Goldmine
October 11, 1996
Robyn Hitchcock
The Invisible Hitmaker Revealed
By Dave Thompson
He's never had a major hit, he's never scored a gold record, and he'll probably never get into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. His best-known video is one which doesn't exist. Through the 1980s he sold almost as many records in America -- where they were never even released -- as he did in his UK homeland. Oh, and if there was any justice in this world, which of course there isn't, he'd have been cast as Dr. Who the moment he outgrew his first pair of flares. He is, of course, Robyn Hitchcock -- the only man in the world who can rhyme the word "love" with "periscope" and make it sound important. And whose latest album is coming out twice: once for the people who like it, and again for those who wish he'd done something else.
It's been said before, but it still bears repeating. The man is a cult figure, one of the most individual songwriters of the age, and absolutely a law unto himself. Yet a career in the Rock 'n' rodeo was never in the cards for the infant Hitchcock. He was born in the sleepy English town of East Grinstead, Surrey, on March 3, 1953.
"When I was young, I wanted to be Dr. Who," he says. "Then, when I was 13, I discovered Bob Dylan and I wanted to be him instead. If I hadn't ever heard Bob Dylan, though, I would probably just have gone on and become Dr. Who instead." Do we need some explanation here? Of course not. "I should probably have been the Doctor after Peter Davidson," he continues. "It was all over after that." Then he reconsiders. He saw one of the mid-1960s Dr. Who movies recently, and it was ludicrous. "Completely ludicrous. But maybe that's because it was in color. Dr. Who's heyday was in black and white," and he laughs because those are the colors of Bob Dylan's heyday too. Especially after he fell off his bike, retired to repair, and left the world an emptier place.
The 13-year-old Hitchcock believed instinctively that he could fill that emptiness. Although, 30 years later, he still hasn't come up with a "Like A Rolling Stone", it's worth pointing out that Dylan has yet to come up with a "My Wife And My Dead Wife". So in truth, they're just about even.
"Looking back on life, I see an awful lot in black and white. The Beatles didn't go into color until about 1965. Elvis was at his best in black and white. Kennedy was interesting because he lived in black and white, but he died in color." Hitchcock himself hit adolescence in color, leaving school at the dawn of the psychedelic era, then going to college in Cambridge just a trip or two after Pink Floyd left. A very long trip or two. "I didn't get there until the early-1970s, so I missed the whole Pink Floyd-people era (and everything they represented). It had all gone." Mournfully, he confesses, "I've never even met an acid casualty." But even as he says it, he knows that's a peculiar admission from a man whose music has been compared with virtually every piece of frazzled gray matter from Syd Barrett to...actually, let's just leave it with Syd. Even more surprisingly, taking into consideration his public image, Hitchcock shatters further illusions when he confesses, "I'm a very drug-free person. I've only taken acid five times in my life -- and that was a long time ago." Neither does he want to repeat the experience. "My daughter took some, then spent the rest of the day cleaning. It's okay, so long as her mother doesn't decide to keep her on it permanently."
Clean of body and un-addled of mind, then, Hitchcock's first musical ventures took place through the early- to mid-1970s, as he worked with a variety of now-forgotten acts around Cambridge. Doubtless there are still other people who remember Maureen And The Meatpackers, The Worst Fears and The Beetles -- and Hitchcock shudders as he realizes several recordings from this period may still be "lying around". Apparently, they weren't very good. "I think I've lost them. There was some stuff with a guy who then became a lawyer (which is really frightenin): crossword clues set to music by Noel Coward. Then there's some other stuff with Maureen And The Meatpackers, which was baically the household I lived with in Cambridge: my partner of the time, Rosalind, and a couple called Paul and Anst.
"I don't think the songs are particularly good. They were fun at the time, but they're, kind of, hippie street-theater Folk club songs for the mid-1970s. And some of them are mine, some of them are joint compositions. I think the first listenable stuff I did was with The Soft Boys."
The Soft Boys -- Hitchcock, guitarist Alan Davies, bassist Andy Metcalfe, and drummer Morris Windsor -- grew out of the earlier Dennis And The Experts during 1976, Punk's Year Zero. Uncompromising, unrehearsed and unrepentantly loud, The Soft Boys were still building a local reputation for themselves when the local Raw label added them to its own burgeoning catalog of eastern England's wilder talents. Why they ever thought The Soft Boys would fit is a question few people would ever dare answer. The Byrds, The Beatles, and Barrett were The Soft Boys' most tangible influences -- the first one for the guitar sound, the last for sheer inventiveness, and The Beatles because music critics are too often lazy (anybody who actually put a tune to their lyrics sounded like The Beatles -- and that included the Sex Pistols' Glen Matlock). By acknowledging The Fabs themselves, The Soft Boys saved a lot of journalistic brain cells.
Not that any of this was too apparent from The Soft Boys' first recordings. Eventually released (in 1984) as the three-track Wading Through A Ventilator EP, the Soft Boys' performance is essentially a rough draft of the next couple of years' worth of directionless semi-thrashing, led off by the maniacal damage of the title track. It is particularly telling that when the band was given the chance to re-record that track a few weeks later for their debut EP, they did not iron out an iota of its insanity.
Give It To The Soft Boys, the band's first release, appeared in the spring of 1977. Featuring that new version of "Ventilator" alongside "Hear My Brane" and the monumental "Face Of Death", it is most notable for its sheer exuberance -- although Hitchcock still raves, "The Raw thing was beginners' luck. It was a really good session. The first Soft Boys recordings were among the best things I've ever been involved in, I think." Give It To The Soft Boys has since been included on Rykodisc's acclaimed 1976-1981 retrospective. At the time, however, it passed unnoticed out of the Raw offices, and close to a year of pub and club gigs followed before the band got another chance to record for former United Artists A&R man Andrew Lauder's newly formed Radar label.
Radar remains one of the most eclectic-but-sadly-undervalued labels of the entire British Punk era. Best known for housing Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe following their departure from Stiff, Radar also recruited Pop gems the Yachts, ex-Damned guitarist Brian James, and The Pop Group (a band which is now reckoned to have been so far ahead of their time they still sound weird and dislocated).
In company such as this, The Soft Boys -- with guitarist Kimberley Rew having replaced Alan Davies -- could not help but prosper. Could they? Hoping that the studio would at least hone the group's eccentricities down to something manageable, Radar packed the band off to work on its debut album, then pulled the plug the moment it became clear just how disastrously the sessions were going.
"Radar spent a lot of money and time trying to get us to sound right," Hitchcock says. "We were very loud onstage, and for whatever reason it didn't really work in the studio. But it was a very unstable outfit. I think we thrived off each others' bad vibes. I've got a theory that the best music is made by people who can't really talk to each other, and can only communicate through their instruments. So we co-existed by trying to drown each other out.
