Los Angeles Times
September 20, 1994
The Offbeat Gets Strong Play
by Jim Washburn
What do you get when you put two quirky cult figures on a double bill? A cult figure quirk-off, if the acoustic Peter Himmelman/Robyn Hitchcock show at the Coach House Sunday night was any indication.
Though they are not household names except among the show's far-from-capacity audience, Englishman Hitchcock and Minnesota-born, L.A.-based Himmelman both have had lengthy careers (dating back to the mid-'70s in Hitchcock's case). Hitchcock comes from the Syd Barrett surrealist school of turning dreams into songs. Though far from a mainstream rocker, Himmelman is a more direct songwriter, grappling with complex emotions and difficult themes. Onstage, though, he tends to balance all that weight with free-flying humor.
"Yesterday I saw the Devil in my bed, I could have strangled him, but I'm English, though", sang Hitchcock in "The Devil's Coachman" during his solo set. The typically British reserve of the character in the lyric also is present in Hitchcock's work, even at his most jarringly surreal.
At least as often as his dreamscape images connect in new ways of expressing human feelings, they also come off as merely clever and emotionally indirect to the point of being babble.
Unlike Himmelman's immediate, far-ranging and sometimes physical humor, Hitchcock's quirkiness Sunday was limited to his wordplay. He has a gift for dissemblance which he used between songs to tell rambling metaphysical shaggy god stories. At one point a napkin sighted on the stage prompted him to invent a tale about Napoleon's soldiers being halted by a huge sheet of paper they had to try to fold eight times.
Hitchcock has concocted some wonderfully strange Pop confections over the years, but his lengthy 17-song set didn't touch on many of them. There were more snippets of choice wordplay and imagery in some songs -- including such lines as "It rains like a slow divorce", and "People get what they deserve: time is round and space is curved".
Hitchcock's story-songs, like those of Pink Floyd avatar Barrett, play out on a lysergic landscape full of fanciful phrases and seeming non-sequiturs. But Barrett had the advantage of being certifiably mentally ill -- his songs propelled outward by inner demons -- while Hitchcock too often (at least at the Coach House) seemed just cutesy and deliberately obscure.
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