Raygun
April, 1993
Interview
by Randy Bookasta and David Howard
St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco. The 1993 Gavin Seminar is in progress with hundreds of wide-eyed young hopefuls milling around the lobby. We slither
through the schmoozing up to Robyn Hitchcock's room. "How far are we from North Beach?" queries Robyn, as he gazes out the window at Union Square. "Let's get
completely out of here." A cab is quickly flagged. Once inside, Robyn looks over and asks, "Have you heard the new record?" "Of course." "Yeah, me too,"
he deadpans. Respect, Robyn's seventh album with The Egyptians (Morris Windsor, Andy Metcalfe), his 13th since the demise of The Soft Boys, was recorded by a BBC unit at his home on The Isle Of Wight. The album's sound is an answer to the two pronounced trends of 1992: Grunge and Unplugged. "Overkill and underkill," states Robyn. "So to avoid these two
extremes -- man, we're so moderate -- we came up with this simple maxim: no amps, but all the wires you like." The cab drops us off at Vesuvios, a historic
North Beach bar once populated by the likes of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Snyder. We venture up the stairs to an open table overlooking Jack Kerouac Street. A handyman nearby plunks away as chunks of plaster fall to the floor. Ty Braswell, Robyn's American representative, wonders: "What if Kerouac
were to fall from the ceiling?"
Robyn: That would be strange because he's buried in Lowell, Massachusetts. It would mean that there's some kind of corpse tunnel.
Ty: It's a conspiracy.
Robyn: Either it's a conspiracy or there's a way that dead matter moves from Lowell, Massachusetts to San Francisco.
You're living in Washington, D.C. now?
Yeah. My fiancee, Cynthia, and I are based there. She's actually got a job outside Dulles Airport. So we're based in Washington for the next year or so. I don't know whether we'll wind up living in Britain or The States. Basically we'll wind up living in a plane (like we usually do). I actually have got a house that belongs to me on The Isle Of Wight.
And you recorded Respect there with a BBC mobile unit.
Yeah, we got the BBC mobile unit 'cause it was the best deal. We got it over on the ferry and just stuck it outside the house. It sucked electricity off of
the junction box upstairs and it thrust it back in through the garage. It was like this huge electricity-devouring parasite that was feeding on my house.
Respect was recorded with mostly acoustic instruments, yet the album has a very lush production quality. If seems that you started with the
intention of having a more basic, stripped down sound, but in the end...
It was going to be 'round the campfire, yeah. That was what I particularly wanted. I think it's basically the difference between me and Andy. I
would do things very, very basically. And Andy is an arranger. I mean, we all do different bits. It's not like I just sit there and play and not take any
interest in how it sounds. We all sit there discussing every note by committee. Plus we had [producer] John Leckie there to arbitrate this time.
If you listen, "Serpent at the Gates Of Wisdom" has got Andy playing bass, organ, and piano. When I have a song to begin with, I don't think it needs anything. Andy fills it up and then once he's done it, when I sing it by myself again it sounds empty and I can't figure out why it was ever like that. An enormous amount of that was him. I spent most of the album on the phone and I'd just dash in and do vocals every so often.
You're even credited on the album for "phone calls".
Yeah, well Cynthia was over here and I was, um, there.
In the press notes for Respect you suggest that you tried to remove some of the cliches in the music that you felt the band had created. You even state that Andy, Morris, and yourself were originally drawn together [in 1976 when they formed The Soft Boys] by, amongst other things, a mutual hatred of cliches. Prior to recording the album, was there a conscious look at your past to--
No, it wasn't looking at the past. All it was is that we'd been playing electric guitar, bass, and drums for 15 years and we were getting very, very
nice at it. The last album and the last electric tour was very cozy, sort of, music. But it struck me that we didn't need it. If I wrote another jangly
Alternative Pop classic, I'd vomit! [Laughs] And I thought, "Fuck it! I'm getting rid of my electric guitar!" So I sold my electric guitars. I don't
have them anymore. I've always been a better acoustic player than electric, really. Also, I think Rock music is going through that Grunge phase and Heavy Metal has been relegitimized since Guns 'n' Roses -- and since Led Zeppelin has been released on CD and kids are allowed to grow their hair again by the music press. Suddenly everyone is looking like 1973, and I never cared for that period much. I just feel that now is a time for us to very definitely produce un-electric music. The problem is now that we're all in our late-30s, we're very, very tasteful. So I'll probably have to do something tasteless without Andy and Morris at some point just to get it out of my system. 'cause when we work together it is...it's as tasteful as Bryan Ferry, really.
