven't used the electric guitar in over a year. Actually I used it on a couple of tracks. But I didn't use any amps (nor did Andy [Metcalfe]).
"So the approach has been that you don't have all that noise going on. Which is great, because you can hear yourself sing. And more important, you can hear each other sing. There's a lot of intricate harmonies on that record that would have never evolved if we had all been prisoners of our amps."
Hitchcock recently has dedicated some of his creativity to other pursuits, particularly painting and short story writing. He hopes to mount a tour of his paintings later this year.
"I like the idea of taking the paintings out on the road and putting microphones and monitors in front of them. The paintings would go up as if they were a Rock show," he said.
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