Matter Magazine
June, 1986 (Issue 15)
A Wizard, A True Star
by John Nellson
Ask Robyn Hitchcock a question -- like, say, "What exactly is a 'Feg'?" (as in the title of the man's Fegmania! LP) -- and you're likely to get an earful of something like this:
"A Feg is a little...cheese. It's a, sort of, ball of cheese, which is wrapped in canvas. And you tie a string around it. They keep them in the dark, in a, sort of, not in a fridge or an icebox...but in what we used to call a "pantry" or a larder, where people could hang up their dead pheasants, and things like that. They'd keep all the dead stuff 'til it 'matured'. And the Fegs, sort of, stored in a thing called a 'Feg Rack' -- a wooden rack. Sometimes you'd get these old pantries...you'd get rats coming in, and the rats would get to the Feg Rack, and people were so used to this that they devised a, sort of, guillotine system, so if the rat ate through a certain amount of the Feg [holds hand out, palms forward], these two steel shutters would go SNAP! like that over its head while it was devouring...as the rat began to fall through it'd catch its tail or something. But of course, every so often it wouldn't work out because people would pick up a Feg or a Feg-Ball, as they became...and they'd get their fingers snared in it.
"I'd got sort of interested in it, and I'd find myself talking about Feg-Balls a lot. I put a poem about them on the sleeve of Trains, where in my interpretation they stop being food -- they become a, kind of, eye that goes through a wall. And the wall melts as the eye matures, and eventually the wall parts, and the eyes come out.
"And Fegmania! was an extension of that: you know, a fully-blown feeling about it, which I thought was physical...you know, it would be someone shuddering in anticipation of eating something. Some kind of phsyical treat, some actual pleasant experience like, say, if you squeeze an avocado...if you press upon a ripe avocado, and you pull out the bit wehre the avocado's attached to the tree, the pulp will actually come through the end of the avocado [makes splat noise] like that. Like toothpaste. Some physical feeling like that. Or maybe even when carrots...if a carrot gets old, it starts to get all these little, sort of, gaps in it. And what you can do is...you get a carrot coming up, and you fill it with, uh, little grains of rice you put in the gaps. So you've got this carrot coming up, and it's just full of rice, and it looks pretty great.
"Or another thing is like live eels burrowing themselves into bean curd, and getting fried to death in a Japanese restaurant. They're in boiling water, and so are the bean curds. And so they rush into the bean curd because it's cold, and then the eels...
"It's horrific. It's that, kind of, tasty impaction. And that's what Fegmania is meant to symbolize. I mean, the Feg istelf is a, sort of, tasty delicacy -- they put all sorts of odd combinations into it. You'd have maybe, uh, tiny fish and, uh, French beans, or something like that...all in cheese. It'd just be a very dense, but tactile, thing."
Oh, I see.
It's this gift for hallucinatory gab -- when coupled with his uncanny grasp of the possibilities of Pop -- that make Hitchcock's records the must-hear experiences they are. What makes them must-owns are the moments when this sheer oozing-forth of imagery gives birth to encapsulated truths and crystalline images that seem to cut through our dulled imaginations like a cleaver thorugh Kleenex. Anyone can write a Pop song -- that's one of the great things about them. I'm just thankful that someone is writing them with lyrics like, "Looking out for number one/Is like drilling for a rainbow/On an iceberg in the sun".
When Fegmania! became the first of his albums to be released in America (on Slash), it seemed a miracle on par with the idea that he would actually be touring here again. And in fact, over the last half of '85 and the beginning of '86, there have been several forays into America, all of which were met by a surprising number of longtime (and newfound) fans.
"People in the audience here look at you like you're a meal (and they haven't eaten in weeks)," Hitchcock mused after his first go-'round. "I wondered if we'd be left as a pile of bones onstage."
