Varsity
January 15, 1999
Sex, Death, And Fish
S.F. Said Meets The Man Behind Storefront Hitchcock
by S.F. Said
"People say I'm obsessed with sex and death and fish," sighs Robyn Hitchcock. "I just think those are the main things."
Sex and death, Okay. But fish? "Yeah. Even that Celine Dion song in Titanic: it's about people who are going to die, they have sex first, and you can bet there's a lot of sea creatures hovering about. They just don't put it the way I do."
As a musician, writer and now feature film subject, Hitchcock has never been one to follow the crowd. In the '70s heyday of Punk and Disco, he led the Cambridge-based Soft Boys to glorious chart oblivion with his skewed take on Psychedelia. Their debut single, "(I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp", set a standard he's sustained through his solo career. Imagine John Lennon singing songs by Monty Python; Syd Barrett making merry with Mervyn Peake. It's brilliant and it's unique, but it's hardly a recipe for world domination.
"I'm more comfortable on one side of things," he explains. "I wouldn't want Michael Stipe's job. But there are always more students, hippies, intellectuals, dissidents and perverts to be colonised."
Among the colonised is filmmaker Jonathan Demme, of Silence Of The Lambs fame. His latest movie, Storefront Hitchcock, records Robyn playing in a New York shop-window. It's a mesmerising film that builds its spell slowly, sucking you in not with gimmicky editing or effects, but with the sheer power of Hitchcock's performance.
"Jonathan doesn't complicate things. He just finds people, sticks them in front of a camera, and that's that."
If you've seen Demme's Stop Making Sense or Swimming To Cambodia, you'll know how effective that can be.
Has the film raised Hitchcock's profile? "It's not designed to play at the Warner Cineplex. I'm not elitist, but I don't aim for the lowest common denominator. Whereas the Hollywood movies are all absolutely terrified of not giving everyone the goods. Everything is coated in so much sugar; then you lick it off, and there's nothing underneath."
Not that he underestimates the power of the mainstream: "The corporate monolith of the '60s looks like a letterbox compared to what they are now. There's the possibility of people becoming citizens not of states but of corporations -- "Good morrow, my liege, I am Ambassador from Glaxo, I bring fair tidings from Siemens." You'll have a Virgin passport. The wars will be trade wars, as they always have been. If the consumer dies, the corporations must die too, so we're kept alive simply to purchase things." He grins wryly. "No one knows what the meaning of life is, but its purpose is to buy things."
This kind of rant punctuates the songs in Storefront Hitchcock, giving the film its shape. The "verbals", as he calls them, are a mix of the astute and the absurd, the surreal and the stand-up. Covering topics from Julius Caesar and irradiated beef to human anatomy ("If we didn't have ribcages, it'd be spleens a-go-go"), they're improvised, unrepeatable one-offs -- not unlike the man himself. And, like Robyn Hitchcock, they may be about to find a wider audience.
Storefront Hitchcock is showing sporadically at small cinemas around the country, including the Cambridge Arts. The soundtrack is available from Warner Bros.
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