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March 28, 2024, 09:21:34 AM

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Been gettin' into Robyn Hitchcock

Started by The Mollusk, April 19, 2021, 04:31:03 PM

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The Mollusk

Ah mate fucking hell. Never listened to this guy's stuff before the weekend just gone. Read a comment on Last.fm saying that the Soft Boys' first album "A Can of Bees" was relatively really underrated compared to the celebrated "Underwater Moonlight", and that "Bees" had much better energy. I thought that sounds like a bit of me, and so my first experience of this chap's music was "A Can of Bees". People on the internet are frequently so wrong about a lot of stuff but this guy was so fucking right. What an absolute blinder of an album this is! Much like an actual can of bees, it's buzzing and mad and brilliant and it cannot be contained. Masterful neo-psych/post-punk songcraft, every track is catchy as fuck and the lyrics are quite honestly stupendously good. It captures the energy of so many other bands I love like Cardiacs, XTC, Swell Maps, even The Cramps, and it is undoubtedly a massive influence on Parquet Courts, of whom I also am a great admirer.

This morning I forced myself away from listening to "Bees" for the umpteenth time on repeat and gave his solo album "I Often Dream of Trains" a go. I don't know what I was expecting, but this gorgeous stripped-back sombre sweet acoustic record of quirky hymns and Syd Barrett-esque psychedelic folk really took me by surprise. Despite its minimalist structure, every song here shimmers, amuses, perplexes and enthrals. Superb stuff.

Hitchcock has a wonderful way with words, creating rich and evocative scenes and peculiar descriptive terms which can all at once be beautiful, vulgar and really funny. Additionally, he's a rhyming master, and often when listening to his songs for the first time I find I can predict what the second rhyming couplet word will be, and yet it's still always pleasing to hear it out loud, even more so when he suddenly veers off track and sings precisely what you aren't expecting to hear.

I need to revisit "Underwater Moonlight", since I enjoyed it but was admittedly totally in the thrall of "A Can of Bees" at the time and need to let that dust settle before I let the rest of the light in to my brain. Similarly I checked out "The Man Upstairs" and I could see its merits but I wasn't really taken by how, erm, soft it is. It was a bit too sweet and lovely for my tastes. So, off the back of what I've enjoyed the most/least, where should I go next?

McChesney Duntz

You might get a kick from the Boys' Live at the Portland Arms LP - an all-acoustic live set with some inspired cover versions and some hilarious Hitchcock ravings (one of the joys of RH live is his improvised inter- and sometimes intra-song banter). Basically anything from the original run of the Soft Boys (outside of the two official studio albums, there's a lot of scraps swept up into various releases of varying legitimacy and availability; the two-CD 1977-81 compilation hits most of the highlights) will be well worth your while.

Solo-wise, wrap your lips around his first, Black Snake Diamond Role, then maybe Eye (the unofficial sequel to Trains), and maybe the odds-and-sods Invisible Hitchcock collection (some of his most eclectic and brilliantly bizarre stuff lies among his ostensible throwaways). His self-titled album of a few years ago is his strongest recent outing, I'd say, though there's not too much I'd have you avoid. But we'll get to that another time - the above oughtta keep you busy for a spell.

DrGreggles


daf

#3
The Soft Boys - Return of the Sacred Crab



Featured on the album 'A Can of Bees' - released in April 1979

QuoteRobyn Rowan Hitchcock was educated at Winchester College. While at art school in London around 1972, Hitchcock was a member of the college band The Beetles.

Robyn Hitchcock : "I started trying to write songs in about 1969, but as I understood words far better than music the early stuff was just poems with chords stuck in every so often: F sharp, A minor, C7, E major A... I had no idea how melody worked. My tunes could have been stuck together by a donkey on a trampoline. The first song I actually completed by myself was a George Formby take-off called 'Standing by The Public Conveniences'. My understanding of music came slowly. Initially I was helped by an old school friend, Martin - we were big dreamers in the early Seventies and used to play at The Troubador in the Brompton Road."

In 1974 he moved to Cambridge, where he did some busking, and joined a series of local bands: B.B. Blackberry and the Swelterettes, The Worst Fears, and Maureen and the Meatpackers.

Robyn Hitchcock : "The Soft Boys came into my head in Cambridge, in the hot, dry summer of 1976 while punk was being conjured up by a small group of artists and villains in London. My idea was to concoct a tribe of translucent, bloodless man-things that had awesome powers but were largely invisible: stalkers of the hypothalamus, erotic guerrillas that would transform people's thoughts in a different way from the bludgeoning M.O. of UK punk. The front man would be a robot, for good measure; being the songwriter and lead guitarist I would supply the material and direct the music, while he, Golem-like, would be the cyber-darling of the crowds."

