Campus Calendar
February, 1992
The Juxtaposed Thoughts Of Robyn Hitchcock
by Paul Robicheau
Robyn Hitchcock is holed up in "some room" not far from his home on The Isle Of Wight to conduct phone interviews. But like the "Birds in Perspex" (his term for creatures encased in plexiglass paperweights) on his latest album Perspex Island, the oft-termed eccentric English rocker will soon "come alive" -- to launch a U.S. tour which brings him to Providence February 5 for a date at the Campus Club, and Boston February 8 for an 18-plus show at Avalon.
Hitchcock is also ready to be freed from the image of being a strange bird -- the guy you'd call "the quintessential cult artist". Perhaps it had something to do with his habit of singing songs about fish, frogs, and insects -- not to mention his wife, and his dead wife, and having a lightbulb head.
But Perspex Island -- recorded with his longtime band The Egyptians -- casts Hitchcock in an unusually accessible vein (especially on the Beatlesque single "So You Think You're in Love"). There are no fish or insects in sight: just additional guitar by R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, and richer production by Paul Fox (who did XTC's last album). Hitchcock suggests Perspex Island should even appeal to "mainstream, bland people", adding that when he and The Egyptians perform the new material live, "It will be as close as we get to Rock."
"It's like Pink Floyd or the Pretenders or R.E.M. (or something)," Hitchcock continues on a droll roll. "It's the kind of thing you could sell to people who don't like music -- like German wine is for people who don't drink wine. Big-selling records sell to people who don't really care about music. They want something to talk over at parties, and drive to. They're not music fans who know about Morrissey (and all that kind of thing)."
Ah, but there's one problem with this theory. Perspex Island hasn't sold big -- even though it topped college and Alternative radio charts. Of course, obscure love songs like "Birds in Perspex" and "Vegetation And Dimes" suggest that Hitchcock hasn't completely lost his strange streak. "Nothing is strange per se," he muses. "A tomato isn't strange. But a tomato on the surface of the moon is strange. Wings aren't strange. But wings would be very strange on the back of a truck (or on the back of George Bush). So when you're talking about something strange, you're talking about the context. I'm not strange. And I'm not a connoisseur of the strange, as such. I just know how juxtapositions work.
"I was aware of the fact that people used to say about my stuff, 'It's Robyn Hitchcock, you'll never understand it.' And although that's nice in a way (because you think you've created something exotic), it's also a bit like walling yourself up. You put the last brick in place, and you're completely sealed away. You can't breathe. So, if you like, [the new album] is to do with trying to get in touch both with myself and with other people. But I hesitate to make it sound too much like a, kind of, born-again manifesto -- like the man who gave up insects and found love."
It's actually true that Hitchcock found love -- he dedicated Perspex Island "to Cynthia, the most wonderful woman in the world." However, the 39-year-old Hitchcock hesitates to say his recent songs reflect a more comfortable everyday life, countering that, "Everyday life is what you care to observe."
"I'm just trolling around, and whatever comes up I use," he says of his songwriting. "But, having said that, you can choose what does come to the surface -- and whether you want to use it."
On many of his '80s albums, peaking with The Egyptians' 1988 major-label debut Globe of Frogs, Hitchcock freely drew from an imagination dominated by slippery creatures. However, he says now, "It had all become a bit of a cliche actually. The whole business had become rather predictable, and it just took me a while to, kind of, trim away all of those things.
"I prefer looking at cold-blooded animals to warm-blooded. They're just more interesting visually -- but they don't seem to be popping up in the songs so much. It was like [my] head looking down on the body, and they weren't from the same species. Some marble angel's head found itself on the body of a steel baboon, and it was weeping, 'Oh, my god, am I part of this baboon?' And the answer was, 'Yes, you are,' and it took about thirteen albums to work that one out. So this [album] is totally human."
Indeed, a songwriter can't get much more straightforward than the easily hummable "So You Think You're in Love".
"Well, that's good," Hitchcock says. "I've always tried to have both sides in songs. So I try to be up and down at the same time. It would be like, 'It's a beautiful day, but it's going to snow tomorrow,' or, 'I love you -- but of course, I might love anybody.' I was always qualifying myself. It was like being a politician."
"It's really hard to write up-tempo Pop songs. I always write loads of depressing ones."
Hitchcock closes Perspex Island with two songs that are not only melancholy, but decidedly topical. "If You Go Away" is about people going to war, leading to a chorus of "It's corporation time/The world's going up in smoke tonight".
However, Hitchcock distances himself from the political connotation, noting the song was written before last year's Gulf War. "That was very controversial, wasn't it? Where people were frightened of being seen as against the war, 'cause they didn't want to be seen as unpatriotic," he says. "But regardless of your politics, people don't come back.... What do all wars have in common? They have people leaving their families and not returning -- and that's all that song's about.
"I'm not out to make political points. I don't think they last. They date a record."
As for the album's closing farewell to "Earthly Paradise", that song has a sharp anti-pollution message tucked amidst its twinkling Folk Rock guitar textures.
"I'm trying to avoid complaining, you know? I've spent a lot of time sounding very cynical and sneering about things, and generally kind of waving my hatred around -- to the point where I thought I was really a bit of a little misery (like Bob Dylan, or somebody). A lot of my early stuff was snarling. And it's okay being an angry young man, but you don't want to be a petulant middle-aged one."
Back in the late-'70s, Hitchcock was kicking up snarling tunes like "Rock 'n' Roll Toilet" and "I Wanna Destroy You" with The Soft Boys. When that group broke up in 1981, Hitchcock went on to a solo career. Kimberley Rew, The Soft Boys' other guitarist, hooked up with Katrina And The Waves (the band known for its 1985 hit "Walking on Sunshine"). Soft Boys bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor rejoined Hitchcock at about the same time, as The Egyptians.
The trio isn't playing any Soft Boys songs on tour: Hitchcock is only dipping back as far as his 1981 solo nugget "Acid Bird". "Those [Soft Boys] songs don't really mean much to me now. It's like a vintage car. It's great that it actually works -- and you take it out and polish it up, and it looks good. But you don't want to drive around in it the whole time."
Nonetheless, Hitchcock says of The Egyptians' current tour, "You won't be marooned in the '90s." The band is opening concerts with an electric set
("It's much harsher live"), followed by an acoustic set (in which Metcalfe plays piano). The latter set will primarily consist of songs from Hitchcock's 1984 gem I Often Dream of Trains and 1990 solo effort Eye. But, he adds, it may also include "some of the things that we've done Rock versions of reduced and taken back to acoustic -- like an acoustic version of 'Heaven'."
"We need good dynamics, because some of the show will be very quiet and some
of it will be very loud," Hitchcock says. "It's just the three of us, but we tend to get residual harmonics building up. Like air miles: after a while as a, kind of, bonus for making a certain amount of noise, you get extra noise. You get notes that you didn't play that start appearing in things."
Hitchcock has more than a passing fancy for weird guitar tones, since the prime reference point for his music other than The Beatles is founding Pink Floyd axeman Syd Barrett (who would pack psychedelic oddities into single-length songs). "They were my big influences," Hitchcock says of Barrett and The Beatles. "Being the kind of creature I am, it took me a lot of time to transcend my influences.... Unfortunately (or fortunately), I'm a good mimic. So you'll always find traces of people like that in my stuff."
"I just want to carry on, being able to afford to make records in some way -- and paint and draw (and all that kind of thing)," says Hitchcock (who painted the abstract cover of Perspex Island).
"Those are my goals."
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