Option
September/October, 1988
Nature Boy Robyn Hitchcock, In The Flesh
by Andrew Warde
It comes out in one almost breathless torrent, nearly deadpan: "One of the most common ways for tarantulas (and indeed most dangerous spiders, and some frogs) to enter the British Isles is through consignments of bananas. As you know, our climate doesn't permit the more exotic kind of insect or animal to grow naturally. We don't grow anything more damaging, I suppose, than foxes or badgers, or the most unusual sizes of dragonfly. You have much more exotic things out here. And of course, further down south, you've got colored flowers, and snakes that wrap 'round themselves and eat their own tails, and exhausting birds that can just stare at you and burst (and things like that). We don't have that kind of thing in England, so the main thing I want to point out is fruit -- or, precisely, bananas, because of their long and finely-tapered unyielding yellow skins, and their beautiful green facade, as they arrive crate after crate after crate after crate at the docks, until there are so many crates of bananas that the customs guys can't open them all. And that's how the tarantulas get in. So, the current plague of tarantulas that's infesting the Home Counties around London is due to a banana import boom, you could say."
Hiding a deep breath, he strums a guitar chord for perhaps half a beat, before adding, "This is a love song." Which he then sings.
Robyn Hitchcock is on stage for the fifth of five sold-out appearances in the back room of McCabe's Guitar Shop, a Santa Monica venue invariably described as "intimate". He's been playing a series of solo-acoustic shows in The States, and genuinely seems to enjoy the casual, close-up setting. Hitchcock, long appreciated by connoisseurs of Madcap Pop, is spinning strange yarns between songs, after drawing from his well-documented obsessions with birds, amphibians, and other gifts of nature. As in his songs, he has a flair for the bent, the bizare, and the non-sequitur. He says he makes up his sometimes-rambling and frequently-funny introductions on the spot.
"Sometimes if I'm introducing a song, I know what kind of theme I'm going to talk about. But I hate to have a script. I'm pretty much a prisoner of the unconscious -- and that's how I've always worked, artistically. You don't really know where it comes from at all. You just accept it. You can't take any credit for talents, only for how you've used them. And I'm not sure if I've used mine, or abused them."
Before his set, in a Mexican restaurant a few doors toward the beach from McCabe's, Hitchcock begins talking about his solo mini-tour, a break from the process of recording his next album. "I've been doing acoustic things for a long time. Long before I did electric stuff, I used to do acoustic things in Folk clubs. It's something I'm quite good at. I'm not really a Rock 'n' Roll-er at all. I'm more of a college professor. I think I might have been a professor of oceanography -- or biology in general -- involved in a microscopic way of looking at organisms.
He stares off wistfully for a moment, but that's about as personal a remark as the 35-year-old Hitchcock is willing to make. Disdaining efforts to coax personal information out of him, Hitchcock is much more voluble and willing when it comes to his "opinions on things".
Characteristically changing the subject without prompting, a brief mention of DNA sends him off on the following tangent: "We're dealing with a lot of old Judeo-Christian guilt here. That basically all matter is evil, which people have tried in different ways to perpetuate. That women are unclean because they menstruate, or becaue they have babies. If they really believe that women are unclean because they have babies, then they believe that human life itself is a bad thing. This whole concept of original sin -- and decline and fall. Guilt over matter is what we're struggling against."
"I would like to see a new, updated religion that didn't exploit the same weaknesses, and didn't require the same kind of surrender. I think religion is basically an attempt to do without your parents. You grow up, and suddenly there's no mummy and daddy anymore, so you have a big mummy and daddy in the sky. There's no one there to smack you, or explain, so people go for god. If people behave in a moral fashion simply out of fear, that's not really a good basis for behavior. You should behave out of compassion -- because you empathize with people -- not because you're frightened of Hell. It's like Jesus died for your sins years before you had any -- you're born into debt! You didn't ask Jesus to die for you, but apparently he did it. The whole thing's insane. We don't know why we do anything. Least of all me."
"Prisoner of the unconscious", indeed.
Hitchcock's music, from his nascent recordings with The Soft Boys, to his most recent Globe Of Frogs, is all of a piece. Within a congenial and perky Pop framework, Hitchcock's songs venture out from the cobwebbed corners of his brain. His compositions are slyly accessible and occasionally heartbreaking, but the oblique strategies of his lyrics give his work its aura of hip dissociation. Hitchcock can be outwardly weird -- an obvious example might be "My Wife And My Dead Wife", a tale of a married man obsessed by his former mate's ghost -- but it's his more subtle flights of whimsy which are so captivating.
A vegetarian as well as a prolific songwriter, Hitchcock's preoccupation with things organic is a recurring motif in much of his work. Insects, frogs, birds, fish, non-specific references to "flesh"; plus fruits, vegetables and flowers; are staples of any Robyn Hitchcock album. If he missed his calling as a professor of biology, a misspent adolescence is probably to blame. No doubt Hitchcock wasted many hours listening to The Byrds, The Beatles (bands which both took their names from the little critters that so fascinate Robyn), Bob Dylan, and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Though he pays tribute to his influences on occasion, Hitchcock prefers to emphasize his own material.
"For a long time, I was really paranoid about doing covers because I didn't think my own songs were strong enough," he admits. "I want to be known as a songwriter, and I think I've got enough good stuff now. I think my songs can stand the competition if other people's songs are in the live set." Clenching his teeth, Hitchcock adds, "On the other hand, if A&M [Hitchcock's record label] wanted us to do a cover, it would be because then we'd get a radio hit. And that would be really sick. I mean, I don't want to sell records as much as they do. When you're releasing a cover version palpably because you can't write anything commercial yourself, I think that sucks."
And what's wrong with having a hit? "I don't want that much attention. I mean, I've got an enormous ego, but I don't like that dictatorial thing of 50,000-seaters, and your poster on every wall. It's like you've become Big Brother, the corporate people behind you urging people to buy your stuff. You've got to watch it. If you stick your head too far out of the trench, someone'll shoot at you. I like to get things done without attracting too much attention. It just gets in the way. It doesn't write you any good songs. But I never wanted not to make money. Not to sell records. Not to have any success. People seem to think that I'm totally anti-business. I just want a balance. It must be possible to make a good living, have some fans, sell a few records; without being thrown all over the place."
Latching on to a subject, Hitchcock offers some observations on fame. "Obviously, Pop stars, or politicians, or any celebrity, is worshipped because other people all know who it is. If you saw Henry Kissinger, you'd go, [whips his head around] 'What!' It could be someone you detested. It could be Richard Nixon or Neil Diamond (or somebody like that). But they're famous. What's this attraction about fame? The attraction about fame is that hundreds of non-famous people know about the famous person. There are 15 million Henrys and Spikes and Lisas out there making this one person famous by their attention to him. So you have famous newsreaders -- people like Walter Cronkite. They haven't done anything special, but they're on a pedestal simply because so many people know about them. I grew up seeing people like that. They proliferate through the media like a, kind of, virus. I don't really admire anyone in politics or show business because I think people go into it for bad motives. I certainly wouldn't idolize them.
"The essential thing about a star," he continues, "especially a popular star, is two completely opposite things. One is that everyone can identify with them, and the other is that somehow they're on a pedestal. The Beatles were a classic example, as they were four versions of the same thing. Everyone else could be a Beatle. Like lots of little girls want to be Madonna, or Marilyn Monroe. But they'll never be that person. And they'll never understand Marilyn Monroe, because all they'll have is a picture of her. They'll always be seeing her from the outside. But they won't put themselves in her shoes, and realize how she felt, because they're too busy worshipping her."
Complementing his interest in things living, death is another of Hitchcock's favorite topics. Getting worked up, he free-associates to the subject at hand. "The worship of the dead comes in strongly. The sacrificed idols are the strongest: James Dean, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Marley, Jim Morrison, John Lennon -- they're all on posters. Sadly, Dylan didn't die young. His fate has been to have to live having become a legend. To have to survive as a human being when he can no longer react as such because he became a god. So he has to age while his photos remain young and beautiful. The man who once appeared to know the meaning of life (but wasn't telling) is now stumbling around the place. It was that era when Rock stars were seen as all-time champion poets, and seers, and mystics.
"Because music and drugs failed to change the world, the sights are a lot lower now: it's just show business. Madonna and Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson are talented, but they're products of an age of disillusionment, where people have given up attempting to do anything except to entertain. They're probably just as intelligent as Lennon and Jagger and Dylan, in their own way. But they're born of that apathy."
Is anyone carrying the inspirational torch today? "I think people like Billy Bragg have inspired a lot of people. He's quite a strange character, Billy Bragg. He's such a great hybrid. He's something nobody could have predicted. He's an amalgam of traditional Folk and Punk, but without a band. That strange voice, and writing quite hippie-political songs like 'Between The Wars': he's an entertainer. If you want to be a preacher, you should just be a preacher. You can't go into the business because you want to inform people. You've got to be an entertainer on some level."
A flower-vendor approaches our table, wordlessly proffering roses. Robyn doesn't miss a beat: "No, we're full, I think." And he changes subject again.
"Now there's what they call 'World Music' coming out. Andy Kershaw's this DJ -- he has a two-hour-a-week show on Radio 1. And he plays a lot of Roots music, World music. He'll play anything Reggae, African, Ethiopian, R&B, Blues, English Folk, a little bit of Rock. He plays us. He'll play the Talking Heads or Screaming Blue Messiahs. It encompasses things like Terry Allen: anything you read about in Folk Roots. He plays this song by Terry Allen called 'Gimme A Ride To Heaven Boy, My Name Is Jesus Christ'. It's all listenable. I think it's nice that so-called 'Folk music' is being allowed to be trendy again for the first time in 20 or 25 years. It hasn't reached hysterical proportions, but people are seeing it as a cool thing to listen to. Unfortunately, most Rock music depends on being cool for its listenership.
