The Guardian
December 3, 1998
Robyn Hitchcock ***
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
by Caroline Sullivan
It's taken Robyn Hitchcock 20 years to play the Queen Elizabeth Hall -- 25 if you count his stint with the long-departed group he founded, The Soft Boys. That he has only now progressed to mid-sized venues is attributable to one thing, the C-word.
Hitchcock embodies the term "cult act", drifting from one record label to another, selling just enough albums to avoid needing a day job; lionised by a small, ardent following but virtually unknown to the rest of the world. And that's how it will probably remain. He is unlikely ever to trouble the charts in a serious way because his brand of English eccentricity is just a touch too eccentric. There's his crustacean fetish, for one thing, and latterly an obsession with traffic cones. Two cones were parked in the middle of the QEH stage and sat there till Hitchcock suddenly saw them. "I forgot to move the cones," he apologised, and shifted them a couple of feet to the right, where they stayed, a testament to his peculiarity.
He is fortunate enough to have a fan in director Jonathan Demme, which is how he came to be headlining the largest venue of his career. Demme made a film of Hitchcock doing a gig in a New York shop window. The result, Storefront Hitchcock, premiered at the London Film Festival, and the singer is consequently enjoying his highest profile ever.
His act is simple: he strums a guitar, sings in a high, unmelodious voice and chats in between. Songs run the gamut between odd and damned odd, the subject matter ranging from the 1969 moon landing to Victorian sexual mores. Most of the tunes were frankly tuneless, functioning as indie-Folk containers for Hitchcock's stream of lyrics. R.E.M. would scarcely have recognised a cover of their song "Electrolyte".
The real meat of the show was the bits between songs, where he exercised the breadth of his Hitchcock-ness. His meandering stories about guitar picks and astronauts drew gusts of laughter, not because they were funny but because he was. Robyn Hitchcock not appearing at an arena near you, but entertaining anyway.
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