He was actually on Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous a few years back.
What's that?
A tasteless TV program in which this Robin Leach character comes to your home and shows off your riches.
That sounds about right. Yeah, he would. That would, kind of, fit in with what his aspirations have been. He'd make his lifestyle into an art object to
a degree. But that's like saying that Madonna is actually a performance artist and she is a piece of art, and that her lifestyle is more important than her
records (which is probably true). I don't know whether I am. I'm too hapless. I don't have enough exterior grip over my creativity or how I present
myself. I don't even get my hair cut. There's just a lot of things I can't organize. I just can't be bothered.
Is the "weird" tag often associated with you another cliche that you'd like to remove from your songs? It seems that your lyrical approach over the
last few years has become more direct and personal.
In fact, I think they've always been personal. Most of the songs have been autobiographical in some sense or the other. I've never put myself in anybody
else's shoes. All I've done is put myself in different guises -- but they were all actually about me. I think they're just less-disguised (or less metaphorical). I think it gains, I don't know...it's no better or worse, really. It's just what occurs to me. My stuff has a much more human face than it used to. I mean, 15 years ago I would have just as happily been an insect. I was very embarrassed by my humanity. But I'm not waving the flag for Jesus (or anything) now. I think to begin with people liked us because they thought that I was unlike other people. So did I. And the whole shtick was based on the fact that there is everybody else, and then there's Robyn Hitchcock. Okay, well he does sound rather like Syd Barrett, and he does sound a bit like John Lennon. But it was still the idea that I was something apart. Somehow that's changed. I think the emphasis is more on how I'm like other people. This has been a very de-mystifying process for a lot of people. They probably go, "Oh man, he used to be so out there." I'm just like everybody else. But I maintain that everybody is just like everybody else. The differences are so fractional. You know, even Syd Barrett probably gets up in the morning and crosses the road and cooks his bit. I doubt that he puts his food under his plate and turns the TV upside down to watch it. Even Michael Jackson is probably normal in 95 per cent of his actions. He's just grown up in a very rarified world. I grew up in a very rarified world.
Do you think that human nature generally leans toward good, or evil?
I don't think human nature leans toward either good or evil. I think humanity may destroy itself (and it may take the world with it). Good and evil are only human concepts. But it's really obvious that we are a prisoner of duality. We have light and dark, male and female, up and down, left and right, good and bad. You know, it's not a tripodite universe. It seems to me the only salvation would come from opening a third eye in people where they began to
become, sort of, telepathic and sympathetic to a degree where they could feel each others' pain and pleasure. Essentially, evil is greed. Greed for power, greed for control, greed for property, greed for sex. Sex is an excuse for death. We only have sex because we die. If we didn't die, we wouldn't need to
reproduce. So every time you're aroused by the shape of a woman's hips or a flick of her hair, that's simply because we are going to die. The whole thing
is fueled by death.
On our way to your hotel room we noticed that the seminar was having a panel on virtual reality. Do you have any opinion on the potential impact of
virtual reality on society?
I don't know what the immediate impact is, but I can see in the long term that you'd wind up with a situation where you can no longer have sex because of
AIDS and other things breaking up. Human contact becomes dangerous, distasteful, and -- ultimately -- unnecessary. Babies are simply fertilized out of sperm and egg collected from the mother and father, and they're cooked up in a little pot somewhere. And as they pop out, they're put into a helmet and they go straight into the virtual world. In the virtual world they live, they're taught by the precepts that the old ones have decided are the most righteous, and they're brought up to live with the helmet on their whole life. So I think it's fascinating, yeah.
Respect features a couple of your paintings, once again, on the cover. Apparently you're planning an exhibit of your work soon?
It's always dangerous to talk about these things (in case they don't happen). But hopefully there should be a bunch of paintings ready by next year. It could
be a traveling exhibition, like a Rock tour. I'd like to have it so it's in each town for a week, and we'd have an opening night where somebody plays the piano and we hand out white wine and tiny mutilated shrimp (and stuff like that). You know, use what name I have as a musician to, kind of, start selling my pictures (which hopefully will be the way things go in the future). I'll do more pictures and fewer records and, sort of, move into that and eventually. If I could calm down enough, move into writing stories. But I can't concentrate enough to write stories at the moment. As arthritis sets in we won't have to do so many gigs. I definitely want to have a break from writing songs for a couple of years and do other things. I just play because I have to. I'm compelled. But I've been doing it for so long that even the songs themselves have become cliches. There's a lot of things I'd like to say that I can't say in a Robyn Hitchcock song. I'm trapped in my own way of doing things as a songwriter.
