The Hartford Courant
April 7, 1995
Hitchcock Acoustic, Subdued But Solid
by Roger Catlin
"Didn't this used to be a stand-up place?" Robyn Hitchcock wondered as he looked at the modest, mostly seated audience at Toad's Place in New Haven Wednesday.
Sure, and Hitchcock used to lead a Rock band called The Egyptians.
But on a sleepy midweek evening, he mostly played solo on acoustic guitar while fans of his massive output sat.
Hitchcock was nonplussed. "Feel free to lie down completely for this one," he said.
Lying down dead used to be a central concern for Hitchcock's skewed tunes. A wife was dead. He was dead. His friend was dead. The ghosts intermingled.
Now, with nine reissued albums from the 1980s and a new single, he's back for his own kind of afterlife. But his concerns haven't changed much. "It's great to be alive," he blurted as he began his 70-minute set with a rushed monologue about the properties of its alternative: "You always know if you're not."
Hitchcock has grown from a strange young man to an eccentric middle-aged man. In a loud patterned shirt and graying locks and sideburns he was in fine, melodic voice -- though his face had as many tics as his twisted songs.
He fluttered his eyes constantly as he picked an Elizabethanesque melody in "Shuffling Over the Flagstones" -- the instrumental that followed the opening "Cynthia Mask" -- showing his guitar-playing skills.
Oblivious to promotion of his past solo catalog and material from The Egyptians, he played as much from the subsequent A&M albums that haven't been reissued, mixing in "The Yip Song" and "Driving Aloud (Radio Storm)" from his last album -- 1993's Respect -- as well as such revived delights as "Queen Elvis" and "Egyptian Cream".
Hitchcock can weave a spell with his odd imagery, keen melodic sense, and heavily accented voice -- a kind of Monty Python for music. His newer songs -- judging from the single, released on the small K Records label out of Olympia, Washingotn -- are simpler as they play with the conventions of the songwriting form.
"I Something You" -- with its accompanying couplet -- "You ought not me", includes a middle bit that begins: "In this type of song/Middle bits are so predictable".
Hitchcock shows are never such, however. And Wednesday he brought along violin player Deni Bonet to provide a melodic edge to a handful of his songs. In the encore, Hitchcock, in a different but equally bold-patterned shirt, switched to electric guitar accompanied by violin.
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