Michigan Daily (University Of Michigan)
April 14, 1995
Robyn Hitchcock Comes Out Of Oblivion
by Dirk Schulze
For 20 years -- first as a founder of the legendary Cambridge band The Soft Boys, and later as both a solo artist and leader of an outfit known as The Egyptians -- Robyn Hitchcock has been making some of the most wonderfully skewed Pop music available anywhere. Although he has never sold too many records, he has influenced a generation of musicians with his concise songcraft and twisted, often poetic, lyrics.
With The Soft Boys, Hitchcock mined a pyschedelic vein far to the left of the trends of the mid- and late-1970s. It failed to catch a corporate life, but then it sound helped spawn the Byrds-y ring of R.E.M. and other College Rock staples of the 1980s. Later, he made a series of increasingly self-assured recordings -- each of which, despite their varied sounds, focused on his unique personality and musical vision. Rhino has reissued eight of these albums and a collection of previously unreleased songs on CD, each with extensive liner notes, art, and bonus tracks. Unlike many other similar reissue projects, Hitchcock was quite involved with the process.
"Nothing was done without my approval," he said. "They didn't just give me the money and say, 'Okay, Hitchcock, now we're going to reinterpret your entire career.' I was responsible for finding pictures and 3-track demos, getting tapes out of my mother's roof, and tracking down tapes I didn't even know really existed."
As he made his way through the 1980s and into the '90s, Hitchcock found himself making increasingly glossy recordings with The Egyptians. After the stripped-down sound of the mostly one-man show Eye, from 1990, Hitchcock realized that the time of his backing band might be coming to an end. "It just got faded after so long," he said. "I felt that the band wasn't necessarily the best vehicle for my songs anymore, as we grew more professional. You have to watch what you're doing or everything just, sort of, slides off into a pile of seamlessness and overdubs. And you shimmer off into the distance like Bryan Ferry -- and there's nothing left but the packaging. I want to get the essence of the songs out, otherwise the production and the song end up competing with each other."
There is a certain ahead-of-its time quality to all of Hitchcock's recordings. It is never that they could not have been commercial successes. It is just that they were never in the right place at the right time. The Soft Boys cut their teeth during the Punk revolution and made their best record -- 1980's slice-o'-chiming-Psychedelia Underwater Moonlight -- while New Wave ruled the radio. After almost breaking onto the charts with 1989's Queen Elvis and the "Madonna Of The Wasps" single, he retreated from public view and made the bare-bones Eye. When he returned with another shining Pop album (1991's soaring, Beatlesque Perspex Island), Nirvana shot to the top of the playground heap and Grunge was the magic word of the moment.
Now that the Post-Postpunk of Green Day and Offspring is king, Hitchcock has embarked on a solo tour, playing his songs mostly alone with an acoustic guitar. Not exactly the most commercial of moves, but Hitchcock is quick to point out that he is not retreating into Folk music. "It's still Rock music, just without a band. They're still my songs. But now it's just me singing them. I used to make them up alone around the kitchen table, and now I'm performing them alone again."
Rather than anticipating the next movement of the collective popular music whim and acting accordingly, Hitchcock is working on another album alone and at his leisure, recording when he wishes and adding other instruments when he wants. As usual, he is wokring towards writing four times as many songs as he will eventually need -- the reason for the two collections of unreleased material, 1986's Invisible Hitchcock and the fresh You & Oblivion.
Despite his apparent bent toward an unrelievably prolific pen, he never forces songs. "You can tell when you've got a song in you, and when you haven't," he said. "They come out of a, sort of, blind spot. And if you put a light on them they tend to disappear. They come from wherever you're not looking. And as soon as you become self-conscious about it, they dry up. That's why I can't write songs about topics -- otherwise I would write lots of songs about Rush Limbaugh and New Gingrich (and their British equivalents)."
If the songs that do come out of his blind spot occasionally defy interpretation, Hitchcock claims it is because they are not usually about specific topics. "A lot of them don't neccessarily have subjects," he said. "They're more just a way of looking at things: different meditations on death and time and the fact that your consciousness is so intense while you have it -- and goes out so quickly (like dropping a match in water)."
Regardless of their lyrical content, the Pop appeal of many of his songs cannot be denied. Even the folks at Muzak realized this fact, appropriating "Madonna Of The Wasps" for use in elevators and shopping centers everywhere. What is preserved in their ultra-light treatment of the tune is not the question of just what is the "Madonna Of The Wasps" (or swans or flies, for that matter), but the perfect construction of the song's verse and chorus.
Hell, charges of "sellout" cannot even be addressed at Hitchcock for the Muzak-ization of one of his songs, because the fact is he never had anything to sell. He never rose to the top only to abandon his fans, nor did he ever (with the possible exception of 1982's Groovy Decay) give in to corporate pressure. He wrote for the joy of writing, of telling stories -- as he does now. "Everything I do now is entirely for my own benefit -- particularly now that it's just me, and I'm not a part of a group venture," he said. "I'm very lucky to make a living doing what I like -- and do best. I haven't yet had to go work in a bank, or become a dental hygienist."
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