Your father was also a painter and writer.
He didn't do too well as a painter. He did paint for quite a while. But his best stuff was right at the beginning and right at the end. He wrote a lot
of books that weren't published. He had a lot of good ideas -- like one where people are living in an abandoned aerodrome, and one where people have got sex
organs in their armpits. All kinds of stuff. People didn't know how to market it. They'd say, "Well, is this science fiction, or is this a children's book, or is it supposed to be pornography?" My dad just didn't fit into any marketing category. And to an extent, the same thing has happened to me.
What elements of your father's work have you incorporated into your own?
What I have picked up from my dad is probably self-dislike and a vivid imagination. I'm pretty much like him in a lot of ways. I think like my
mother, but I feel like my father. Now he's dead, so I don't know where that leaves him. Sometimes I just carry him around in a box.
[A second batch of coffee is served...]
Robyn [to Ty]: Do you want some NutraSweet?
Ty: No. I'm officially off of NutraSweet.
Robyn: Since when?
Ty: I've heard about the controversy around NutraSweet, but nobody's explained it to me.
What is the NutraSweet controversy?
NutraSweet contains a tiny parasite that lays eggs in your brain and eventually hollows it out. It's really dangerous. You'll want to watch out for it.
What inspired "The Wreck Of The Arthur Lee"? Have you seen Arthur recently?
No, I've never seen him. But he was scheduled to perform a couple of shows in London last year, and he didn't show up. It's more to do with...it's a
lament. I'd been out in L.A., and I'd been listening to Love a lot, and I'd been having a really disturbed time. Cynthia and I were separated at that stage. I was just getting genuinely freaked out making that terribly nice record Perspex Island (which had been written before so it doesn't really show on the record). I was listening to Arthur Lee and Love a lot, and feeling very jagged. And being the impressionable type I am, I thought, "God, I must write more songs with lots of different chords in them. I'm getting too streamlined, man." Then I got back to England. I woke up at 5:00 in the morning with a bit of a hangover, and there was no food in the house. So I picked up a guitar. It was a sunny morning in June, and I made up "The Wreck Of The Arthur Lee". It was really more "The Wreck Of The Robyn Hitchcock" at that stage. I thought about all of these things that just disappeared -- like The Avengers. Although I think they found them at the bottom of the sea. They didn't go into another dimension after all. I thought of the Arthur Lee as a ship, and you find this wrecked ship and it's like, "Where have the crew all gone?" It's certainly not meant to be an insult to him -- but I don't know how he'd take it.
Are there any foods that contribute to your appearance?
Uh, well, I guess I've...do you mean why I've put on weight?
No.
Well, I eat an enormous amount of chocolate, chocolate cake, Heath nut crunch fudge bar with New York ice, avocados, cheese. I don't eat meat. But
anything fattening.
You've made a lot of seafood references in the past.
I have in the past. I really try to avoid that because that became an enormous cliche. I think it also made it all seem very childish. We'd get fans
throwing fish and lobsters on stage. Somebody brought a live lobster in Chicago. Thank god they didn't throw it on stage. They took it onto the bus
and gave it to our tour manager.
Did you eat it?
No. We gave it to the Chicago lobster home. All of that stuff became a bit of a drag. So I try to avoid it. But I certainly eat an enormous amount.
In 1956, you saw a dead chicken for the first time. Did this have a traumatic affect on you?
Yes, because before that I thought chicken were immortal. My world crumbled. I didn't stop eating chicken until 1987. My daughter, on the other hand, started eating chicken because a chicken pecked at her a couple of years ago. She had been a vegetarian for four years (or something), and she was so outraged at this chicken pecking at her that she immediately went out and forced somebody to buy her a chicken and ate it whole. Since then she has eaten all forms of meat, as much as she possibly can. She's shaved off her eyebrows and she eats a lot of meat.
If you could travel in time, where would you go?
I would travel back to the late-1940s. I would live in an apartment in New York. I would go to Jazz clubs occasionally, and I would enjoy the lack of
crime. Maybe I would come out here and come to this place and watch Jack Kerouac (and people) unleashing what was about to become the hippie nightmare.
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