1995
Robyn Hitchcock
Black Snake Diamond Role
Groovy Decay/Decoy
I Often Dream Of Trains
Sequel
by David Cavanagh
Outside of his phalanx of devout followers, Robyn Hitchcock's ongoing thing has had one major hadicap inhibiting those with a good heart and money to spend. Simply, his oeuvre is tricky to discover from scratch. Which records do you get? Will any do? Is Element Of Light better than Queen Elvis? Is Respect the best of all, simply because it's the most recent? In shops, Hitchcock's albums have kind of lain there -- the unspoken inference being: if you're not part of the clique then you're part of the problem.
Sequel's intensive Hitchcock reissue project comes at a point in his career when, having let his R.E.M. sponsorship lapse, briefly re-formed The Soft Boys as a touring unit, and taken to playing sporadic acoustic gigs, his entire catalogue may as well be made available. It can't hurt, as they say.
There will be nine albums on Sequel in all: his eight albums for Midnight Music and Glass Fish from 1981 to 1987 (the later A&M/Go! Discs stuff is readily available), plus a roundup of rare stuff. Of the initial three, Black Snake Diamond Role (1981) was his first post-Soft Boys work, a multi-faceted showcase for his Byrds and Barrett musical angles. Aside from containing the often fondly discussed "Brenda's Iron Slege", it also has "Acid Bird", in which two classic Hitchcock shibboleths memorably etnwine: his spot-on Gothic language ("Black shadow on an acid bird that etched her way across her field so long ago") and his love of Electric Folk. But with Hitchcock it's not all mining disasters. The profoundly silly "Do Policemen Sing?" showed him to be steeped in the Bonzos' tradition of getting increasingly worked up about a matter of no consequence whatsoever.
Groovy Decay ('82) wasn't too good. While the CD is beefed up to 19 tracks with songs from its sister album Groovy Decoy (rleased a few years later), the '80s-conscious production is tinny and off-putting, and is not helped by a saxophone, which leads the ballad "St. Petersburg" down to the place marked "'Will You' by Hazel O'Connor", a blackspot traditionally patrolled by no coastguards.
Then: a corker. I Often Dream Of Trains (1984) was a charming, eccentric look at another England through its trams, stations, and mother figures. Hitchcock, on acoustic guitar and piano, flitted from nocturnes to nasal Folk to strange Pop, peaking on the a cappella tour de force "Uncorrected Personality Traits", which welded Desmond Morris's Manwatching onto the chassis of Steeleye Span's "Gaudete": "Reconcile your parents to you", he sang balefully, "By becoming both at once".
The following year saw him support Paisley Undergound bores The Rain Parade with his trio The Egyptians -- and make Fegmania!, the first of the magic Rickenbacker albums he still makes now. Closer in wordplay to Reeves & Mortimer than to any of his songwriting peers, he remains the only man ever to have greeted Kentish Town audience with the words: "Great to be back in London, birthplace of Princess Anne."
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