With repeated touring, radio airplay, a live album (Gotta Let This Hen Out!) released here on Relativity (and that label's plans to reissue all his import-only discs in this country) and talk of the majors sniffing around, time may soon put the lie to Hitchcock's assertion on Underwater Moonlight that, "There ain't no way I'm gonna be/Anything I oughta be".
Robyn Hitchcock oughta be a star.
Hitchcock began playing Folk clubs around Cambridge University in the early-'70s with a few like-minded souls, including -- if he is to be believed -- a quartet he named The Beetles (what the hell, by that time nobody else was using the name). Another early project was called Maureen And The Meatpackers, which consisted of "two girls and two blokes -- basically two men playing guitars, and the women -- in a completely sexist way -- not playing guitars.
"We did a, sort of, Psychedelic Doo-Wop (I suppose is the best way to describe it), some of which is on tape -- and will probably, when we get around to it, come out some time. And there's some stuff with the girls from that singing -- after it was over -- with The Soft Boys doing the backing tracks. But Maureen And The Meatpackers was good. That wasn't quite so much my band, 'cause The Soft Boys...from fairly early on...straight away I was, sort of, given a bunch of guys in a job lot by some bloke (who then left)."
From the surrealist Howl-And-Thrash of "Wading Through A Ventilator" through the dance intricaies of A Can Of Bees and the Schizoid Pop of Underwater Moonlight, The Soft Boys were one of the only post-'60s bands to make truly psychedelic Rock music. Not "paisley", with all its connotations of nostalgia and dead ideas, but "psychedelic", as in, "Of, pertaining to, or generating hallucnations, distortions of perception, and occasionally, states resembling psychosis." (Simulated erudition courtesy of American Heritage Dictionary Of The English Language.)
When The Soft Boys finally "strangled on their own guitars", early in this decade, there was barely a mention on either side of The Atlantic. As they had been, so they would go -- like so many great bands before them -- foundering in a sea of indifference (and posthumous releases, like the half-live Only The Stones Remain/Lope At The Hive and the grab-bag Invisible Hits). It's not something Hitchcock misses.
"Anyone would think -- the way they talk about The Soft Boys -- that The Soft Boys had sold a million records. People still seem to ask me about that as if that's the most important thing. To me it's not. I mean, I've had twice as many records out under my own name. It's simply that I haven't done gigs much. I don't think The Soft Boys records sold significantly more than mine. I don't know what it is...I get sort of sick of talking about The Soft Boys."
The staggering Black Snake Diamond Role was the first solo LP to surface in their wake. But this was followed by the flawed Groovy Decay, a brace of singles that seemed like housecleaning, and talk of retirement. Once again, this was but a temporary pause, and the minimal and highly personal I Often Dream Of Trains seemed an antidote to the misguided commercial streamlining of Decay. With Hitchocck playing nearly all the instruments, the starkness of this LP give it the impression of being a series of demos for some album that never happened, but Hitchcock insists that this was not the case.
"No, it wasn't demos at all -- it was an album. I didn't want to have a band on it, that's all. I wanted to have a band on Fegmania!, and in consequence, I did. But I'd always wanted to make a record without a band -- that was uninfluenced by anybody else; that didn't have anyone else's guiding hand; no one else to rely on whilst doing it, to say, "Should it be like this?"; and to have no one else's style imposed on it -- so there was no room for any, kind of, weakness, on my part. To see what I was like without the props. Like, you say, 'I wonder what I'm like if I spend a week by myself without any friends,' you know? What are you like if you're on our own, when there's nobody there to influence you this way or that? So it was making that sort of record.
"And it was also the end of the...I mean, I started off making records by myself -- acoustically -- and I'd gone through the whole cycle of having a band, losing/leaving a band, not having a band, having session men, making records, doing gigs, not doing gigs.... And it was like starting all over again by myself, like I had been maybe eight years beforehand."
Fegmania!, recorded with his new full-time band, The Egyptians (ex-Soft Boys Andy Metcalfe and Morris Windsor, and newcomer Roger Jackson), only confirmed that Hitchcock was as good or better than he had ever been. It's an unadulterated-yet-readily-accessible platter that didn't let commercial production values get in the way of songs that are as brilliant, wise, and idiosyncratic as ever. And if new songs like "Raymond Chandler Evening" and the anti-Bitburg anthem "The President" -- both previewed on tour -- are any indication, the best may be yet to come.
You've never sold incredible amounts of records over the years, but you must sell enough to keep doing it. You've got some pretty devoted fans.
Yeah. I mean, people come 'round the house with bowls of fruit and things. That's the only way I can describe it. Some people will leave sacks of rice in the garden.
Is this some sort of symbolic, or ritual, sacrifice?
[laughs] I hope so! Otherwise, I can't see why they'd want to leave all that rice there! Yeah, somebody left some custard, I think...some custard in the mailbox. Another time, someone left a fish in the back yard. So yeah, we do have that kind of an audience.
"My Wife And My Dead Wife" seems to be one of everybody's favorites from Fegmania!. You like to sing about ghosts a lot.
Well; I sing about ghosts, I sing about seafood, I sing about public transport, I sing about all those things a lot (and everything else) in a, sort of, random rotation. And so you could feed those into a computer, and work out what they had in common. But I don't know, I'll tell you.
Your ghosts often seem to be ghosts of past relationships.
As opposed to ghosts of future relationships?
Okay, so you don't have the same girlfriend you had ten years ago, or, people are dead and they didn't used to be dead. But people always distort the past -- it becomes very important. I mean, so much of aging is the death of potential, the death of possibility. Very few people...because you have to choose something, people tend to go for what's easiest, what's convenient. They lack the judgement to make the right choice when they're young, or they think that anyway, twenty years later, "I was too young to realize this. I did the wrong thing." People forever...their possiblities, kind of, wilt as they get older, I mean, a baby could be anything. Each baby is a potential savior of the universe. But by the end of it, all they've been is a garbage collector, or a dictator (or something). Or a nurse -- something positive. There's nothing much more positive than nurses.
And people develop that attitude -- they have the ghosts of their earlier selves around. I think it's the ghosts of your own potential, the ghosts of your friends, and things like that.
A lot of the bitterness that used to dominate your older songs seems to have gone. At least, it doesn't seem as noticeable.
Doesn't it?
Well, it's never as glaring as in a song like "Insanely Jealous" (where it was incredibly scathing).
That's the way I felt. But I think that happens to a lot of people. I think it's nice when you get less bitter as you grow older, rather than more bitter. That your experience doesn't make you more bitter, that your experience makes you perhaps more sympathetic. I presume that means you've had nice experiences, rather than being a withered old stalk of bitterness.
You can see a lot of those walking around New York City every day.
Well, you can, and you don't want to be one. I mean, I haven't seen the light or anything like that -- the light's as far away as it ever was, and I'm sure if someone told me about the light I wouldn't want to hear -- but I don't feel half as strongly as I used to. You know, I don't feel quite...all those things that bothered me -- and everyone's going to be bothered by something, we all have things that make you uncomfortable, things that disturb your bed while you're asleep -- it doesn't matter so much now.
Yeah, you're right. It's less violent. Trains is a mournful album. It's got a lot of, sort of, "death-of-things" in it, but that gets it out of the way. It's, sort of, sad rather than angry. Fegmania!'s a friendly album. I don't think it's too paranoid. I mean, Underwater Moonlight and Can Of Bees are very paranoid records. Can Of Bees is just an onslaught. It's really, sort ot...raw meat. Blood dripping from the sinews, you know? And Moonlight -- although it's surprisingly cheerful for its circumstances, it's got a lot of paranoia in it.
I think they're great! I mean, I wish I could write a song like "Insanely Jealous". But I couldn't even perform that, now. I couldn't stand up there and sing that. I do "Kingdom Of Love". "Kingdom Of Love" somehow has weathered better. "Insanely Jealous" was just the mood of its time. I haven't got the fuel for that. Perhaps if something really unpleasant happens to me, I'll get to sing it again.
