Sunday Telegraph
August 25, 1996
Miles Off The Wall Rock
Robyn Hitchcock
by Tobias Hill
And now for something completely different. Robyn Hitchcock comes out onto the stage wearing a green-and-red salamander shirt, leans grizzled chops over the microphone, and opens with a new song called "Not A Good Night To Be A Red Tomato". Not to be outdone in the funny-interesting stakes, the 12 Bar club is a 16th-century barn, squirrelled away in an alley behind Andy's Music Shop in Denmark Street. There is a plastic aspidistra in the alley. Inside, the tiny bar has a capacity of 80-going-on-60, and Hitchcock's head pokes through a hole to the first-floor circle. The crowd blows smoke rings at his head. The whole place is eerily reminiscent of Hitchcock's own lyrics. It's a disturbing prospect.
"Er, this is about hatred and how much fun it is. Er...um, I think the reason people were so scared of CDs when they came out is because the thinness of the CD-cases reminded them of the slices they could be chopped up into if their relationships went wrong." Hitchcock riffs his fingers across his acoustic guitar and starts to sing -- along with half the audience. It's a clue: just in case the shirt and the aspidistra didn't make it obvious, Robyn Hitchcock is a cult musician.
There are people here who have turned up to watch him every Tuesday for the past month. It's like The Rocky Horror Show. Any minute someone's going to jump onstage, flash their suspenders, and wave a candle. A small, lovely venue, and a congregation-like crowd. It could be that this is how Hitchcock likes it: that arenas and chart success are not part of his plan. His style was off-the-wall when he played with The Soft Boys 20 years ago, it remained well clear of the wall when he formed The Egyptians, and it has been stuck to the ceiling ever since.
Despite this, he is an excellent guitarist, using acoustic and electric to their full range. But it's the Folk roots of Hitchcock's earliest work that come through in the most beautiful of his new songs -- "Filthy Bird" and "The Speed Of Things", both from the new solo album Moss Elixir. Almost despite himself, the best of his songs sound more like Euan McCall than John Cale. There are other songs -- "Heliotrope", "Let's Go Thundering" -- where he pushes his bass-baritone voice up to a shrill, uncharacteristically Pop-ish treble. The main performance finishes to the obligatory cries of "encore".
Hitchcock instantly bounds back on in gleaming white pyjamas. The packed room is swelteringly hot, the side-doors have been thrown open to a prime panorama of London back-alley graffiti and odour. But no one seems to mind. They're not even blowing smoke rings any more. The support band -- Homer -- come back on to back up a five-track finale. They play on Moss Elixir, and they look comfortable enough onstage with Hitchcock to provide a new support band. But that might not be part of the cult figure's grand plan. "I'm not afraid to be/The only person on the planet", he sings in the night's penultimate track, "Beautiful Queen". Hitchcock looks happy solo, miles away from the walls, doing his own thing.
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