The Independent (London)
September 8, 1996
I Don't Get It And I Don't Want To Either
by Nicholas Barber
In Rock terms, the first week in September is The Twilight Zone: the interregnum between the summer's big festivals and the autumn's big tours, the week when we get over seeing bands in fields and get ready to see bands in arenas. A perfect time, then, to go to London's smallest venues. The smallest of them all is the 12 Bar Club, a room of such doll's-house proportions that the singer balanced on the soapbox stage can lean over and read what the reviewer is scribbling in his notepad: an especially unnerving situation on Tuesday, because the singer was Robyn Hitchcock, and I wasn't scribbling anything very nice.
When the rest of the country was going Punk, Hitchcock was flying the goat for surreal Psychedelia of the English-eccentric variety in the hope that he would be mistaken for the long-lost son of Syd Barrett and Sergeant Pepper. In the 12 Bar Club there was no room for a band to help foster this illusion. Instead, we had to concentrate on the sweating, sinister man himself -- and his lyrics, which are baffling, contrived, miserable nonsense poems about German planes circling a chess board, and a woman asking the Egyptian god of death to lengthen her headphone lead. It would have saved us all time and discomfort if he'd just worn a baseball cap with an arm and mallet sewn on, and emblazoned with the words: "I'm kerrrazy! Honest!"
And yet, Hitchcock is a cult celebrity. He has been adopted by American college radio -- and by R.E.M., who were heavily influenced by his former band, The Soft Boys. You either get it or you don't, I suppose. I don't get it, and I don't want it, either. After all, rhyming "Stalin" with "darling" -- as he does on his new album, Moss Elixir (Warner) -- is not big or clever. The trick is to make it seem as if the words are where they are for some purpose other than just to rhyme with each other, and Hitchcock never pulls it off. It's possible that he's a misunderstood genius. But if so, he's not one of those useful geniuses who invent helicopters or formulate laws of physics: he's one of those lesser geniuses who irritate people with their persistent daftness.
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