"Unfortunately, it just didn't work on tape, so Radar put out one single [The now-legendary "(I Want To Be) An Anglepoise Lamp"], then they decided to get rid of us because we didn't seem to be producing anything." Well-received critically, the single nevertheless sank without a trace, and the band was out on its own again. Radar's dissatisfaction is understandable. Gathered together under the only marginally misleading title of Invisible Hits in 1983 (and a decade later on 1976-81), Radar-period tracks like "Let Me Put It Next To You" and "Blues In The Dark" are essentially the sound of a writer learning to write. His ultimate vision still not yet in place, Hitchcock himself alludes to these recordings as "awful", although it is a sign of how quickly he was coming to grips with his talent that by late-1979, The Soft Boys were confidently recording their live shows, even retaining one from a show in Cambridge for eventual release.
Live At The Portland Arms did not appear in public until 1983, when it was offered free to purchasers of the Invisible Hits collection. And now that it was too late, the strides forward which Hitchcock had made were plain for all to see. Recorded under what a modern audience might call "unplugged" conditions, this largely acoustic set features some of The Soft Boys' most idiosyncratic numbers. The epic "Sandra's Having Her Brain Out", "Give Me A Spanner, Ralph" (which ranks among the first songs Hitchcock ever wrote, back around 1973), and "I Like Bananas (Because They Have No Bones)" are all included alongside excerpts from the band's willfully obtuse repertoire of cover versions: "Book Of Love", All Shook Up", and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin". But despite the improvements which it showcased, Live At The Portland Arms is not, it should be stressed, a particularly representative sampling of The Soft Boys' live performance. It wasn't loud enough, for a start. But it does possess a charm and ambience which reflects considerably better on the band's memory than their studio work ever would, while it also captures the band at a time when their auidences were finally beginning to comprehend what The Soft Boys were doing. In the past, band and audience alike would turn up at venues wondering what they were letting themselves in for. By 1979, however, people knew what to expect from The Soft Boys, and the fact that they still went to see them speaks volumes for the group's versatility. The songs were pretty good as well.
Another sign that the band's popularity was rising came when Raw reissued the Give It To The Soft Boys EP in late-1979, then threatened an accompanying single of the unreleased "Where Are The Prawns?". Thankfully, says Hitchcock, the latter release was cancelled before any damage could be done. "They had a version with no proper vocals -- we were drunk."
The next label to give the Soft Boys a chance was Aura, another company whose ambition (labelmates included Nico and Annette Peacock) greatly outweighed its life-expectancy. Unfortunately, this relationship, too, was to come to naught. "We were going to do a deal with them, but we never did," Hitchcock recalls. "Nothing was signed. I never saw any money -- and that's kind of what I'd expected." However, Aura did release a Soft Boys album, even if they didn't tell too many people about it.
The Soft Boys had already recorded A Can Of Bees under their own steam, releasing it on Hitchcock's own Two Crabs label in 1979. It sold respectably at gigs and via mail order. The following year Aura picked it up, simultaneously presenting collectors with the first of the conundrums with which Hitchocck's subsequent career has become synonymous. He explains, "The Two Crabs issue has a white back, Aura has a yellow back, and the one we reissued through the Midnight label in the 1980s has a pink back. And the last three tracks of each one all are slightly different: different songs, different takes, different musicians, whatever." Rykodisc's attempt to clarify this mess on the 1976-81 collection, however, sends Hitchcock off on another tangent. "The Rykodisc CD has everything that was ever out on any of them," he explains. "So from being slightly unlistenable, it is now a completely indigestible mass. It is indeed like being dropped into a basin full of scurrying claws ripping away at your Armani suit. It is not a pleasant experience -- but they weren't pleasant times." All of which is a willfully obscure way of admitting that A Can Of Bees remains one of the great lost opportunities of the age. The songs were familiar of course, and many would go on to become bona fide classics (like the earlier "Face Of Death", "Leppo And The Jooves" was still in Hitchcock's live set five years later). But dubious production and lackluster arrangements reduced much of the album to little more than an exercise in disjointed Power Pop, over which some bloke (Hitchcock) recited lyrics which simply didn't sound inspiring when you couldn't see him singing them.
Although he has never been what one would call an overtly visual performer, Hitchcock has nevertheless always been a captivating live presence, capable of imbibing the dumbest rhyme of unfathomable depth with a cracked grin or a knowing glare. In the studio, however, he could be as lifeless as the haddock which once spent three days lying in the gutter outside a London club after its bearer was forbidden to take it into a circa-1980 Soft Boys gig. Of course it was his inability to rise above that lifelessness which would ultimately curse The Soft Boys' entire studio output. The smooth course of A Can Of Bees was also hampered by another ripple in The Soft Boys' lineup, as Matthew Seligman (ex-SW9) moved in to replace Andy Metcalfe. The ensuing lineup -- now regarded as the "classic" Soft Boys -- made its vinyl debut just weeks later, with the Near The Soft Boys EP.
Featuring two Hitchcock originals, "Kingdom Of Love" and "Strange", Near The Soft Boys is most notable for its version of Syd Barrett's "Vegetable Man" -- one of several Pink Flyod songs which resided within The Soft Boys' repertoire ("Astronomy Domine" was another). Indeed, it was with "Vegetable Man" that The Soft Boys' own rise to acid-inflected immortality began, as the band became the focus for what the trend-hungry UK music press was hoping would become the Next Big Thing: a psychedelic revival. It would be another year or so before anybody else joined that particular bandwagon, and maybe three before the thing had gathered enough speed to actually get rolling with the newly solo Julian Cope, a newly-painted Robert Smith, and the newly studio-bound XTC joining Hithcock in the stroboscopic bubblelight. At the time, however, the mere lure of such a revival was sufficient to mark The Soft Boys as something special -- even if no one was quite certain what that specialty was.
The Soft Boys themselves seemed to share that uncertainty. Their second album, Underwater Moonight, was released (on latter-day Henry Rollins/Richard Butler manager Richard Bishop's Armageddon label) indecently soon after their first, and it surely suffered as a result. Critics who had been stung once by Can Of Bees were in no mood to repeat the punishment, and approached Underwater Moonlight with understandable caution -- to the point where it would be several years more before some people even admitted to having liked it. Now, of course, Underwater Moonlight is widely and justly acclaimed as being among the finest albums of the New Wave -- the Trouser Press Record Guide assigns it a spot in the top half-dozen releases of the period.
The alubm has its fair share of future favorites: "Kingdom Of Love", reprised from the Near The Soft Boys EP; "Queen Of Eyes", which Hithcock would re-record with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and Bucketful Of Brains publisher Nigel Cross for the Nigel & The Crosses project; the vehement "Insanely Jealous"; and the two tracks destined to be The Soft Boys' next single, "I Wanna Destroy You" and "Old Pervert". (Several demos and alternate versions from this album were included on 1976-81.)
Posthumous praise buttered very few parsnips in 1981, however, and Underwater Moonlight was to prove the final "new" Soft Boys release. Over the next year, the band essentially disintegrated, even if the musicians themselved did not exactly part company. With Hitchcock now eyeing a solo career, Matthew Seligman was retained as co-producer for what would become his first album, while both Kimberley Rew and Morris Windsor would be recruited to lend their talents to the record -- although not to the same songs. Hitchcock aside, no more than two fellow Soft Boys would appear simultaneously on any of the tracks recorded after this point. It just seemed easier that way.
Hitchcock remembers the ensuing sessions as some of the happiest times he has ever spent in a studio. "It was the first time I'd ever got to make a record by myself. It was the first time I'd got to pick who I was going to have on individual songs." Other guests at the sessions include studio-owner and producer Pat Collier, Psychedelic Furs drummer Vince Ely, guitarist Knox (Collier's old sidekick from Punk heroes The Vibrators), saxophonist and future Soft Cell collaborator Gary Barnacle, and a then-unknown Thomas Dolby. Commencing in November, 1980, the sessions took place at Alaska Studios -- the tiny and notoriously malodorous rehearsal space built into an old storage area beneath a railway bridge at London's Waterloo Station. The first track to be recorded, by Hitchcock and Morris Windsor alone, was "Acid Bird". Shortly after, "I Watch The Cars" was laid down while Hitchcock and company recovered from the breaking news that John Lennon was dead. Another song with vaguely iconoclastic connotations was "The Man Who Invented Himself", a song which some sources maintain was written for, or about, Syd Barrett (a vague similarity to Kevin Ayers' similarly themed "Oh Wot A Dream" probably helped them reach that conclusion). Hitchcock himself claims Monty Python's Life Of Brian movie as a more appropriate inspiration. Some 20 songs were completed altogether and work began now on compiling an album from them and on coming up with a suitable title for it.
The Perfumed Corpse was an early, and distinctly Edward Gorey-esque working title, while Hitchcock also toyed with Zinc Pear for a while. Indeed, test pressings of Zinc Pear do exist. Largely identical to what would finally be remixed as Black Snake Diamond Role, Zinc Pear is most notable for featuring "Happy The Golden Prince" and the old Soft Boys favorite, "Give Me A Spanner, Ralph," in place of the eventual "Brenda's Iron Sledge". Neither of these tracks would be lost forever, of course, even if one does need to pay attention if one wants to track them all down. "Give Me A Spanner, Ralph" turned up on the Invisible Hitchcock compilation of odds and ends alongside three more session refugees: "All I Wanna Do Is Fall In Love", the bizarrely titled "A Skull, A Suitcase And A Long Red Bottle Of Wine", and "My Favourite Buildings" (a song which would be re-recorded during the I Often Dream Of Trains sessions). The spoken-word "Happy The Golden Prince", meanwhile, would later be released as a free flexi-disc by the London fanzine, Bucketfull Of Brains (itself one of the magazines which had done the most to support Hitchcock). (A Soft Boys flexi, coupling the unreleased "Love Poisoning"/"When I Was A Kid", also appeared with an issue of the magazine, in 1982.) Yet another outtake, "Dancing On God's Thumb", would appear as the B-side to Hithcock's next single, "The Man Who Invented Himself", while "It's A Mystic Trip" and "Grooving On An Inner Plance" would be included on a flexi-disc issued free with that single. Finally, "It Was The Night" would be demo-ed again for Hitchcock's next album before the original version -- alongside an unreleased version of "I Watch The Cars", and the Zinc Pear mix of "The Man Who Invented Himself" -- would later be appended to Rhino's 1995 reiusse of Black Snake Diamond Role.
The completed album was released in May, 1981, to a largely mystified audience. In an age when Gothic Rock was struggling to wrap itself in the shroud it still wears today, and the new Romantic/Synthipop generation was flaunting its frilly shirts and annoying keyboard sounds to the Pop-picking masses, Hithcock's cracked vocals and crackerjack imagery could not have been further from contemporary expectations if he'd put on a baggy checkered suit and implored people not to call him Reg -- which, of course, he promptly proceeded to do.
Matters were not clarified by the continued outpouring of Soft Boys material, as the band proved that in death it was at least as prolific as it had been in life. A single of "Only The Stones Remain" appeared in October 1981, followed by the pleasantly bewildering Two Halves For The Price Of One budget-priced album (which promised a song called "Black Snake Diamond Rock" alongside versions of "Astronomy Domine", The Byrds' "Bells Of Rhymney", and a new, apparently sober, version of "Where Are The Prawns?"). The album's title made more sense once the record was placed on the turntable. Half live, half studio, Two Halves really could be viewed as two separate albums condensed down to one side each. Bearing their own individual artwork, the two sides were individually titled, too: Lope At The Hive (which translates as Live At The Hope And Anchor) was the concert side, Only The Stones Remain served up a handful of studio takes. (Presumably to avoid spreading the confusion even further, when the album became The Soft Boys' first-ever American release, it was retitled Only The Stones Remain. Unreleased tracks from the Hope show, incidentally, were featured on 1976-81.)
Two Halves For The Price Of One was well-received, reinforcing The Soft Boys' psychedelic reputation, and Hitchcock lost little time in exacerbating this linkage when he entered the studio with former Gong guitarist Steve Hillage to begin work on his second solo album. Hillage had garnered an interesting pedigree in the years since he departed Gong's land of flying teapots, first through a stream of increasingly individual solo albums (which can today be held almost single-handedly responsible for kick-starting the age of mystic New Age music), but also through his gradual departure from the guitar playing which had made his name. His production of Simple Minds, on their epochal Empire And Dance album the previous year, was especially impressive. And Hillage is, as Hitchcock puts it, "a nice guy". Unfortunately, the recording sessions were less agreeable, even though Hitchcock was now ensconced within the majestic 24-track AdVision studio. He was blessed with a budget of £12,000 and armed with what, in retrospect, seems a most-impressive battery of sessions musicians: Sara Lee would later join the B-52s, saxophonist Anthony Thistlethwaite eventually became a Waterboy, and occasional Psychedelic Fur Rod Johnson (who "wanted to be a machine", says Hitchcock). It wasn't the company that was wrong, then. It was the attitude which pervaded the sessions.
"I wanted to do what other people were doing at the time," Hitchcock has explained. "Rather than doing what The Soft Boys had always been associated with, which was being Retrodelic. I wanted...to do something that sounded like it was 1981." The original demos for this ambitious project had been recorded by Hitchcock and Matthew Seligman. And if that initial team had remained intact, the next few months (not to mention the ensuing album) might have gone a little smoother. Seligman, however, was suddenly invited to join the Thompson Twins (then approaching the peak of their hit-making fame), and Hitchcock decided to go it alone. The result, he insists, "was a complete abortion. I hated making it. I've never listened to it."
Three years after the Hillage sessions were released as Groovy Decay, Hitchcock released the original Seligman demos as Groovy Decoy, simply to excise the memory of its predecessor from the record racks. Hitchcock justifies his hatred of the original album with ease. "Nice producer, nice studio. But it was done in the midle of the night when I was drunk. And I was recording it with a bunch of aliens, really. I'd stepped out from the usual circle of people that was The Soft Boys -- and later became The Egyptians -- so I was a bit isolated.
