The New York Times
April 6, 1995
Dry Spell
by Neil Strauss
In the last few years, the idiosyncratic English songwriter Robyn Hitchcock has been going through a strange sort of metamorphosis.
"I was in Rio recently," he said in an interview before his concerts at The Bottom Line last week, "and there was a corpse on the beach when I got there at sundown. It was lying there very still with flies on its wrists and ankles, and a towel over its head. It wasn't just motionless like sunbathers and sleepers are. It was just still. It's the first time I ever saw a dead human. It's funny: that's what I'm going to become someday, and I've never seen one."
The change that occurred in Mr. Hitchcock, who is 42, was evident not because he decided to write a song about it -- but because he didn't. "What's funny is I didn't actually write anything about the corpse," Mr. Hitchcock said. "It's something that I would have written about in the past. But not so much now."
Unfortunately, Mr. Hitchcock doesn't have an outlet for his new material. Though Rhino Records recently reissued eight solo albums he recorded after his influential group, The Soft Boys, broke up in 1980, Mr. Hitchcock is not signed to a record label. Since Respect, his 1992 album on A&M Records, he has released only a three-song single on K Records -- a tiny label based in Olympia, Washington.
"After Respect, I got very menopausal," he said. "I think I was just burned out. My father had died, I'd been unsettled from traveling a lot, then I moved to The States and lived in Washington, D.C. for a bit with somebody I was going to marry. But it didn't work. And I just didn't write anything for eight months."
At The Bottom Line, Mr. Hitchcock was in great shape, performing a few of the 40 new songs he's written since recovering from his dry spell. The audience seemed to hang on every word, whether he was singing an older song like "My Wife And My Dead Wife" or a new one like "I Something You".
Mr. Hitchcock's personal stamp -- which is not quite madness or looniness, as it's often described, but normalcy with an imaginative or symbolic twist at the top -- is still on all the songs. But his subject matter, which was once dominated by the small, squirmy members of the insect and amphibian worlds, has moved up on the evolutionary ladder and is about more warm-blooded creatures like cats. This is in part a function of Mr. Hitchcock's improving self-esteem.
"I was a white middle-class kid from a wealthy background. And I used to hate myself, and didn't want to be human," he said. "I spent a long time feeling as if I was walking along carrying my head floating in the air like a balloon. Or I'd feel like an angel's head sewn on to a baboon's body -- which I think is pretty much the human condition. But now I feel a bit more human and less harsh. And I suppose I'm at least halfway through my life. There's no point in trying to stamp on the rest of it like a cigarette end."
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