In 1976, Morris Windsor and Rob Lamb formerly of pub-rock bands Mad Hatter and Sheboygan teamed up with Robyn Hitchcock and Andy Metcalfe to form Dennis and the Experts, rehearsing in Robyn's front room. In December Rob quit - Robyn was in bed at the time, so he had to shout his resignation through the keyhole.

Kimberley Rew : "I first heard him at some weekly informal musical get-togethers at the Great Northern Hotel run by a man called Sunshine Joe, with a backing band he later described as 'people who were living in my house'. At the time I was renting a room in a terraced house whose basement contained Spaceward recording studio. Robyn arrived and recorded and we met in the kitchen where he stubbed his fag on the lino and was rebuked by recording engineer Mike Kemp."

Robyn Hitchcock : "My friend James 'The Great One' Smith had pointed out to me some of the great local players who were already on the ladder to professionalism. On his advice, I met Morris Windsor in his dark eyrie, where he gave me some coffee and we leafed through copies of Creem magazine together, not saying much. Then I found Kimberley Rew, appearing through a trapdoor with shoulder-length hair and an ironic (or was it?) grin; he seemed amused that I was me and he was him. Could it have been the other way 'round? From my performance-art perspective, living for my weekly spots at folk clubs, these guys were like Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton, as yet unused. Matthew Seligman smiled charmingly at me across an empty plate in another medieval chamber, and Andy Metcalfe loomed out of the shadows to play bluegrass mandolin at the Portland Arms occasionally."

Dennis and the Experts were booked that month for a university Christmas ball - recruiting Alan Davies on guitar - Robyn arrived at the venue, and finding the blackboard that was being used to list the evening's musical program, erased 'Dennis and the Experts', and chalked in 'The Soft Boys'. In October 1977 they released their first EP - 'Give it to the Soft Boys' on Raw Records, run by local entrepreneur Lee Wood.

     

Robyn Hitchcock : "The early Soft Boys featured Alan 'Wang Bo' Davies on guitar and was light in touch; we were crystalline guitars over a nimble rhythm section. Our first EP 'Give It to The Soft Boys' shows us trying out whatever we thought would work, and on that record it did. When Kimberley Rew replaced Wang Bo, our sound mutated into a ferocious kind of folk-metal, not the easiest of wares to peddle to a UK audience in 1978, which had only the year before been brutally shaved of whiskers and bell-bottoms and converted to punk."

Kimberley Rew : "I joined in January 1978, having baby-sat and sat in the previous month. We signed to the short-lived Radar Records, who had Costello and Nick Lowe and were thus considered the last word in cool. Radar financed an album to be made over two weeks at the residential Rockfield studios on the Welsh border. But the coolness was already returning to room temperature and the album was mothballed, followed shortly by the rest of the record company."

A single featuring two tracks from the abandoned album sessions - "(I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp" and "Fatman's Son" was released in May 1978.

     

Robyn Hitchcock : "Having spent months and thousands of pounds trying to record 'Sandra's Having Her Brain Out' and other songs of mine from that era, our record company dropped us before the deal was even signed. No one rushed to take their place, so A Can of Bees was released on our own label in spring 1979. Whilst it was a hit with neither the press nor many of our listeners, it was the best approximation yet of what we were playing at the time, and it did make its way to a swathe of US record shops where young musicians working there behind the counter would listen to it in amazement, sometimes putting it on to clear the shop at closing time. I've worked with a few of them since. The Can of Bees tour was a demoralizing experience: long silences in the van punctuated by Kimberley sighing, "Looks like rain.""

A Can of Bees was re-issued in 1984 with a re-jigged side two - dropping "The Return of the Sacred Crab", plus live versions of "School Dinner Blues" and "Wading Through a Ventilator" -  adding 'Fatman's Son', and live versions of "(I Want to Be An) Anglepoise Lamp" and "Ugly Nora".

daf

#4
The Soft Boys - I Wanna Destroy You



Opening track from the album 'Underwater Moonlight' - Released in June 1980

QuoteUnderwater Moonlight, the second studio album by The Soft Boys was recorded between June 1979 at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge, and January and June 1980 at the Alaska and James Morgan studios in London. The recordings were done on 4- and 8-track, and only cost £600.

