Record Collector
1995
Punk And After
Robyn Hitchcock: Black Snake Diamond Role (Sequel/Rhino)
Robyn Hitchcock: Gravy Deco (Sequel/Rhino)
Robyn Hitchcock: I Often Dream Of Trains (Sequel/Rhino)
Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians: Fegmania! (Sequel/Rhino)
Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians: Gotta Let This Hen Out! (Sequel/Rhino)
Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians: Element Of Light (Sequel/Rhino)
Cult artists can pass you by for a lifetime, and you'll never notice the loss. Robyn Hitchcock is one of those musicians who seem easy to slot into a dead end street marked "English eccentric". What other people say about him -- he's an eccentric, he's from Cambridge, he likes Syd Barrett and writes songs with titles like "Brenda's Iron Slege" -- almost strips away the need to hear his work yourself, unless you're a Cambridge eccentrica and a Barrett obsessive yourself.
But think again. His first six post-Soft Boys albums have now been fully revamped, remastered and reupholstered with bonus tracks and sleeve notes, by Sequel in Britain and Rhino in the States. En masse, they make up a Cook's Tour through Hitchcock country. And you know what? It's not the featureless trip through England's flatlands that you might have imagined.
Not that Hitchcock isn't everything his cult followers say he is. But thankfully he's more than that. It's the easiest thing on earth to be an eccentric, and a select handful of Rock musicians have managed to turn exactly that into a lifetime's work. Most of them still think they're Syd Barrett.
On the evidence of his recordings from 1981 to 1986, Robyn Hitchcock knew exactly who he was, and sometimes he didn't like it. He escaped from the archetypal Cambridge cult band, The Soft Boys, with a reputation for whimsical imagery and a scalpel-like wit. That survived -- along with all the Soft Boys personnel -- on his first solo record, Black Snake Diamond Role. Hitchcock combined elements of Punk, Psychedelia, and an idiosyncratic worldview to stunning effect on "The Man Who Invented Himself" and the ethereal-but-still-spiky "Acid Bird". Even when his lyrics tended towards late-'60s-style coyness, he retained enough irony to shoot down his own thought balloons. The bonus selections, which include alternate takes, demos, and B-sides, are merely acidic sugar in the tea.
Having ground himself a workable solo career, Hitchcock immediately sabotaged it with 1982's murky, over-electronic Groovy Decay. Steve Hillage produced this heavy-handed exercise, which Hitchcock disliked so much that he released demos for the albums as Groovy Decoy in 1985.
Gravy Deco allows for immediate comparison by gathering up the tracks from both albums. The demos are understandably thin, but at least sound like the work of the man behind Black Snake Diamond Role. By comparison, the Hillage versions have jettisoned their creator's identity. The two versions of "Young People Sscream" make the point most effectively: the enigmatic Lodger-era feel of the original take is lost on the cluttered, clumsy revamp. The demos also include a minor gem which didn't make the finished record, "How Do You Work This Thing?" -- a slice of Cambridge Rockabilly that wouldn't sound amiss on an Alex Chilton record (remember what I was saying about cult artists?).
Crushed by the Groovy Decay episode, Hitchcock didn't make another record for the best part of three years. When he did, it was something of a classic. I Often Dream Of Trains was cut virtually solo, which allowed him to strip his music to the bone, and leave melodic ideas almost to hang unfinished in the air. Again, the Chilton comparison holds up, as Trains has something of the subdued-desperation-but-unashamed-passion of Big Star's third album. And "Sometimes I wish I Was A Pretty Girl" still sounds like a perfect Syd pastiche/tribute. The bonus demos and B-sides extend the record to 24 tracks on this edition.
Fegmania! could hardly have been more different. It marked the debut of The Egyptians -- who turned out to be Hitchcock plus The Soft Boys' rhythm section and a couple of friends -- and swapped the understated experimentalism of the previous album for a sound that veered dangerously close to the 1985 Pop mainstream.
Robyn built the record around "The Man With The Lightbulb Head" -- he even made a movie for the song -- and this fine updating of the Pink Floyd sound of "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play" is the finest moment on the album. But "I'm Only You" is another enticing offering, as if America's Pop-Psych band the dB's had been transplanted to England in 1967. Then there are the bonus tracks -- a Byrds-style cover of "Bells Of Rhymney", some unissued demos, and the ten-minute instrumental soundscape "The Pit Of Souls".
Gotta Let This Hen Out! (the title came from Robyn's mishearing of a Higsons lyric) recorded a sweaty, adrenalin-fuelled night at The Marquee Club, during which The Egyptians revisited parts of the Soft Boys' catalogue, and translated extracts from the Trains and Groovy albums into more orthodox style. The new CD repeats the bonus tracks from the existing version of the album, incidentally.
Finally, Element Of Light was what Hitchcock regarded as the first band LP, rather than a solo record with outside support. Impressively varied in its musical approach, it lacks some of the off-the-wall anguish of the earlier LPs. But Robyn's lyrical insight in songs like "Winchester" and "Bass" (rhyming with "gas", not "face") is worth the swap. There's also the chance to hear him predict the Crowded-House-imitating-Lennon sound on "Somewhere Apart" -- which is where, after all the cult hype, Hitchcock seems to exist on most of these albums.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE