Newsday
March 31, 1995
A Sign Of Spring: The First Robyn Sings
Hitchcock, Now 42, Is Back On Stage
by Ira Robbins
Singers have drowned in their own tears and drowned in the sea of love. Robyn Hitchcock, however, appears to be in danger of drowning in his back catalog. A few years ago, Rykodisc re-released the work of The Soft Boys, Hitchcock's '70s New Wave band. Over the past two months, Rhino has reissued eight of his subsequent albums and assembled a stack of outtakes into the previously unreleased You & Oblivion. After years of cult fame, the irrepressible author of such surrealist whimsy as "Eaten by Her Own Dinner" and "Grooving on an Inner Plane" could be mistaken for a walking antique.
"It's surprising that the mid-'80s is now history," says the Londoner, who turned 42 earlier this month. "To me, it loomed in the terrifying future, and now it's the cozy, pre-technological past." His collection of recordings, he ventures, "has nothing to do with its time at all. It bears as little relation to the '90s as it did to the '80s."
Which is another way of saying that Hitchcock has always lived in his own creative world. Other than an oft-noted resemblance to the solo efforts of Pink Floyd genius-burnout Syd Barrett, Hitchcock brings originality and imagination to the task of writing and singing fascinatingly weird music that usually means different things to different listeners.
Hitchcock lived in Washington, D.C., for a few years and concentrated on painting. "I got all menopausal as a songwriter," he explains. "I'd open the sack and there was nothing struggling in the net." Relocating back to London in '93 -- around the time his last album, Respect, appeared -- seems
to have revived his musical muse. He's got almost enough material to cut another album, and has a three-song single just out on K Records of Olympia, Washington. "I wanted to get something out on vinyl, which is enjoying a bit of a renaissance now that it's been stamped out," he says ruefully.
The world has changed a lot since Hitchcock began his iconclastic career, but he insists, "I'm not Alternative. Alternative is Pearl Jam and Helmet: Grand Funk Railroad in drag. I'm an entertainer. My clientele are intellectuals, hippies, misfits."
As a solo artist, he reports, "I still play some very loud guitar, but I haven't any more to do with Rock And Roll than Pat Nixon. Rock should be a young person's game. You're supposed to have made your pile by thirty and spend the rest of your life in and out of rehab, a coda to the sizzling career you had when you were young. Folk singers and Blues singers don't have a sell-by date. I feel like I'll carry on playing indefinitely."
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