"People have a pretty tribal attitude to music, especially in their teens. This crowd listens to that, and this crowd listens to this. I had that when I was a teenager. The hip people would listen to The Incredible String Band, and the jocks would listen to The Beach Boys. And then Brian Wilson wrote 'Good Vibrations' and the whole thing broke open. Suddenly the hip people found they had to listen to the Beach Boys as well. It was very confusing.
"Every ten years since the war there's been a music movement that everybody had to follow, a bandwagon that it was necessary to jump onto under pain of death. You look at those photos of the Woodstock generation: everybody had central-parted long hair, beards, greatcoats, that, sort of, hangdog look. And then when the Punk thing came along, everybody had to have short hair, or spiked hair and ripped jeans. And if you didn't -- The Soft Boys are one group who didn't -- people couldn't take you. You didn't register on their screens.
"So this time around, I've been waiting for what's the movement gonna be? What's the totalitarian thing everyone's gonna have to jump on? What's gonna be the watershed that divides the generation of '78 from the generation of '88 and makes all the punks and New Wave-ers feel like old men -- or old people, rather? Maybe it's World music. Which is great, 'cause if so, it's very subtle. You can't go 'round saying, 'I'm into World music. I look like a world. I don't want to listen to none of your B-52s or Talking Heads.' Because by its very nature, World music is catholic. It's a question of including things rather than excluding them. Maybe this time around, it's gonna be a time of people absorbing lots of great music. A bit like in the '60s, when all the sitars came in.
"Rock 'n' Roll has a sense of history, which it didn't used to have. I mean, the way you get a really exciting new music is if the musicians have no respect for history. Rock 'n' Roll has such a sense of its own past that anyone of any intelligence immediately starts researching it and it's harder to come up with something new. There are all these old archetypes that you can pick off the shelf. You can have the old Velvet Underground-Byrds look, or the Rockabilly look, or the Woodstock Nation look. Or you can even pick the mid-'70s, and listen to 'Shaft' -- wah-wah pedals and big flares. That may make it hard for anyone inside Rock to come up with something exciting. But I'm sure whatever quarter it comes from, no one will be expecting it to come from there."
A painter and a poet in addition to his musicianly pursuit, Hitchcock sees himself as a dilettante in those other fields. He claims not to have plans to publish any of his other work, and he's gotten away from an early desire to try his hand at filmmaking. "As soon as you get a bit of influence in the Pop world, people tend to come and offer you things to do. Just 'cause you can sell records doesn't mean you can act, or paint, or draw. I mean, people like David Bowie, or Sting, go up and act because they don't respect the medium they're in and they want to be taken seriously. They feel embarrassed about making so much money out of being a Pop singer. I think you should stick to your craft."
But are there two Robyn Hitchcocks? Is the eccentric behind "The Man With The Lightbulb Head", "Give Me A Spanner, Ralph", or the unabashedly psychedelic "A Globe Of Frogs" really just a naked extension of Robyn's own persona? Or is the loon onstage rambling about tarantulas just a performer, distinct from the serious, straightforward Hitchcock conversing expressively in a restaurant? Though fans of his music may conclude otherwise, he suggests the latter scenario is closer to the truth.
"Picasso didn't look like his paintings. J.G. Ballard doesn't look like The Drowned World or The Atrocity Exhibition. He's a guy in a pinstriped suit who lives in a suburban house in Guildford. And if you met J.G. Ballard, you'd have a normal conversation with him. I don't think you should confuse people with their art. You have different conversations with different people. If I was going to buy some carrots, there'd be no point in my starting a long involved story about a spoon, because they wouldn't sell me the carrots."
Hitchcock's next album is in the works, with much of the material already recorded. "I would say it's gonna be a lot less precious. So far, it hasn't got any cute little songs like 'Balloon Man' or 'Heaven', or those dreadful things that they put on the radio. It's got some of the songs that I'm doing already -- 'One Long Pair Of Eyes', 'Veins Of The Queen', 'Superman', 'The Executioner'. It's got a lot of piano on it, and acoustic guitar. It isn't, kind of, a 'rent-a-Byrds'. It hasn't got much of the jangling-guitar-and-harmonies stuff. It's got Billy Bragg's trumpeter, Dave Woodhead, on it. He's brilliant. He went off and scored this whole thing out, and he changed virtually nothing. He said it was all ripped-off bits of Handel. It sounds like an advert for the British Tourist Bureau, sweeping in low in a helicopter on a bright crisp February morning when all these immaculately right-wing people are going out fox hunting (or something).
"It's provisionally entitled Flesh Cartoons. It hasn't got anything about fish on it."
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