BAM
September, 1985
Robyn Hitchcock Lurks In The Shadows
by Angela Carlson
Robyn Hitchcock -- brilliantly obscure wordsmith, inheritor of the Syd Barrett legacy, and writer of clever guitar-laden post-psychedelic ditties -- has released his fourth solo album, Fegmania!. It's also his first domestic release (courtesy of Slash Records) and the inspiration for Hitchcock bringing his own lyrically weird brand of melodic, '60s-influenced Rock to America's oily shores.
The reason this mastermind of the long-defunct and criminally underrated Soft Boys (which also featured Kimberley Rew of Katrina And The Waves) has taken so long to map out a decent little tour of The States is best stated by Hitchcock himself. "The problem with getting to The States, you appreciate, is that it's a very big place. There's no point in doing things if you can't afford to do them properly -- if your van breaks down, or when you get to the gig, you find that the band are all dead because there's been no air in the van," Hitchcock explains. "Or, you find that the band has all been eaten going through customs, and there's nothing left but a load of bones. You have to be aware of all these problems."
I Often Dream Of Trains, an idiosyncratic, densely personal collection of acoustic material released last year, marked Hitchcock's return to the music world after his self-imposed retirement in 1982. Frustrated by their lack of public recognition (The Soft Boys' textured, clever guitar songs paved the way for the so-called "New Psychedelia" in Britian and the "Paisley Underground" here in The States), Hitchcock told the press, "I've decided that the whole record business must have a haircut, a pose, or an image to go with it to be successful. I can't see any point in continuing. I can't be bothered."
"I was just very tired, basically, sort of physically and mentally tired...every so often you just wear out for a bit, don't you?" Hitchcock now says. As he tells it, he was being "plagued by submariners," so he spent six months in the house with the shutters up, armed with a blunderbuss, firing an occasional warning shot at anyone foolhardy enough to approach the mailbox ("I didn't get anyone," he adds). He also diddled around on a portable 4-track recroder, working out the solo material that would appear on I Often Dream Of Trains. "It was an attempt not to sound like anybody else," he says of the LP. "It's got nothing to do with Rock 'n' Roll; it's got nothing to do with Pop music. To me, it's a Folk record."
Fegmania!, however, is Hitchocck's most accessible work to date, a comfortable implosion of musical ideas that never stray too far from his self-proclaimed rootedness in the past. Songs like "The Man With The Lightbulb Head" (Hitchcock's first video) and "My Wife And My Dead Wife" are unique wihout being downright inscrutable. Soft Boys fans should find Fegmania! a refreshing return to Hitchcock's cleaner, Pop orientation. While he admits that one reason he'd retired was because he never thought he'd write anything to top his Black Snake Diamond Role LP, he's done a helluva job trying, recuiting a band that calls to mind the Kimberley Rew era of The Soft Boys. Of Rew and his new band Katrina And The Waves, Hitchcock says, "I always thought Kimberley would go down well in mid-America. Personally, I prefer Kimberley in his band to Kimberley in my band. He'll keep going; Kimberley would play every night of the year, you know? He'd play to three deaf peole and a mouse. It wouldn't make any difference, and the mouse would be deaf in the end as well. Kimberley's the kind of guy who'd actually go to the audience's houses and drive them to the gig. He's got an enthusiasm for live work which I really don't share, which is why I haven't done many gigs lately."
For his U.S. tour, Robyn enlisted a sax and keyboard player, as well as Morris Windsor (drums) and Andy Metcalfe (bass), who were both in The Soft Boys. This time out, Hitchcock wasn't able to put on the Egyptian-style revue he'd envisioned: "I'd like to be wheeled on by a couple of fat guys, and they'd open a sarcophaguous, and I'd come out in a great cloud of incense, and the band woould leap up from behind their instruments with these 1930s-style tails and these shiny heads."
For all the notoriety surrounding Hitchcock (his biggest fans are fellow musicians), he's still very much a cult figure, even back home in England. While Hitchcock isn't giving out his age ("I expect I'm about...400"), he stresses that he developed his musical tastes back before Punk Rock ever dirtied up the scene. "Bands now learned their trade after Punk happened, and they've learned it well. But their ideas of how songs go weren't shaped by The Beatles, they were shaped by The Sex Pistols," he says. "What I've been doing had gestated for years. It has nothing to do with New Wave or Punk."
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