Willamette Week
June 2, 1997
Robyn Hitchcock, The Master Of Twisted Pop, Discusses Movies, Stagecraft, And Fruit
Stop Making Sense Part Two
Rock Interview
by Richard Martin
A master of the twisted image and poignant thought, Robyn Hitchcock has sculpted words around gliding melodies for nearly 20 years. First as a member of the English Psychedelic Pop band The Soft Boys, then as a solo artist and leader of Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians, he's released records without regard to trends or movements, instead relying on a singular vision to create exquisite and often literary songs.
On his latest album and first for Warner Bros., Moss Elixer, Hithcock mixes highly metaphorical tales of love and death with his usual array of otherworldly narratives. The record arrives amidst a barrage of new and reissued Hitchcock material, including a limited-edition collection, Mossy Liquor (Outtakes And Prototypes), a three song EP on Olympia's K Records, and a nine-CD retrospective on Rhino and greatest hits compilations on both A&M and Rhino.
Early next year, the feature-length film and accompanying soundtrack Storefront Hitchcock will hit theaters and record-store shelves. Directed by Jonathan Demme, who won an Academy Award for Silence Of The Lambs and earlier shot one of the most highly acclaimed concert films, Stop Making Sense, the work will feature the singer-songwriter performing a selection of old hits, new tunes, improvised rants and a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary".
Currently on tour with London guitarist Tim Keegan, Hitchcock spoke to Willamette Week after taking a dip in a Los Angeles hotel pool, which failed to moisten his famously dry sense of humor.
How did you and Jonathan Demme come together for Storefront Hitchcock?
Jonathan appeared through a trap door in my dressing room just outside New York and said, "Do you want to make a movie?" and then just vanished in a flash of light and a puff of smoke. I saw he'd left a card with his phone number emblazoned in gold. So I got my people in touch with his people and we exchnaged beads and tokens and it materialized.
So will it be more like Silence Of The Lambs or Stop Making Sense?
More like the latter, except for the butterflies. It's me live, only not filmed in a real club but in a storefront window. If it works well we might do another one called Underwater Hitchcock where I play the same gig in the bottom of a swimming pool.
Do you find it flattering that there have been so many re-releases of your records, or is it overkill?
I think it's good. If you're a novelist, you expect that your work stays in print. If you're a Graham Greene or a William Burroughs or Evelyn Waugh, you'd hope that your novels were available and they didn't just disappear so that they only had your last two books in the shop. The same goes for me. But there are far too many records around anyway. Everyone's made too many. There's more than enough music to keep an archeologist from the future happy for the next million years.
A lot of people describe your music as surrealistic. How do you feel about that?
I can understand it. To me, life at its peak is surrealistic. It's when you've got things with each other that don't normally go with each other. You might be driving through Nebraska, and then suddenly there's an English phone box in the middle of a field. Every so often things like that happen, and I think that's more attractive than just what is. Maybe I've never learned to accept reality and maybe the wisest people do. I like to twist things about a bit.
Your distinctive approach to commonplace subjects like love and death keeps you out of the mainstream. Does it ever bother you that you're not as rich and famous as U2 or R.E.M.?
I think there's a compromise. I could always sell more records, and I'd be quite happy to play to bigger crowds. And I've probably not taken the best opportunities in my career sometimes. But on the other, hand I'm still here -- assuming I make it to Portland. I've been in the business for 20 years, and I still have a record deal and there are a lot of people who seem to like my work and who assure me that it lasts and that it means something. I never fantasized about playing stadiums. I never stood in front of mirrors with my guitar. It takes a particular kind of psyche to be able to deal with Stadium Rock. U2 are probably better at it than R.E.M..
So we shouldn't expect to see a giant lemon onstage?
I was going out with real lemons actually. On the first leg of this tour, we had the fruit of the day. We had a nice big green cone at the back of the stage and Igor, my road manager, would put a lemon or a lime there and I'd point it out to the audience and then I'd go off for the encore and he'd come on and remove the fruit and screw in a red light bulb. It was all very theatrical, but we couldn't bring it on this long of a tour. But don't talk to me about U2, man. I've been into fruit for years.
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