New Times
July 29, 1999
Wrap Your Lips Around a Hitchcockian Bake Sale
by Elana Roston
"Viva Sea-Tac", one of the songs on Robyn Hitchcock's new record, describes Seattle, where Hitchcock discussed via phone his upcoming Los Angeles appearance. "I think the further you go up the coast from L.A., the less pressure you feel," he muses. Unlike L.A., "a very varnished, lacquered kind of place, in San Francisco, there's less atmospheric pressure, it's almost like a weather thing. Portland is less, and Seattle is even less. In Seattle, things feel wide open, there's fresh air, and almost no pressure at all. It's like being trepanned -- an old Peruvian-Aztec kind of thing people did as a form of brain surgery to let demons out of people's heads. They scraped away the bone matter, leaving the brain exposed to the air; and this apparently used to calm people down a bit. But you don't need to have your bones scraped away. You just need to move up the coast a ways." Hitchcock's music reflects a similar quirky combination of Beatlesesque melodies, a sardonic melange of dark, surreal imagery, and an earnest attempt to figure out the truth of the matter.
Hitchcock wanted to become a musician at 13. In fact, he says, he never wanted to do anything else but "be one of those people who goes 'round places singing their songs." Though "all those '60s people -- Dylan, The Kinks, The Beatles, people like that who are now very old classic Rock people -- influenced my stuff, I've come to my own conclusion. I turned out to be me rather than those people, though I can feel their influence in the attitude.
"I'm not as decrepit as those guys I admired in the '60s, but I'm certainly headed that way. My mortality has always been a pressing issue -- you have all eternity to not exist. You're riding an escalator up a giant pyramid, and it's moving at triple speed, and you're a woozy slug who's coming out of a crack in one end. And for a few seconds, you're caught before the building hundreds of feet above the earth and thousands of feet below the sky. But music, in some way, helps."
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