"But on the whole, I think technology and I have never mixed successfully. Beefed-up productions, high budgets, big promotional things: they've, kind of, presented their own version of me. But it's not me. Maybe you've got to be entranced by the technology. Because I have a lot of trouble communicating with them." It didn't help, either, that much of the album featured saxophone -- an instrument which Hitchcock didn't particularly like at the start of the sessions, and one which he would come to despise as they continued. It is not at all coincidental that his own favorite tracks on the album, "America" and "Fifty Two Stations", are the sole sax-less songs in sight. Yet Groovy Decay was not, as many of Hitchcock's early fans would agree, as bad as its creator makes out. The accompanying versions of "St. Petersburg" and "The Cars She Used To Drive" are both well-regarded within his canon today, while the flexi-disc-only Black Snake outtake "Grooving On A Inner Plane" was re-recorded with fair results. "Midngiht Fish" echoes the kind of thing The Rutles might include within their Anthology series of outtakes and diddly bits, while "How Do Yo Work This Thing?" is reminiscent of an overwrought Peter Hammill (more overwrought than normal, that is!). Even "Nightride To Trinidad", the most obviously dated track on the album, has its adherents -- and that despite the awful disco remix to which it was subjected for an accompanying 12-inch single. Nevertheless, the sessions were nowhere near as productive as their predecessors', to the point where there were no outstanding outtakes whatsoever for the Rhino reissue of Groovy Decay (to which Groovy Decoy has, however, been commendably appended).
Hitchcock launched himself straight into another frenzied burst of recording -- with Seligman and fellow Soft Boy Andy Metcalfe -- the moment his promotional duties were over. It was the only way of getting rid of the horrible taste in his mouth. These late-1981 sessions have never been released in their entirety, although several of the songs have appeared across various compilations and collections. A new version of "Kingdom Of Love" (which originally appeared on The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight), for instance would be appended to Rhino's reissue of Groovy Decay, while other remnants include "Aether", "Nothing", and "Stranded In The Future" (which would emerge on 1995's You & Oblivion outtakes collection). Another song from 1981, "The Abandoned Brain", was re-recorded for inclusion on Invisible Hitchcock after the original tape was lost. Finally, two tracks from this period, "Eaten By Her Own Dinner"/"Dr. Sticky", turned up on a UK 12-inch single in the fall of 1982 and can also be found on Rhino's Invisible Hitchcock. The sessions were productive, but they did not exorcise Hitchcock's own dissatisfaction.
By the end of the year, in fact, he had essentially lapsed into a full-fledged retirement. Resparking his teenage fascination with Bob Dylan, reliving his own dreams of Syd Barrett, Hitchcock admits, "All I really wanted was to sit there like a middle-aged dreamer, staring out over the bridge into the valley and blowing smoke out of my nostrils, reminiscing." Surprised to discover how little the commercial failure of his two solo albums concerned him, "I thought, 'Why have a career? Why not just retire straight away?'" He was aided in this grand scheme by a particularly unexpected windfall. While Hitchcock had been mourning the misery that was Groovy Decay, a set of songs he co-wrote with ex-Damned bassist Captain Sensible had been catapulted to quite unexpected heights on the back of the Cap's surprise "Happy Talk" hit.
"I wrote the words for all the flops -- all the fillers -- on the album, it seems," Hitchcock recalls with self-deprecation. And it is true that the album Women And Captains First was not an enourmous hit": it made it to number 64 in the UK. But Hitchcock's needs were not enormous either. "Captain kept me going for quite a while. I did other odd bits and pieces as well, but nothing of note. I didn't do any gigs, and I decided it was all over and I wasn't going to perform anymore." Between the fall of 1981 and the spring of 1983, Hitchcock dropped out of sight -- although that is not to say he had completely given up. Retirement itself was fine, but it was also very boring. And despite his best intentions, "I found myself stockpiling songs."
In March of '82, he recorded the version of "Keeping Still" which would later turn up on the You & Oblivion collection. And three months later, he and Matthew Seligman convened to record "Listening To The Higsons", a tribute to the East Anglian White Funk band whom many press pundits were tipping for success. The Higsons didn't make it, but the song remains a jewel, appearing alongside "Eaten By Her Own Dinner" and "Dr. Sticky" on 1982's blink-and-you'll-miss-it 12-inch. The Sussex barn where they recorded was hardly the Big Pink. But just like Dylan's Basement Tapes, word of Hitchcock's return was fast to get around. Hitchcock himself followed.
In May, 1983, he linked up with a couple of friends -- James A. Smith and Simon Kunath -- and began making demos in earnest. A couple of the trio's early efforts -- the spacey instrumental "Pit Of Souls", and "Trash" -- would subsequently emerge on Invisible Hitchcock; four more would be appended to Rhino's reissue of the album which followed, I Often Dream Of Trains (or Crystal Branches as Hitchcock originally intended to title it). The making of demo tapes continued over the next year, a period during which Hitchcock also girded his loins for his return to active duty, booking into Alaska Studios for three or four days in the spring of 1984 to record I Often Dream Of Trains.
Hitchcock worked largely unaccompanied -- another friend, Chris Cox, dropped by to add some bass on one track, and -- somewhat surprisingly -- a saxophone was allowed to appear on another. But for the most part, Hitchcock's third solo album is exactly that: a solo album. Accordingly, I Often Dream Of Trains joins Black Snake among the albums which Hitchcock says he most enjoyed recording. "Probably because they're the ones I've had the most control over. You bring other people in and you start to let them take over, and maybe that's not always a good thing."
I Often Dream Of Trains also contains some of his finest songs yet, "Sometimes I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl", and two a capella numbers: "Uncorrected Personality Traits" and "Furry Green Atom Bowl". Even the outtakes are impressive. A Re-recording of "My Favourite Buildings", and "I Used To Say I Love You" were included among the five songs appended to the album's first British CD reissue, while "Insect Mother" (which Hitchcock would re-record the following year) features among the bonus tracks on Rhino's CD reissue of Fegmania!. Further outtakes from the I Often Dream Of Trains sessions -- "Falling Leaves", "Winter Love", and "Bones In The Ground" -- appeared on the B-side of another in the long trail of collectible Hitchcock singles, a new version of the old Soft Boys staple, The Byrds' "Bells Of Rhymney". 1984 also saw Hitchcock make his first live appearance on BBC Radio, recording a solo session for broadcast on the Mark Radcliffe show September 15. He performed four songs, all from I Often Dream Of Trains: the album's title track, "Sometimes I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl", "Flavour Of Night", and "Ye Sleeping Knights Of Jesus".
(It was the start of a long and fruitful relationship between Hitchcock and the BBC. But archivists will be horrified to learn that when Rhino contacted BBC in the hope of incorporating these session tapes into the CD reiussue of the Trains album, the tapes turned out to have deteriorated beyond any hope of salvage.)