Kimberly Rew : "Financially, the second album was done bit by bit.  Every time Robyn got enough money together we could record a few songs at a time.  Pat Collier was a great producer- he didn't change our sound at all.  He was sympathetic and had a natural feel for it.  He was low-key and confidence inspiring. Robyn was always developing- his songs appealed directly to peoples' feelings.  The curtain of dark imagery just got thinner and some light came through.  In the early days, we'd have competitions to introduce little twists into the music.  We stopped that by the second album and simply supplied the musical setting for the songs."

   

The album was initially unsuccessful commercially, especially in the United Kingdom, where over half the sales were exports to America.

Robyn Hitchcock : "'Moonlight' was the work of four young guys in their mid/late twenties and I thought it was pretty good really. I'm definitely pleased with it, and I'm glad it has survived. It's one of the albums I'm most proud of. It's certainly the best Soft Boys album."

After the Soft Boys split, bassist Matthew Seligman joined Thomas Dolby, playing on the albums 'The Golden Age Of Wireless' and 'The Flat Earth', featured on Stereo MCs' Supernatural, and Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos, and played in Dave Bowie's band at Live Aid. Guitarist Kimberley Rew formed Katrina & The Waves, whose sprightly hit 'Walking On Sunshine' is a retro club favourite to this day. Drummer Morris Windsor teamed up with Seligman's Soft Boys predecessor, Andy Metcalfe, in Hitchcock's subsequent backing band, The Egyptians.

Video Game Fan 2000

Worth listening to the demos and outtakes from Underwater Moonlight There's a lot of extra material that's a lot like the Can Of Bees stuff.

Element of Light is good. And there's this track.

daf

#6
The Soft Boys - Only The Stones Remain



Released in 1981 as a single to promote the album 'Two Halves For The Price Of One'

Quote'Two Halves For The Price Of One' was issued just as The Soft Boys were disbanding, and, as the title implies, consists of two distinct sides, each with their own sub-titles, and seperate front covers -

"Only the Stones Remain" - which includes late studio recordings by the group.
"Lope at the Hive" - featuring five songs recorded live at the Hope & Anchor.

 

Oddly, one side seems to be 20p cheaper than the other - so remember to hold it the right way round when you take it to the counter!

peanutbutter

Kimberley Rew won the Eurovision in 1996
Solo Hitchcock is tricky for me, he's one of those acts who seems to have tons of quite okay stuff but not that much great stuff (although loads of the quite good stuff feels close).

Iirc the 2 disc reissue of underwater moonlight's bonus stuff was a fair bit better than many of those things often are?

daf

#8
Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians - My Wife & My Dead Wife



Featured on the album 'Fegmania' - released in March 1985

QuoteFegmania! was the fourth studio album by Robyn Hitchcock, and his first with his backing band The Egyptians - which included the former Soft Boys Andy Metcalfe and Morris Windsor. Stills from the video for the song "The Man with the Lightbulb Head" were reproduced as cover art for the front and back of the LP sleeve.

Robyn Hitchcock : "I always thought we were a bit too uptight in the studio, but I thought that live that translated to a very tight show. I think all those records were blueprints, you know. Listening to them now, they all sound just slightly fast and they all sort of suffer from '80s dust sprinkled over them. The drums and the guitars and all that, you know. Nearly everything recorded in the mid-'80s has shoulder pads. You had to be very nimble to avoid it. There's a sort of gloss, you know. It wasn't intentional, but it just sort of went down with the recording."

     

The song was inspired by the 1945 film of Blithe Spirit, directed by David Lean and starring Margaret Rutherford and Rex Harrison. Originally a 1941 comic play by Noël Coward, it concerns the socialite and novelist Charles Condomine (Harrison), who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant, Madame Arcati (Rutherford), to his house to conduct a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book. The scheme backfires when he is haunted by the ghost of his annoying and temperamental first wife, Elvira (Kay Hammond), after the séance. Elvira makes continual attempts to disrupt Charles's marriage to his second wife, Ruth (Constance Cummings), who cannot see or hear the ghost.

 

The play had been a major success, and Coward advised Lean not to jeopardise this with the adaptation, telling him "Just photograph it, dear boy". In spite of this, Lean made a number of changes such as adding exterior scenes, whereas the play had been set entirely in a single room, showing scenes like the car journey to Folkestone which had only been referred to in the play. Perhaps most importantly, the final scene, in which Charles dies and joins his two wives as a spirit, does not occur in the play, which ends with his leaving his house after taunting his former wives, of whom he is now free. Coward objected strenuously to this change, charging Cineguild with having ruined the best play he ever wrote.

daf

#9
Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians ‎– Bass



Featured on the album 'Element of Light' - released in 1986

QuoteElement of Light was the fifth studio album by singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock and his second with his backing band, The Egyptians. Most of the album was recorded at Alaska Studios and Berry Street, but two tracks, "The President" and "Lady Waters & The Hooded One", were live recordings made for the BBC, with overdubs recorded on BBC Mobile and at Alaska.

