Newsday
June 17, 1989
Hitchcock, The Master Of Pretense
Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians, And Poi Dog Pondering
A Veteran English Band And A Touted Texas Newcomer, Thursday Night At The Ritz In Manhattan
by Wayne Robins
The comedian Dennis Blair has an astute bit about the speech patterns of English Rock musicians. The gist of the routine is that Blair wonders how a guy who has the speaking voice of a third-generation Cockney fishmonger has the singing voice of someone who never left the front porch of his Mississippi Delta shack.
There is one stream of English Rock that has gone against that grain, beginning in the late-1960s with Syd Barrett, a founder of Pink Floyd and poet laureate of British Psychedelia. Robyn Hitchcock is Barrett's most productive musical descendant, one who provides his own dark, unashamedly English-accented whimsy to floridly impressionist themes.
Playing guitar with a taut trio filled out by Andy Metcalfe on bass and Morris Windsor on drums, much of Hitchcock's material came from recent albums such as Globe of Frogs and the current Queen Elvis. The rollicking Folk Rock of "Balloon Man" stood out from the pack, with Hitchcock and Metcalfe engaging in the kind of lean guitar-bass interplay Scotty Moore and Bill Black from King Elvis' band might have engaged in if they were slightly manic-depressive English musicians.
Hitchcock's vision is decidedly non-Memphian. "Veins of the Queen", one of
the more irreverent songs from Queen Elvis, imagines intimacy with Her
Highness. But Hitchcock's delivery is so innocently straightforward that even the most rigid royalist shouldn't be offended. A baroque trumpet solo added an appropriately regal touch.
But much of the time Hitchcock's reliance on non-sequiturs and contradictions can be off-putting -- as if he's more interested in amusing himself than his audience. "My Wife And My Dead Wife" and "Sleeping With Your Devil Mask" were both clever songs -- but they both had the faint whiff of pretentiousness.
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