Suddenly rejuvenated, Hitchcock's next decision was to begin working with a band again. Initially, the intention was simply to demo some new material, so Hitchcock called up the first compatible musicians he could think of: Soft Boys Andy Metcalfe and Morris Windsor. The sessions went so well, however, that a full-time partnership was never far away. Hitchcock himself still expresses some surprise that his new band should so resemble his old one. "We just had one day's rehearsal. We recorded the next day, and it was fantastic. Working with Andy and Morris utterly transformed the songs." Close to two-thirds of a new album -- plus a rudimentary home-made video for the song "Man with The Lightbulb Head" -- were completed before I Often Dream Of Trains was even in the shops, with the new band (briefly augmented by saxophonist James Fletcher and keyboard player Roger Jackson) making its live debut at the London Hope And Anchor during a series of shows intended to raise money to keep the venerable old venue open. As it turned out, the north London basement within which so many of the Punk-era bands had got their start was beyond help. But The Egyptians -- as Hitchcock dubbed his new band -- were a phenomenal success. A handful of one-off gigs soon became a crowded diary. And as the March, 1985 release of this next album, Fegmania!, approached, the band was seldom far from stage. Even so, Hitchcock was not working exclusively with The Egyptians. He and a friend, double bassist Chris Cox were constantly recording together, with three songs from these low-key sessions -- "Vegetable Friend", "I Got A Message For You", and "Point It At Gran" -- eventually appearing on the Invisible Hitchcock collection. A number of others also appeared before the public in 1995 as the You & Oblivion album.
Another regular playmate was Peter Buck, guitarist with R.E.M. (who were then in London to record their Fables Of The Reconstruction album). Cox and Hitchcock wasted little time in consummating this new friendship in the studio. "It was great," Hitchcock enthuses. "We did 'Birdshead' [Which would appear on You & Oblivion] and an early version of 'Flesh Number One'" -- a song which wouldn't receive an official release until 1988. "Peter came 'round and we worked. Then I took him back to the tube station in my blue-and-white VW van. I think he'd been up all night, as well. It was very quick -- if you want to get two songs down in 40 to 45 minutes, those two are your men. Chris is remarkable. He can learn a song and forget it all in the same song. It's fantastic. And Buck isn't all that different.
"I enjoyed working with them because they both do their best performances when they don't actually know the song. Neither of them had heard those songs before. It's incredible." Buck would also join The Egyptians onstage at London's premier late night club, Dingwalls, in March 1985, accompanying them through a version of "Bells Of Rhymney" before a checkered-suited Hitchcock led the band through an absurd game of musical chairs which ended with him playing bass, Metcalfe switching to drums and Windsor strumming guitar.
"As we near another oft-prophesied Psychedelic Summer," Melody Maker's excited review of the show pleaded, "one can only hope it'll be Hitchcock...who spearheads the rebellion." The imminent release of Fegmania! only amplified such pleas. Still the best-loved album within Hitchcock's back-catalog, Fegmania! resounds with classics: "Egyptian Cream", a song which dates from the pre-Groovy Decay sessions with Matthew Seligman; "Heaven", which was also released as a single; and "The Man With The Lightbulb Head" would all be featured on any Hitchcock "Best Of" compilation you could dream of. But still there is one song which, more than any, eptimozes both Hitchcock and -- via its popularity -- his audiences's expectations of the man: "My Wife And My Dead Wife".
Hitchcock acknowledges the song's importance when he admits, "I've constantly heard a few songs from my repertoire over the years. I sing a lot of them to this day. Things like 'Airscape' and the 'Dead Wife' song. 'Heaven'. They've been around so long I can't even imagine a time when I haven't written them. And I've found that if you consistently remember one or two events in your life, that historical event becomes its own reality. So when I listen to those songs on record, they don't really sound like I think they do. They sound younger. The skin sounds fresher, the voice sounds squeakier, you can see my eyes poking just above my collar, my nose looks very small."
"The 'Dead Wife' song," as Hitchcock now refers to it, has gone several steps further than that, however -- not only taking on its own life as a song, but also stepping into the realms of video as well. So many people have fond memories of a "Dead Wife" video that it comes as a stunning blow to learn that the closest Hitchcock has ever come to making such a thing is the live performance version included on 1985's Gotta Let This Hen Out! concert video, which itself is interspersed with mere glimpses of a dead-looking wife in full bridal drag.
"Oh God!" Hitchcock ejaculates. "That was Karen! Karen and her husband were hippies from Lytham St. Annes and they directed the Marquee show [Source of the Hen video and album]. They filmed us, then Karen went and enacted scenes from the songs. She covered herself in lilies, then lay down on the ironing board and filmed herself for the 'Dead Wife'. Then she got into the shower in her bathing costume and poured treacle over herself for 'I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl'.
"They also had some live holiday footage of themselves driving through America -- which they inercut with this very sweaty live footage. It was all very strange -- and it had nothing to do with us." Another urban legend bites the dust.
"My Wife And My Dead Wife" reappeared, alongside "Heaven" and two older songs -- "Brenda's Iron Sledge" and "The Cars She Used To Drive" -- on Hitchcock's next BBC session, the first he would record for Radio One's Andy Kershaw Show, broadcast Sept. 7, 1985, a month before the Gotta Let This Hen Out! album and video were released. Melody Maker continued effusive when the Hen album rolled around, noting first that Hitchcock writing a song like "Heaven" was akin to George Michael (then at the peak of his teen-dream sappiness) composing "Layla", but then pronouncing, "'Perfection' is not a word normally applicable to live albums, but this time around...what other word is there?"
Recorded at the London Marquee in April, 1985, Hen (both in its original form, and the extended CD versions which Midnight Music and Rhino would subsequently release) is a leisurely stroll through Hitchcock's entire back-catalog, from A Can Of Bees ("Leppo And The Jooves") through to Fegmania!. It is also a fair-but-not-entirely-accurate reflection of The Egyptians' live sound. Some vocals, bass, and keyboards were all "repaired" in the studio before release -- but the glue really doesn't show. Over a decade on from that Melody Maker review, Gotta Let This Hen Out! (the distinctive title, incidentally, is taken from a line in "Listening To The Higsons") remains an excellent album. And there was more to come as well.
A year on from the main attraction, three tracks from Hen were matched with three further performances from the Marquee show and released as the equally entertaining Exploding In Silence. "That was a picture disc, which means nobody could ever play it. So it didn't matter what we put on it," jokes Hitchcock. "It's got a picture of me with the big teeth, and the hat. The problem is, you can't see the radishes in that shot. On the Invisible Hitchcock cover, there's a nice, moody picture of me toting some radishes -- which had just been washed to make them exra-moist and globular. And I'm doing my best 'fuck off and die' look (which I used to specialize in, but which is diluted by the presence of some very fine radishes). The Exploding In Silence picture was from the same session, and I'm grinning in that one. I don't know why. Maybe I'd just eaten a radish."
