Newsday
February 28, 1993
Hitchcock Pays Respect
by Tony Fletcher
Too often in Pop music, the pursuit of success overwhelms all other considerations. When Robyn Hitchcock, a maverick English musician with almost 20 albums to his credit (some as The Soft Boys, some on his own and the last few with his band The Egyptians), finally turned his eccentric Pyschedelia into Beatlesque Pop with his last album Perspex Island, there was a pervasive feeling that it was make-or-break time for Hitchcock. It was as if anything less than Top 40 airplay for his blatant (and disarmingly charming) single "So You Think You're In Love" would spell failure.
It's a bogus attitude, but an increasingly common one in a music industry that finds it so difficult to deal with cult status. Fortunately Hitchcock -- who of course did not become a Pop star with Perspex Island -- knows this to be so, and his new album Respect (on A&M) therefore sees him in retreat from the demands of commercial radio and MTV. Much of Respect was recorded at Hitchcock's home on The Isle Of Wight (just off England's south coast) with bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor helping to keep the songs to their acoustic basics before building them back up with keyboards and the occasional string arrangement. Respect is not as obvious as Perspex Island or the preceding Queen Elvis, and it will not be targeted to the mainstream. But that makes it no less intelligent or worthwhile.
The sense of melancholy that haunts Respect is no doubt due to the death
of Hitchcock's father in 1992. Respects are paid most prominently in the mournful "Then You're Dust", and death surfaces in almost half the album's songs. But most of the Hitchcock's sadness is thankfully turned into passion, and nowhere better than on the lovely ballad "Arms of Love". (The song has already been recorded by R.E.M., whose guitarist, Peter Buck, played on the last three Hitchcock albums, though not this one.)
Fortunately, a return to basics and the loss of his father have not unduly
affected Hitchcock's love of the sublime. An established painter and short story writer who always supplies a nonsensical fairy tale with his sleeve notes, Hitchcock gets a final laugh in the whimsical "When I Was Dead". After being invited to dinner by the devil, god says "Oh ignore him! I've got all your albums," to which the narrator replies, "Yes, but who's got all the tunes?"
After so many years of being so prolific, and so consistent with it, the answer might well be Hitchcock himself.
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