The Hartford Courant
May 22, 1993
Robyn Hitchcock Finds Niche In Neo-Unplugged
by Roger Catlin
Talk about a man out of time.
Robyn Hitchcock was creating cryptic, surprising Rock back before Punk created an underground movement, when Alternative was a gleam in a semanticist's eye, before the first Rock critic had looked up the word "quirky".
Today, it would seem his music is perfectly suited for college radio's smart listeners. But even the trend-mongers have an unfair bias toward youth.
As Hitchcock moves into his 40s, he's finding himself being abandoned by potential fans for Grunge neophytes. Worse, he's starting to find surreal imagery and willful tilt to the bizarre tiresome. Much of his ignored new album, Respect, has his most straightforward -- and conventional -- songs
yet.
He's still enough of a towering figure in the Rock subculture to gather a loyal crowd of a couple hundred folks who couldn't care a whit about the last Cheers episode (or at least were happy to tape it).
Thursday at Toad's Place, where he walked around unnoticed in the crowd before his set, he seemed comfortable enough with the surroundings to begin with a long, good-natured rambling about his longtime bandmates -- Andy Metcalfe and Morris Windsor -- and their choice of onstage beverages. Then he broke into a version of Crosby, Stills And Nash's "Almost Cut My Hair" that went as far as the second verse.
It was even more offhand than the cover of Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting" in the final encore nearly two hours later.
But in between, the attention to his own music was fairly careful and exacting. Hitchcock, who has careened between solo-acoustic performances and full-bore electric trio on his past few tours, has found a trendy compromise this time out -- the neo-unplugged approach.
He strummed rhythm on an acoustic guitar most of the night. When he strapped on an electric 12-string, he tended to draw dreamy textures out of it -- not driving Rock. Likewise, Metcalfe split between acoustic bass and keyboards, while Windsor stood at a percussion set affixed with bongos, a snare, and a variety of electronic triggers.
Beginning with the keenly drawn Pop of "Driving Aloud (Radio Storm)", he played most of the new album, choosing such nuggets as "Only the Stones Remain" (dating back to the threesome's days as The Soft Boys), and Hitchcock's earlier "Oceanside" and "Listening to the Higsons".
Already an eccentric figure on stage (he flutters his eyelids as he sings), he seemed especially vexed Thursday to see his image projected live on a video screen in the rear of the room. He seemed, after a while, to be playing and telling his fanciful stories to the image -- which told them back to him, ad infinitum.
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