In fact, Exploding In Silence is the only Hitchcock disc in the last decade (the newly released Moss Elixir notwithstanding) to picture the artist so prominently. Beginning with Gotta Let This Hen Out!, he had preferred to utilize his paintings. "Pictures of me always have that 'fuck off and die' look to them -- mainly because I don't like being photographed. And it got worse. Every so often there's a nice shot of me -- which is done when I'm not expecting it -- and we've used one of them on the cover of Moss Elixir. Because having done an exhaustive photo session, we just found some old shots which my partner took of me when I wasn't looking and they're much more relaxed. It's unfortunate, the 'fuck off and die' look, because it's not what I mean to convey. It's just the way I feel about cameras." And there were a lot of them going off now.
Both Fegmania! and Gotta Let This Hen Out! gave Hitchcock a visibility he had never previously imagined. And it was in this rareified atmosphere of imminent stardom that he and The Egyptians set to work on their next album: the often brilliant, but occasionally labored, Element Of Light. "Things had started to happen," Hitchcock remembered. "I was a little bit more out of the bubble I'd been in [during] the early-'80s." He paid his first visits to The United States, gigged regularly to the kind of appreciation which The Soft Boys could only have dreamed about, and found people regularly queuing up for his autograph. "In a way, I was starting to feel like a real person." A real person who was working with a real band.
Although Fegmania! was the first album upon which The Egyptians performed as a unit, Element Of Light would be the first upon which that unit could truly expand. The first, as Hitchcock said, to be made by the trio "as an ensemble right the way through." Unfortunately, this stability was balanced out by a certain instability in terms of the actual recording. The band used three different studios over the course of the Element Of Light sessions, and still two tracks -- "The President" and "Lady Waters And The Hood One" -- could only be completed after versions performed at the Town And Country Club for broadcast by the BBC were stripped down to their rhythm tracks, then rebuilt from there. Several other cuts, meanwhile, pale in comparison with the verisons which were recorded only months later for the Andy Kershaw Show. Broadcast May 29, 1986, this latest BBC radio session featured stunning version of "Bass", "The President" (inspired by Ronald Reagan's trip to Bitburg), and "Lady Waters And The Hooded One" (all from the album), the B-sides "Tell Me About Your Drugs" and "The Can Opener", plus one oldie: "Fifty Two Stations". From start to finish, it has a relaxed quality which Element Of Light could only aspire towards. Neither was settling into the studio the only problem which bedeviled Element Of Light. Hitchcock admitted, "It was harder to assemble material for Element than it was for Fegmania!. After the initial sessions, there was a lot of stuff that didn't seem that strong."
Element Of Light was Hitchcock's first album to be released simultaneously on CD and vinyl, and the CD's bonus tracks swiftly proved a serious bone of contention among his fanbase. CDs were still relatively new to the Rock world 10 years ago, with nobody willing to predict whether or not they would ever catch on. Forcing fans to fork out for four new songs available only in a format whose future was still open to conjecture was not a popular gambit. For anybody whose appetite was whetted by this initial foray into the Hitchcock archive, however, the Element Of Light CD was but the first course in what would soon become a gigantic repast. His next album, Invisible Hitchcock, was to be a complete collection of largely unreleased oddities, dating all the way back to the Black Snake Diamond Role sessions. It would not be an easy meal to consume, however. Indeed, released in the U.S. by Relativity as part of a general licenseing deal which covered most of Hitchcock's back-catalog, Invisible Hitchcock swiftly set about creating another splitting headach for fastidious collectors. The British and American vinyl versions both comprised slightly different tracks, with the British CD then adding further variety to the pot and -- though it was still nine years away -- the first U.S. CD version of this fascinating (if oddball) collection only added to the confusion. It was great that all three permutations on the original theme were combined onto one disc, great that additional bonus tracks were then taken from the Eaten By Her Own Dinner EP. But all that hard work was promptly undone when one track was excised from the original running order and returned to the earlier album from whose sessions it had originally been snatched. And there was still no room for Hitchcock's version of "Kung Fu Fighting", one of the most intriguing cuts produced during this entire period. "Kung Fu Fighting" was recoreded for the UK benefit album Alvin Lives In Leeds (Midnight Clang 4).
"They wanted a series of ghastly hits from the 1970s," Hitchcock recalls. "And that was one of my particular favorites. There's a really good live version of that which The Egyptians did as well, which has never been released. But if we ever do a posthumous Egyptians live album, that should go on. That was really good fun." This apparent propensity for delving into his archives, says Hitchcock, is in fact one of the pitfalls of the cult status which he enjoys. "The fans love the unreleased material. It doesn't matter what it is. If it didn't come out, they have to hear it." He leaves unspoken-but-ominously-obvious the belief that there was often a very good reaosn for it not having been released in the first place. "Some of it was rubbish. Some of it was never completed. And some of it was on a cassette tape which broke (and I never got it repaired)."
That was the fate of much of the material packed onto 1995's You & Oblivion. Following Element Of Light and the attendant touring, The Egyptians broke for a short hiatus, during which Hitchcock continued recording (solo and with Chris Cox). It was during this period, too -- in October 1986 -- that he recorded another BBC session, comprising "Fun In The Sun", "Lock Away Your Eyes", and "Where Angels Fear To Tread". Unfortunately, details of this session (not to mention the tapes themselves) appear to have been lost long ago, and Hitchcock acknowledges that You & Oblivion might have shared that same fate. Cox dubbed the sessions onto a cassette, recalls Hitchcock, "but the tape broke, and I forgot it until I was visiting with Chris [Cox] again, in 1994. And I came across three reels of these tapes." He played them and was surprised at just how fresh they all sounded.
"What I like about [the album] is it was all recorded very fast. There was no time for anyone to go overboard." Rhino's reissue campaign was already in the planning stages. It was easy for Hitchcock to slip this latest archive find into the program. "I think there's a big argument for having two forms of record released. One would be a, sort of, subscription. If you were a Robyn Hitchcok subscriber, you'd get the Robyn Hitchcock outtakes. You'd probably need a five-year embargo, because it's dangerous to let people get stuff too soon -- in case it turns up on another album. But if something hasn't been recorded after five years, it's never going to happen. So if you were a hard-core subscriber, you could get all this stuff. And if you were a regulation, standard-issue human, you'd just buy the proper record." At the same time, however, he remarks, "I've probably put out too many records, and You & Oblivion is the climax of this. I handed over tapes of 30 songs, and they put 22 songs on the record. No one wants to listen to all that in one sitting! Even I only got to the end of side one before I had a headache. I think you have to look on that as a, kind of, reference record. In other words, I've put out a lot of this stuff -- A: because it's there and B: because people buy it. But C: on the other hand, I don't think it's an artistically brilliant maneuver."
The initial loss of the Cox sessions was caused, in part, by Hitchcock And The Egyptians' decision to sign to a major-label deal with A&M in 1988. The group's popularity on the American college circuit had been growing for some time, and for A&M their recruitment finally signalled the label's acknowledgement of the fast-exploding grassroots Alternative scene (as highlighted by The Smiths, R.E.M., Billy Bragg, The Replacements, and so on).
