Sunday Telegraph
March 5, 1995
Sliding Under Doors
James Delingpole Meets Robyn Hitchcock, The Former Soft Boy Who Won't Sell Out
by James Delingpole
Let's get one thing clear straight away: Robyn Hitchcock, the English singer-songwriter who almost singlehandedly kept aloft the tattered flag of Pyschedelic Pop from the Punk-dominated late-'70s through to the '90s, was never a big fan of LSD. "Acid didn't stimulate my creativity," he explains. "It just made me more interested in reality. So I'd be more likely to watch News At Ten or listen to Farming Today. It reversed my natural inclinations. If I'd taken lots of acid, I think I'd probably just have become an accountant."
For those familiar with Hitchcock only through his oeuvre -- the first with art rockers The Soft Boys, later with The Egyptians and as a solo artiste -- this may come as a somewhat surprising revelation. Here, after all, is a man who has dedicated his career to recreating the spirit and sound of the psychotropic late-'60s: his music redolent of The Byrds and The Beatles; his vocals and lyrics strikingly reminiscent of Pink Floyd's crazy diamond, Syd Barrett. Now 42 (though he could easily be a decade younger) Hitchock is looking handsome and well on the meat-, caffeine-, nicotine-, alcohol- and drug-free diet with which he has been "experimenting" of late. He talks of this new fad without a hint of sanctimoniousness (he's doing it for fun -- to remind himself of what it was like, as a child, to exist without artificial highs and lows) and cheerfully encourages me to load up on coffee and cigarettes during our leisurely chat at a central London cafe.
He's good company. Easygoing, intelligent, and dryly amusing, Hitchcock has a gift for bringing a fresh, often exotic perspective to even the most cliched subjects. Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll is one of them. The soullessness of Los Angeles -- "You've got to jog around covered in varnish and then go and eat raddichio in natty little restaurants" -- is another.
His conversation -- like his strange lyrics -- appears to be less the product of cultivated wackiness than of a genuinely original mind. This last he almost certainly inherited from his novelist father, the late Raymond Hitchcock -- whose work includes a story in which MI5 make Stonehenge invisible, incarcerating anyone who has witnessed the event in a mental home; another in which a new god comes into power and puts people's sex organs in their armpits; and another in which a woman gives birth to a rubber tyre. Much to Robyn's evident disgust, none of these stories was published because, "No one could decide what genres they fitted into." Instead, Raymond's fame rests on the success of more commercial work like Percy's Progress, his novel and screenplay about a penis transplant.
The career of Hitchcock fils has followed a similar path. "So You Think You're In Love", his most successful single to date, took Robyn only a few minutes to write and could, he says, have been done by anyone who had drenched themselves in '60s Pop. Yet it is for that rather than for any of his more inspired, complex, or heartfelt work that he remains best-known. "The trouble is it got a lot of airplay in The States," he says, "But it's completely unrepresentative of what I do."
In America, where his notable friends and admirers include Peter Buck and Michael Stipe of R.E.M., Hitchcock has a strong following. In Britain, however, he is mainly remembered -- albeit dimly -- for his work with The Soft Boys (who enjoyed a cult reputation in the late-'70s for their Canute-like attempts to stem the advance of Punk by wearing their hair long and playing tunes with more than three chords). His more recent albums with The Egyptians (ex-Soft Boys Morris Windsor, Andy Metcalfe) scarcely registered over here, which is odd since many of them -- including 1993's superlative Respect -- are as fine as anything he has ever done. Though mildly encouraged by this week's reissue, on Sequel records, of his first eight post-Soft Boys albums, Hitchcock has come to accept that he is never going to be as big as, say, Phil Collins. This, he insists, is more by choice than accident. "I couldn't produce that sort of music if I tried. But to give Phil his due, he does what comes naturally to him," says Hitchcock wryly. "I don't suppose he's dying to make records like Robyn Hitchcock, but can't because his bank manager won't let him."
Hitchcock agrees that his compositions -- which embrace everything from Syd-Barrattesque gimmickry to sublime, Jingle-Jangle Guitar Pop -- are too eclectic and inaccessible for mass consumption. "There's an element in big-selling records which is always a bit background-y. They purr comfortably in the corner and give off a nice little platinum glow. My stuff isn't like that. It's not designed to make you feel good if it's on in the background. It's there to be listened to."
This love-it-or-leave it perversity has been a feature of Hitchcock's music since the day when, following a middle-class upbringing in Winchester and a stint at public school and art college, he formed The Soft Boys in 1976. "We were originally called Dennis And The Experts," he says. "But one night, in the middle of a gig, I said, 'Okay, we're the Soft Boys.'
"The idea was that The Soft Boys were creeping, bloodless things -- like civil servants -- that had been filleted. That could slide under doors, and appear and disappear. They'd be very influential -- but they'd be invisible. And they'd probably have some kind of unusual sexual proclivities."
The Soft Boys -- though later cited by Peter Buck as a bigger influence on R.E.M. than The Byrds -- failed to set the world on fire. "We were trying to play music that was far too complicated for us after four pints of Guinness," says Hitchcock.
Typical of their gigs was the set they played to 100 people in Sheffield. "At the end, one person said, 'Fuck off,' one person clapped. Everybody else just stared. They just couldn't see what we were for."
Hitchcock is evidently happy with a career that, thanks to his success in America (where he plays at 2,000-seater venues and has sold over a million records), has made him a comfortable living. Soon, he plans to settle with his girlfriend, Michele, in the genteel West London suburb of Chiswick. Not very Rock 'n' Roll, Hitchcock admits. But then again, he has never hankered after the trappings of megastardom.
"I've always been very unambitious," he says. "My goal is simply to write decent songs. And some of them are very good. There's no doubt in my mind that I'm as good a songwriter as Sting. But it's never been my concern to get a lot of arrows pointing at me saying 'Great songwriter of the Twentieth Century'."
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