The Plain Dealer
April 15, 1995
Hitchcock Plays Past But Shows The Future
by John Soeder
Robyn Hitchcock was in town Thursday night, ostensibly to plug his nine-album retrospective on Rhino Records.
Nonetheless, his easygoing performance at Peabody's Down Under in the Flats was more than a stroll down memory lane. A couple of detours into the present nicely rounded out the proceedings.
Hitchcock sneaked in his latest single, an ambiguous ditty called "I Something You", toward the end of his 80-minute set. Earlier in the show, he unveiled "DeChirico Street", an unreleased work-in-progress steeped in the haunting urban imagery of its namesake, painter Giorgio DeChirico.
Elsewhere, Hitchcock came off more like Pop Rock's answer to Salvador Dali.
Accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar, the British singer-songwriter, 42, kept the audience of 400 fans rapt with a sampling of surreal selections from his back-catalog. Among the highlights were the chipper "Balloon Man", "Glass Hotel", and "Queen Elvis" (a Beatlesque ballad laced with lush, downwardly spiraling chords).
Hitchcock's rambling between songs proved similarly offbeat. He launched into a hilarious, stream-of-consciousness monologue about an Arby's sign and introduced the kinky "Egyptian Cream" as, "The standard one about someone who starts as a girl, turns into a man, and ends up covered in vegetation."
Violinist Deni Bonet, a veteran of the Mountain Stage syndicated radio show, joined Hitchcock on several songs, including the bracing "Driving Aloud (Radio Storm)".
Hitchcock fleshed out the show's stripped-down sound by adding a bit of Blues-y harmonica to "Man With A Woman's Shadow" and switching to an electric guitar for a spate of encores that concluded with the hard-rocking "Listening To The Higsons".
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