In somewhat the same vein, your early songs often had a bitterness concerning relationships that bordered on misogyny -- whether it's in general, or just reactions to specific persons, was never quite clear.
They were all about the same person -- about somebody that I projected a lot of illusions onto, and was never happy when I met them, because the real them was never the projected them, and I was always constantly frustrated by meeting them. I think that was probably what was wrong. I daresay they probably felt the same way about me, actually! [laughs]
I think probably a lot of it was there. For various reason an intense...sort of, malice, built up. It was just all feedback -- malice about feeling malicious, you know? And then feeling sad because it didn't work out anyway, you know? And wishing that you'd managed to carry on. But why carry on with something which was bad...missing something which didn't work anyway? It's just so perverse. And that's the way it went. So there's this, sort of, combination of hatred and nostalgia -- like someone wishing that they were back in Belsen, or something. Which I can't imagine anyone doing. Or wishing you were back at your first day of school again (or something like that). Some nightmare.
At least if it comes out like that, that means I must have managed to communicate my feelings (which is good, 'cause i try to avoid them). I like words, you know? I prefer just to invert things, to escape. That was pretty malicious. A lot of it isn't fun, you know? I remember being onstage...I remember those certain points when I thought, "God, all these songs in this set are so miserable! They're all complaining! I don't enjoy one of these songs -- and I wrote the whole lot." It's quite a long time back -- five years ago or so -- but they're all negative, and I don't enjoy them. And I'd rather sing songs from Revolver, or sing "Eight Miles High" (or something like that). I think maybe Costello realizes the same thing.
I mean, no doubt your strongest stuff is when you're confronting something unpleasant, rather than, uh, "Gee, what a wonderful world/I'm glad I've got two legs and a smile on my face".
It's good when you can take pessimistic ideas and feelings and distance them enough to treat them humorously -- as on "Sleeping Knights Of Jesus".
Well, it has to be...that's the way to do it. Anyway, I like...inappropriate things, because that's how I see life: inappropriate. Policemen get more money than nurses do (and things like that).
And people like Sting get to be considered the face of Literate Pop while Robyn Hitchcock is considered a novelty or acquired taste. It's telling that some of Hithcock's biggest fans have become musicians themselves (R.E.M., The Replacements, The dBs), and gotten some degree of fame long before their mentor. Like it or not, Hitchcock may also in no small way have been a spiritual light behind the so-called "Paisley Underground".
"People are drawing a lot on the late-'60s. Not beat-boom type stuff, not '64: the, sort of, '66-'68 stuff, when Pop was at its height, its flowering. Which was the era we've always drawn on. Not so much psychedelic, just the, sort of...I don't think we ever made a psychedelic record.
"It's as much The Beatles as anything else, really. Nearly all of my songs could have been written by The Beatles. Stylistically -- I'm not saying they're as memorable as The Beatles' best songs.
"You know, having really loved songs like...uh, well, all of them (particularly the Lennon ones), I think scores of those songs...there's no way I could get off on Siouxsie And The Banshees, even though they recorded 'Dear Prudence'.
"I had arguments with people about that, with them saying, 'Uh, The Jam. They were just as good as the early Beatles,' (or something). They fucking weren't! None of those people could sing!
"I mean, The Clash and The Jam [pained look]...I mean, especially people like The Clash and The Jam: I couldn't understand why anybody liked them. Those awful, thick, unappealing voices. Everybody...people were just licking them, they couldn't get enough of them. And Paul Weller's just treated like a god by so many people. He's fucking terrible! It just bugs me that people like that were getting that sort of recognition. I hope it screws their heads up.
"Not that I'd necessarily want that much myself, because it would probably do the same to me. It'll be just insane if suddenly everything's turned 'round and they all say, 'Well, great, yes, we'd love to hear all your malicious songs about seafood with three-part harmonies. Have another million dollars.'"
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