"I think we were the last of the independent bands which were still independent," Hitchcock laughs. "So they had to sign us." Among Hitchcock's own hard-core following, the general consensus is that the four albums he and The Egyptians recorded for A&M -- Globe Of Frogs (1988), Queen Elvis (1989), Perspex Island (1991), and Respect (1993) -- are uniformly disappointing, characterized only by a handful of songs and a few more legendary curios -- the "Dark Green Energy" B-side recorded with Peter Buck during the Perspex Island sessions; a scarce seven-track A&M live promo, Live Death; and a crop of videos which were tailor-made for the MTV audience's vision of this eccentric Englishman (but which leave Hitchcock himself cold).
He had already paddled tentatively in the video world via a clutch of Super-8 videos shot with director Tony Moon. "But then corporate Rock struck and A&M said, 'We'd like you to make videos on 16mm and synch your voice up, and mime to this.' But I'd never mimed to anything in my life (mainly because we couldn't afford it). So I turned 'round and said, 'I don't see why I should,' and we had this great long legal wrangle about how many things I had to mime to.
"We made three or four videos for A&M, and it was a bit depressing because they weren't nearly as good as the homemade ones which we made with bits of string ("Raymond Chandler Evening") and out-of-synch vocals. Basically, I felt the more money that went into the video, the less it showed what we were about. I think we got very good stuff on 8mm -- it wasn't expensive, but it didn't make us look cheap. I think we looked and sounded cheaper the more money that was spent on us." This same theory is borne out by the success of The Egyptians' visits to the BBC Radio studios, where four or more strong sessions would be knocked out as quickly as possible and then broadcast to the nation before anyone could get cold feet. Without exception, they offer vast improvements on their studio counterparts. Indeed, February 2, 1988, Andy Kershaw broadcast one of the best-ever Egyptians sessions, comprising "Tropical Flesh Mandala", "Sleeping With Your Devil Mask", "Chinese Bones" (tracks from the Globe Of Frogs album), and a surprise look back at "Listening To The Higsons". Almost exactly one year later, February 9, 1989, awaiting the release of Queen Elvis, the band returned to the BBC to create vicious versions of "Madonna Of The Wasps", "Superman", "Veins Of The Queen", and "One Long Pair Of Eyes".
Once again, anyone disappointed by the attendant album should lend an ear to these impassioned performances. Although The Egyptians continued to occupy most of his time, Hitchcock was not allowing his extracurricular ambitions to lay fallow. He joined Peter Buck and Nigel Cross to conribute "Wild Mountain Thyme" to a passing Byrds tribute album. But, more importantly, he was also spending a great deal of time in San Francisco. Largely for personal reasons (the birth and subsequent death of a relationship), but also to record the solo material which would, in 1990, become the Eye album. To fans disappointed by the A&M records, this particular disc remains the one oasis of sanity in Hitchcock's recent repertoire.
Eye was released through the Twin/Tone indie, after A&M politely passed on it. "They told me they'd be willing to release half of it," Hitchcock recalls. "But they also said I could take it elsewhere if I wanted to -- so I did." After the poor critical response to its predecessors, it was interesting to note that Eye received almost unanimously good reviews. Indeed, among the many plaudits the album has received over the years, the Trouser Press Record Guide perhaps summed up the general mood with the observation, "As if to underscore the improvement, 'Queen Elvis' [on Eye] is easily superior to anything on the LP with which it shares only a title." Buoyed both by great reviews and Twin/Tone's lighthearted approach to promotion, a solo Hitchcock toured heavily across The United States in support of Eye. Unfortunately, his return to the bosom of A&M soon brought him back to reality.
"I received a fax from the label which basically said, if we wanted to continue our association, our next album had to be properly produced -- which was the complete opposite to what we'd been signed to do." In 1988, The Egyptians had been recruited for their ability to sound unlike a mainstream act. By 1990, however, the mainstream was king once again and The Egyptians had to fall into line. Hitchcock contacted producer Paul Fox and the pair decamped to Athens, Georgia to begin the demo-ing process. "I started demo-ing with Paul and Peter [Buck] at Peter's house in very-late-1990. He had a recording studio conveniently located about 400 yards from his front door. I don't know whether he got there first or the studio got there first, but it was John Keene's place. The studio which the R.E.M. circus all use. So we did the initial recordings there to try out Paul Fox. And at the same time, I was talking to Andy and Morris about whether we were going to do this thing together. In the end we decided we would, so we went out to L.A. and spent a lot of time and money. The original recordings with Paul and Peter were a lot quicker -- just a drum machine and two guitars -- and some of them are really good." They also remain under lock and key.
Perspex Island, meanwhile, was released in August, 1991 and -- bolstered by the much-played "So You Think You're In Love" -- swiftly raced to the top of the American Alternative charts. For a moment, it seemed as though A&M's inistence on a "proper" producer had not been so misguided after all. But only for a moment. Barely had Perspex Island reached the top than the entire music scene underwent one of its sudden, periodic shudders and the whole thing came tubmling down again. Like so much more of the music which seeped into the 1990s from the decade before, The Egyptians' commercial high-point was about to fall victim to the market's changing tastes.
"It's very significant that Perspex Island was knocked off the top of the Alternative charts by Nirvana," Hitchcock explains. "I think other people who came through at the same time as us had all moved up a notch, to different planes -- people like 10,000 Maniacs and R.E.M. and to a lesser extent The Replacements. But everyone else was just there to be scattered -- and that included us. We were still there as an Alternative act, but it had altered, it all became 'Rock' again. People were allowed to have long hair and punch the air again. Buy pretzels and shout, 'Way to go!'
"It had changed, and there wasn't really a place for what we did anymore. Our stuff was far too musicianly and middle-aged -- and I'd put that down to the combination of the three of us. Andy and Morris both suffer from terminal good taste, which is something I don't have. And left to myself, my stuff's a little bit rougher (and probably still fits in reasonably well with the part of the market we've always had)." But Perspex Island was very much a group effort. And in the fierce glare of Nevermind's sonic fallout, Hitchcock is right. It simply didn't fit in anymore. Live performances from this period, of course, prove that in the right environment The Egyptians were still a great Rock 'n' Roll band. 1992's Live Death promo, for instance, features excellent versions of "My Wife And My Dead Wife" and "Withered And Died", plus a surreal take on The Beatles' "A Day In The Life". There is also a limited-edition live album which was made available through Hitchcock's London office, punningly titled Give It To The Thoth Boys (Thoth, of course, is an ancient Egyptian god).
"That has yet another version of the 'Dead Wife' on it," Hitchcock enthuses. "'I'm Only You' is on there, 'Glass Hotel'. There's a good version of 'Egyptian Cream'. It's a good album." Things were still healthy on the live front then and, it was in an attempt to transfer that healthiness to a studio environment that Hitchcock and The Egyptians recorded what must be one of the most anarchic sessions ever broadcast by the BBC, in January of 1992. Hitchcock was living just around the corner from Andy Kershaw in north London's Crouch End district at the time and had become a regular visitor to the disc jockey's house. "He always thought my kitchen was a good place to play," Kershaw reflected. And when the time came to tape a new session, that is where it was done.
