The New York Times
January 3, 1999
The Imaginings Of An Eccentric Gentleman
Robyn Hitchcock: Storefront Hitchcock -- Music From The Jonathan Demme Picture
Warner Brothers, CD, 9 46846-2.
by Anthony DeCurits
In the riveting concert film this album accompanies, Robyn Hitchcock performs in a stark storefront on 14th Street in Manhattan as a sea of pedestrian and automobile traffic flows outside the window behind him. It's a perfect visual metaphor: an English eccentric of the first order, the 45-year-old singer-songwriter long ago turned his back on the world of quotidian events to explore the far more florid realms of his imagination.
The album's spare musical arrangements -- Mr. Hitchcock alone on acoustic or electric guitar or occasionally accompanied by the violinist Deni Bonet and the guitarist Tim Keegan -- emphasize the richest virtues of Mr. Hitchcock's songs: endlessly inventive, poetic lyrics set to luminous Folk Rock melodies. The director Jonathan Demme wisely preserves Mr. Hitchcock's surreal, between-songs musings on sex, death, and religion. The gloriously idiosyncratic result is a performance that suggests an episode of VH1 Storytellers filmed on the other side of the looking glass.
In addition to playing lovely versions of some of his best material ("Glass Hotel", "I'm Only You"), Mr. Hitchcock wrote four equally strong new songs for the film. One of them, "1974", finds him touchingly mourning the decline of one of his musical idols ("It feels like 1974/Syd Barrett's last session/He can't sing anymore"). It's one cult figure acknowledging another and taking courage from the hope that what time will ultimately leave behind are their most visionary moments -- like the one captured on this stirring album.
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