The Boston Herald
November 1, 1999
Robyn Hitchcock's Reunion Is A Winner
Robyn Hitchcock At The Paradise, Boston, Saturday Night
by Brett Milano
It's been a year full of heavily-promoted Rock reunions, from Springsteen to Eurythmics to CSNY. But one of the year's most satisfying reunions hit The Paradise with no fanfare on Saturday.
British Pop surrealist Robyn Hitchcock was touring with a full band for the first time in nearly a decade. And on guitar was his long-lost musical partner, Kimberley Rew. The two last played togather in The Soft Boys, a seminal Postpunk band that broke up in 1980. Rew went on to form Katrina And The Waves, writing their hit "Walking on Sunshine", while Hitchcock became an endlessly fascinating cult artist.
Lately Hitchcock's been writing gentler material and playing acoustic shows keyed as much to his storytelling as his songs. Director Jonathan Demme caught such a show in the recent concert film, Storefront Hitchcock. And Hitchcock's claimed in recent interviews that it's unseemly for anyone older than 40 to play electric guitar.
But as Saturday's show proved, he still makes a fine Rock 'n' Roll frontman.
The set built slowly, with Hitchcock opening solo and the band entering one by one. By mid-set, he and Rew were slashing away at twin guitars, rocking hard on songs both old ("Queen of Eyes", a Beatlesque gem from Soft Boys days) and new ("Adoration Of The City", a mix of sweet words and nasty sound). The rest of the band was Tim Keegan's Departure Lounge, a young British outfit whose opening set showed a strong melodic touch and a definite Hitchcock influence. The band allowed Hitchcock to cover his full range of styles, including English Folk music and Punk-ish Rock.
Hitchcock's always had a love for the macabre, so it was no surprise to hear him announce that Halloween was his favorite holiday. For the occasion, he pulled some of the ghostlier songs out of his catalogue, including the fractured Swamp Blues "Sleeping With Your Devil Mask" and "Madonna Of The Wasps", a sinister love song that got some airplay in the '80s. And the night began and ended with "Mexican God" and "The Speed of Things", songs that pondered mortality.
But in Hitchcock's world, ghostly doesn't necessarily mean depressing. A new song, "I Saw Nick Drake", imagined a meeting with the late English folksinger. And the haunting "Raymond Chandler Evening" included one of Hitchcock's trademark monologues, which veered between personal revelations and wild streams of images. The listener just has to decide where one ends and the other begins.
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