Robyn Hitchcock – A wrinkle in time
“Robyn is a very original artist. It’s funny, because people talk about Syd Barrett being a big influence on his music, and certainly the Beatles and Dylan. But I don’t think it would have mattered what music he heard when he was growing up — Robyn would have become a musician, and an original one. He was inspired by all this music, but I’ve never heard anyone else do anything similar to what he came up with.”
IN 1979, Hitchcock was already the cheese that stands alone, whether he liked it or not. When the Soft Boys — Hitchcock, Windsor, Morris, and guitarist Kimberly Rew (later of Katrina & the Waves, and author of the 1985 Top-10 hit “Walking On Sunshine) — released their debut full-length Can Of Bees, they were definitely in step with the punk zeitgeist. Yet looking back, it’s hard to fathom how their sophomore release Underwater Moonlight, featuring feisty Hitchcock originals such as “I Wanna Destroy You” and “Insanely Jealous”, failed to find an audience, especially since acts such as R.E.M. and the Replacements would eventually cite it as a key influence on their own work.
Hitchcock suggests the reason the original Soft Boys (they reformed in 2002 to cut NextDoorLand) never hit it big was that “what we were doing was out of sync with the times.” With shared influences including Dylan, the Beatles and the Byrds, and individual leanings toward Steely Dan, the Beach Boys, Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart — “all of which are now accepted as classic templates,” he points out — the quartet was at loggerheads with contemporary trends. “In 1977, they were really trying to get rid of all that music. And we weren’t,” he says. “We didn’t look like everybody else, we didn’t sound like everybody else, and we certainly didn’t even feel like everybody else.”
Nor were the Soft Boys champing at the bit to become NME cover boys. “I was always leery about being famous, as I was with taking psychedelics; I could see what it did to people,” says Hitchcock. Having come from a middle-class background, he wasn’t particularly motivated by money, either. “All I wanted to do was write good songs, because other people I admired did that. So the 17-year-old Robyn said, ‘Go forth and become a songwriter, older Robyn,’ and it set me on my way.”
“I often wish I could say to my 17-year-old self, ‘OK, I’ve written these songs, can I do something else now? Am I supposed to make another album, or can I go paint, or learn to be a tram driver?’ But the sad truth is, I’m a habitually ingrained person, and I can’t give up sound.”
Damn, where’s a time machine when you need one? Someone rewind that film.
ON SEPTEMBER 5, 2004, the evening after his official appearance at Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot arts festival, Robyn Hitchcock is playing a secret gig at the tiny Two Bells Tavern. Periodically, he is joined by Scotty McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows, Minus 5, R.E.M.), Kurt Bloch (Fastbacks, Young Fresh Fellows, Sgt. Major), and Sean Nelson (Harvey Danger, Long Winters).
The show is as stripped-down as Welch & Rawlings’ London gig that set in motion the making of Spooked, albeit in a much smaller venue — no microphones, no amplification of any sort. Kitchcock mixes up unfinished originals such as “Ashtray In New York” (“now imagine a big, Barbra Streisand-like chorus right here…”) and brand new songs with more covers (the Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost In You”), before a handful of rapt friends and fans.
That was now. But what does the future hold for Hitchcock? He hopes to schedule a handful of live dates with Welch and Rawlings. They already played on gig together during the Nashville sessions, a Hitchcock solo show where the duo joined him for the encores. Additional outtakes from Spooked may be completed and released…or they may not. (If you wish to hear more Hitchcock covers of Bob Dylan, seek out the 2002 double-CD Robyn Sings, on his own editionsPAF! imprint.)
Spooked is an undeniably fine record, in no small part because of Hitchcock’s continued resolve to disregard the expectations of others. And if he were to try and cater to the public, what would he deliver? “We need good political songs,” he opines. “And I don’t write them. Although if it was a choice between that or being shoveled off an aircraft carrier into a sea full of sharks, you might find I came up with one fast. We need good social songs, songs that…perhaps restore humanity in its best sense. Music that helps people feel, and will therefore bring about in them a kind of revulsion to so much of what is going on in their name. And that’s a tall order. It’s easier for me to write a song about pomegranates.”
And yet Hitchcock’s unique point of view, where pomegranates merit songs as much as presidents and the poverty-stricken, is exactly what makes his music so enduring, concludes Rawlings. “He draws on images that other people have left alone. People don’t realize how much resonance these natural images that he puts in his songs have. One of the great things in Robyn’s world is, there’s a great equality. You could examine the life of any creature on this earth, and when Robyn looks at it, he’s imagining being that creature, what it does and feels, and in some cases, giving it human traits.” (Case in point: The new album’s “We’re Gonna Live In The Trees”, which seems to be written from the perspective of a mother bird addressing her hatchlings.)
“He is very consistent in his point of view,” adds Welch. “I can tell it’s always the same brain. His is an unusual, yet very unified vision of the world. And not so unusual that it doesn’t have resonance in my world. It’s just a different way of looking at things. Which is great. Isn’t that all you want out of art?”
ND contributing editor Kurt B. Reighley, a Seattle-based writer, DJ and performer, is the “Border Radio” roots/americana columnist for The Stranger, and contributes to many other outlets. Last time he interviewed Robyn Hitchcock, they were both slimmer and not yet gone-to-gray.