"That's the best stuff we ever did," Hitchcock raves. "It really was live in his kitchen. It was mixed by our soundman (who's Finnish), and there were about 20 people in the other room drinking wine and coffee. And they'd just hold their glasses still for three minutes while we did a take. Then we'd do aonther one." With Windsor playing a Coke tin and an egg shaker, and Hitchcock and Metcalfe on acoustic guitar and bass, a total of seven tracks were recorded: "Oceanside", "So You Think You're In Love", "Open The Door, Homer", "Birds In Perspex", "Arms Of Love", a reprise of "Kung Fu Fighting", and even "The Banana Boat Song". Looking back across the album which was subsequently culled from a decade's worth of Kershaw sessions, Hitchcock is adamant: "I think the best testament of The Egyptians is that album, because nobody had time to get uptight about anything and finish it off. And that last session, I think, is the real heart of The Egyptians."
With so much positive energy going into the pre-production stage, then, The Egyptians' fourth A&M album, Respect, should have been a killer. Instead, even Hitchcock finds it difficult to look back upon it with much affection. The original plan, he recalls, was to record the album in the same spirit as that final Kershaw session. "I meant it to be recorded by sticking a binaural mic around a pineapple, and have the three of us play the way we did in radio stations. Just basic acoustic Coke-tin with three-part harmonies. But because we had a 24-track mobile outside, it just got out of control very quickly.
"There were two cliches at that stage: there was Grunge and there was unplugged. The young bucks were all Grunge, and the older dudes were unplugged and (R.E.M. were able to go from one to the other in reverse order, which was nice). So I thought, 'Let's try and steer a middle course.' Unfortunately, there was no room for that.
"Respect was meant to be like Let It Be: no overdubs, just the interaction between three musicians who'd been playing together far too long doing it one more time. I always wanted to have a document of the way we played live because I thought it was far stronger than the records we made. But we just treated the house as a recording studio (which wasn't nearly as exciting). It was the best thing collectively that we could do. But it was far too tasty."
Hitchcock is surprisingly matter-of-fact about the decline of The Egyptians from one of Rock's most excitingly anarchic acts to -- as he himself put it -- three musicians who'd been playing together far too long. "Listening back, you can see what was going wrong. 'Balloon Man' and things were fine. We sounded independent, and someone was singing it. You could hear my voice up there. But stuff on Perspex Island and Respect, I'm just buried in the music.
"I know what we were tyring to do, but it was a very collective thing. I, sort of, submerged myself in with the band -- literally to the point that my vocals were mixed far too low. I took a lot of my personality out of those records. I'd been listening to a lot of Bryan Ferry, Eno a bit: music that entranced you -- or made you want to buy clothes and get a new haircut. And alhtough I finally realized it wasn't for me, quite a few fans realized it earlier.
"I think Respect was a rather exhausted record in a way. My father had died, and I'd had a little upheaval in various ways. And we'd done a lot of touring. I think it was a real end-of-an-era album." Neither were matters helped by Hitchcock's increasing problem with losing his voice.
"One of the reasons we took the whole thing down in volume, got rid of the drum kit, was so I could hear myself. And after 20 years, I feel I'm entitled to hear what I'm doing." The Egyptians broke up shortly after the "Driving Aloud" tour finished.
Everyone was over 40," Hitchcock explains, "and it was time to untie the handkerchieves which bound our legs together. And it was time for us all to be on our own, rather than in an aging mob of boys." Talking of the split at the time, Hitchcock sounded very enthusiastic about the future. And yet four years would elapse before Hitchcock's auidence discovered exactly what he meant. Although the period was highlighted in America by a burst of promotional activity surrounding the Rhino reissues (and in Britain by the appearance of the previously unreleased "Statue With A Walkman" on an otherwise fairly pedestrian eponymous "Best Of" collection), Hitchcock broke cover just once, for a one-off single of "Man With A Woman's Shadow" recorded for the Olympia, Washington-based K label in 1995. And people thought he went quiet in the early 1980s!
"When the A&M contract finished, I wasn't in a big hurry to get a new one. I knew I'd have to sooner or later. But I wasn't rushing around companies. Indeed, I wouldn't have had much to rush around the companies with.
"I write quickly. But I wanted to produce a record that was the best possible songs I could get. And rather than spending money and time recording it, I wanted to spend time on writing the songs, recording them, and then leaving them for six months to see if they were any good. Basically, if I was anywhere for any period of time, I'd do a bit more recording, then think about it for a few months. I did something in Seattle, for instance, then went back and overdubbed it a year later."
Of the new songs he had accumulated following the "Driving Aloud" tour, just two would survive through this period. "The casualty rate was really high." The wait appears to have been worth it, though. Moss Elixir has already attracted some of the finest notices Hitchcock has received since the heyday of Hen!, while it is also threatening to dispatch collectors into the same kind of whirling anguish they haven't experienced in a decade as Moss Elixir arrives on the shelves accompanied by a limited-edition vinyl version (the characteristically confusingly titled Mossy Liquor).
Comprising alternate versions of six of Moss Elixir's 12 tracks -- together with six more songs which are unavailable elsewhere -- Mossy Liquor apparently exists purely to confound people.
Moss Elixir, Hitchcock insists, is "the one you put on your shelf as the new Robyn Hitchcock album. Mossy Liquor is the one you file away and never play again.
"It came about originally because I wanted to have some vinyl out. At first, we were going to just put out Moss Elixir with a couple of different tracks. But that's a real ripoff, so we thought, 'Let's just make it totally different. And if someone buys it who doesn't have a record player, they should find someone who does and tape it.'" In any case, it should not be compared to the similarly structured Groovy Decay/Groovy Decoy coupling. Hitchcock is adamant about that. "This time I like both albums."
He doesn't even need to add that like those other albums of which he is fondest, Black Snake Diamond Role, I Often Dream Of Trains, and Eye, this is primarily because he was able to do everything himself. Some people, it seems, really aren't cut out for life in a band. And the older they grow, the truer that is.
"The thing is, if you're playing with a band, you should either really rock, or not at all. And I hate tasteful, middle-aged, bass-drums-organ (and all that stuff).
"I think taste and Rock 'n' Roll are incompatible. And if I ever actually go out with a Rock band again, I'll make sure that the thing is reasonably...it won't be the New York Dolls, but it will be reasonably rough. It can't be too thoughtful or slow or mellow (or whatever). It's much better that you do it on your own or with a harmony." With a full band -- English outfit Homer -- featured on just three tracks, that, he concedes, is "sort of the spirit" of Moss Elixir.
"It's not Julie Andrews running down the hillside filling her lungs with good oxygen and saying, 'Sing my little budgerigar,'" he smiles. "But it's got a lot more life in it than anything I've done in a long time."
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