Philadelphia City Paper
March 24, 1995
What Becomes A Legend Most Is Robyn Hitchcock
by A.D. Amorosi
"Is this for a style or flair section? Are you gonna talk about what kind of shoes I wear?"
I think I'm scaring the ever-fearless Robyn Hitchcock into believing that our conversation will be about pant-leg-width and coiffure gels.
"That'd be most probably very silly," says Hitchcock on the subject from his London home while preparing supper. For what becomes the Hitchcock legend most isn't his bizarre assortment of polka dotted or cheesy patterned baggy tops, but the fact that he is a complicated modern master of the twisted phrase.
Over the course of almost 20 years and a baker's dozen of recorded things, Hitchcock has made mincemeat of any normal thought process, made heroes out of animals, and made a legion of fans reel in delight. His insect's-view of the world has maintained its whimsy in a business that's normally dictated by a sourpuss mentality.
"It's tough to keep your humor. The easygoing aspect of making music is always there at the very beginning whether you're talking about starting out in 1956 or 1995. Unfortunately, it's always combined with a frenzied egotism and a blind unreal idea of how important you're gonna be. There's a, sort of, vertigo looking down on your youth. You never know how real it seems -- or how real you're being talking about the past."
Like imagining what you could've done to not lose your hair or gain weight?
"Yeah" he smirks. "I shouldn't have rubbed all this hair-remover onto my scalp regularly (or I could've stood under a waterfall less often)."
Hitchcock is only looking back because Rhino records is doing it with him. The last two months have seen the Hitchcock back-catalog get a kick in the ass from Rhino (what with nine discs released, dating back from his post Soft Boys days of 1981 to his pre-'90 A&M period).
"I'm the one who has to unearth it all, so it's not like it was done independently of me," says Hitchcock.
"I think I had a tendency to write songs in a pastiche fashion, in certain styles -- say, a la Lou Reed or John Lennon. I'm quite a good mimic. Being so good at doing pastiches is probably not a good thing. I didn't have a definite sound from the beginning. Wherein with, say, R.E.M., they always had an identifiable sound. Stipe always sounded like Stipe. At what point I became 'me' rather than a set of influences I don't know. Probably around mid-'80s with Element Of Light and Fegmania!.
"Fegmania! had good songs on it -- even if some were derivative. Element was my first 'grownup' album. I think I went backwards on Globe Of Frogs -- back to my pastiche Psychedelia. I think since then it's been all me, even if it did have bits of other people floating in it."
Hitchcock's hair also begins to come into his own: it seems, well, fuller, more stylized.
"Yes. I experimented with a series of disastrous hairstyles throughout the '70s and '80s. It's only in the last year that I've come to terms with my hair (as it's beginning to go grey)."
As accorded to all Rhino reissues, it's chock-full of unreleased goodies, remixed junk, and perhaps a lock or two of Hitchcock's very own 'do.
"It was quite interesting to go back, because there's so many formats (or now-obsolete formats). When some of this stuff was recorded, we were still using stuff like 4-track quarter-inch tape. No digital stuff around on the kind of level we were working on."
And which level was that?
"That very cheap level. Now these things haved been mixed onto DAT -- which didn't even exist in 1980. God, it's becoming like translating hieroglyphics in The Great Pyramid Of Cheops onto a typewriter-- a strange mixture of media."
Hitchock's love of the cheap isn't a kitsch thing, but an effective factor in making works that sparkle expensively. Take, for instance, the record I Often Dream Of Trains. Or '91's Respect.
"The concept was to record around the kitchen table. But there was very little innocence involved, because we had a 24-track mobile unit outside the house, and the place teeming with wires and computers. I thought it'd be more like Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes with The Band. We rehearsed and ate at the kitchen table. But that's all that really happened."
For Hitchcock's recent tour (and a new single out on Seattle's K Records), he's gone back to the simplicity he's been known for since the days of The Egyptians.
"Recording cheaply isn't just cost-efficient, but time-efficient. I'm not part of the Kate Bush/Bryan Ferry school of lingering in the studio. I like to do things in one-and-a-half takes. I think that a song has an essential feel, and you either get that or you don't."
This also figures into Hitchcock's lone-bullet theory of solo creation.
"Working with other people often finds them trying to get the fine-tuning right. But they very often lose the soul of the song. It's like spending so much time mending the net they scarcely catch any fish in it."
"Generally, I've found that my achievments have been in inverse proportion to my budget. We did the K tracks in a day in a basement. We did the first two tracks upstairs, but had to stop because the other people in his house wanted to make soup in the kitchen."
Since Rhino has captured a large chunk of his life so zestily and with great ease, I figure that it must be strange for Hitchcock to imagine himself as an artist who's been doing it since the early-'70s -- a time not most notable for personal flair.
"Twenty years," he ponders. "Back then, I looked like some rambling English twee Folk-y thing. I had a beard and long hair (like everybody else), and sat cross-legged. I was a slightly dodgy Folk type."
Hitchcock then asks me if I've got a mustache.
"No," I say. "Why, do you have one?"
"No, not a spare. But I know where you can get one, " he says, ending our
chat.
As long as its cheap.
Robyn Hitchcock -- a man who tells me his fave words are "dial", "kiosk",
"shimmer", "Perspex", "ovulate", and "maritime" -- will make a rare intimate appearance at the Tin Angel March 25 and 26.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE