The Record
November 15, 1996
His Genesis Is Food For Thought
by Jerry DeMarco
Robyn Hitchcock was performing in Denver two weeks ago when a fan shouted: "Hey, Robyn! Why do you write so many songs about food?"
"Why not?" Hitchcock said. "I could write songs about icebergs or sports. But they wouldn't be very interesting, would they?"
Hitchcock is singing more songs about food, sex, and death as he shares the bill with Billy Bragg on a brief acoustic tour across North America. Tonight, they're at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan.
"Sex, food, death, and love are the most important factors of life," Hitchcock said by telephone while on the road last week." It's funny. It's as if I have a monopoly on writing about these things. I might be a trailblazer on the seafood front. I think I'm the first person to write about that. But a lot of my songs, I think, are romantic. People just seem to pick up on stuff that pokes out a bit."
"Poking out a bit" best describes Hitchcock, a Pop Music anomaly who relies on whimsical wordplay, surreal images, and uncommon melodic stews. For more than 20 years -- from his Punk-rocking, mid-'70s work as a Soft Boy to his recent minimalist tract, Moss Elixir -- the British singer-songwriter's poetic Guitar Pop has been a style unto itself.
Now a 43-year-old cult hero, Hitchcock jokes about the genesis of his unplugged bent, saying it reverses Dylan's journey from folkie to rocker.
"When I was 20 or 21 I was singing in Folk clubs, but I wanted to wield an electric guitar and be in a Rock band," Hitchcock said. "By the time I got to my early-30s, I started doing solo shows. I find that I did more solo work as time went by, even when I was with The Egyptians [His longtime backing band]. I got used to dominating the stage.
"My voice, that's the other side of it. The last five years of The Egyptians, every tour my voice would give out near the end. One tour, we lost about three or four shows. I'm sure giving a lot of interviews and smoking unfiltered cigarettes didn't help."
Midway through the current 23-day trek, Hitchcock was feeling no ill effects. The barnstormer took him and Bragg from Montreal to Seattle via Detroit, Denver, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Saturday night, the road trip ends in Boston.
The tour is a warmup of sorts for Hitchcock, who will return to New York in December, when director Jonathan Demme (Silence Of The Lambs, Philadelphia) will make a concert film of his live show.
Demme, who used The Feelies as a high school reunion band in the film Something Wild, has done similar work with Talking Heads and Neil Young.
Hitchcock, backed by a violinist, plays acoustic guitar for part of the show before plugging in for a few numbers. It's an approach he has taken since jettisoning The Egyptians around 1990. "Generally it's quieter. It's less ponderous," he said. "It takes less time to get everything up-and-running. It's more compact and maneuverable."
While retaining some staples, the songlist changes each night.
There's "Only the Stones Remain" and "Queen of Eyes", from his days with The Soft Boys (in Chicago he performed "The Face of Death"). Hitchcock also favors "Egyptian Cream" and "Chinese Bones", as well as his 1988 near-hit "Balloon Man" -- although much of the show draws on the Spartan 1990 album, Eye, and the recent Moss Elixir. He also is polishing new songs onstage that will be in Demme's film.
Hitchcock was saddened to learn that Maxwell's, an intimate club where he frequently tried out new material, will stop booking original bands at the end of the year. He'll play two shows there Dec. 6, as both a farewell to the Hoboken venue and a warmup before Demme's cameras roll.
As of last week, Hitchcock and Bragg hadn't appeared onstage together. But they were "creeping toward it", and expected to perform at least one duet tonight, Hitchcock said. "Both of us have so many songs we want to do. There's more than enough to choose from."
There also is a contrast not only in style, but in personality.
"I'm certainly not like Billy," Hitchcock said. "He's much more focused. He meets the world a lot more head-on than I do. He's got his own beliefs, and he's quite happy to argue with people who don't see things the way he does. I'd just as soon take my cup of coffee somewhere else.
"I never sit there with a point I'm trying to make," he said of his writing. "All thought is free-association to some degree, anyway. I just don't edit my thoughts very much. Sometimes I know when my thoughts are onto something: their noses are twitching, and they leap over the hedge. But I'm never deliberately trying to make a point.
"I write for adults as children. I don't write from a particularly wordly point of view. I'm cynical, but I'm not really a man of the world."
Hitchcock said he likes to "undermine or demolish cliches". Too many musicians write "automatic pilot songs" -- cranking out product instead of something worth listening to, he said. Hitchcock is as prolific as anyone, yet he couldn't imagine writing cookie-cutter style.
"I don't think you can summon an image at will unless you have some, sort of, satanic pact with your images. I actually write lists of titles when I'm in transit. Maybe I'll write a few lines while we're on the train or the plane. When I get to a place of stillness, I'll pull out a guitar and look at the titles. Then maybe I'll write a song.
"It's like the body growing down from the head. You start with the head floating in the air, like a helium balloon. Then you build the body underneath it until it stands."
Asked to offer an image of his life right now, Hitchcock chose a row of flashing lightbulbs that create the illusion of motion. "I'm just, sort of, flying from dot-to-dot, not really going anywhere." He said he is only just learning "how much weight to apply" to any given situation.
"I think the important thing is to appreciate what I already have," Hitchcock said. "You should always be aware of what you've got.
"Most people get by on less than a tenth of what we do here in the West. I'm really lucky to be able to make a living out of something that comes as natually as this. I like being my own boss."
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