     

The album title derives from the song "Airscape", which has been cited several times by Hitchcock as a favourite among his own compositions, and concerns his favourite beach, Compton Beach on the Isle of Wight, which also provided a backdrop for the cover shots. He was inspired by learning about the erosion of the cliffs, and imagining the ghosts of people who had walked the cliffs centuries ago now suspended over the water.


daf

#11
Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians – Tropical Flesh Mandala



Opening track on the album 'Globe of Frogs' - released in 1988

QuoteGlobe of Frogs was the sixth album released by Robyn Hitchcock and his third with his backing band The Egyptians (Robyn Hitchcock, Andy Metcalfe, and Morris Windsor) along with Pat Collier, and emerged as the group's debut after signing to major label A&M.

The album was packaged in dark green, with one of Hitchcock's paintings on the front. The sleeve notes consist of his "manifesto" in which Hitchcock advocates "the organic" as opposed to the big business of "insanity" and implores listeners to bury their televisions:

   

The album features Peter Buck from R.E.M. guesting on guitar, and a duet with Squeeze's Glenn Tilbrook.

daf

#12
Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians – Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)



Released as a promo 12-inch single in the US in 1988 - did not chart

QuoteFlesh Number One (Beatle Dennis) was the closing track on the album 'Globe of Frogs', and featured the duetting pipe-work of Squeeze's Glenn Tilbrook.

Having failed to winkle out any more interesting info about this song, instead, here's Robyn talking about his father, Raymond Hitchcock, who's various achievements included writing the rib-tickling knob-transplant book, Percy . . .

Robyn Hitchcock : "He was an engineer...not an engineer on a train, but a trained engineer...who worked for the telecommunications system, early satellites and things, and the British post office, which was part of it. Then, he became a cartoonist who then became a painter, and he was a great cartoonist, then not a particularly great painter as he began to imitate other people. He was an original who then lost confidence and started imitating Jackson Pollock and Francis Bacon, and doing sort of '60s-styled sculptures...well, it was the '60s! And then he started writing and hit the bonanza with a book about a penis transplant ("Percy").

"I see that the first penis transplant has actually just been carried out in China, and after two weeks, they had to take it off the recipient...not because it physically didn't work, but because there were psychological problems! Which means that the guy's back with his stump, so I don't know what he's going to do. And, anyway, I was wondering what my father would have thought of that. And, yeah, Ray Davies wrote the music for the movie of "Percy," which...I don't know if there's any real classics on that, but it was just after "Lola," so it wasn't long after his heyday as a songwriter. So Raymond then spent the rest of life as an author, and he died in very early '92."

His first solo album 'Black Snake Diamond Role' is gold from start to finish.

Video Game Fan 2000

Just hearing the most played songs of this guy - "Balloon Man" "Brenda's Iron Sledge" I never would have guessed what his catalogue contains and wrote him off as cheeky 'surreal' bollocks. You do have to do a bunch of digging but the gold is there. Every Groovy Decay has some direct hits.

Quote from: peanutbutter on April 19, 2021, 05:48:02 PM
Iirc the 2 disc reissue of underwater moonlight's bonus stuff was a fair bit better than many of those things often are?

Its gold. There is an alt version of "Insanely Jealous" that makes it plain that the song is a Dylan parody (Insanely jealous of yewwwww...) that is a thousand times better than it has any right to be. "He's a Reptile" is on there and "Over You" is just hanging around on a rehearsal tape like its nothing.

peanutbutter

Quote from: Video Game Fan 2000 on April 19, 2021, 08:40:04 PM
Its gold. There is an alt version of "Insanely Jealous" that makes it plain that the song is a Dylan parody (Insanely jealous of yewwwww...) that is a thousand times better than it has any right to be. "He's a Reptile" is on there and "Over You" is just hanging around on a rehearsal tape like its nothing.
Yep I can remember all of those and it's been 10-15 years so that's a good sign! They've a comp of cast aside shit too that's pretty good as well, I think.

Def a case that they had it in them to make a DRASTICALLY better album than Underwater Moonlight or the first one if their creative energies got focused in the right way. Not that either are bad, but like, just overflowing with ideas at that point.

Video Game Fan 2000

It's true for a lot of his solo stuff as well. Element of Light is a good record, but some of the extras are fantastic! "If You Were A Priest" is a fun postpunk track on the album, its a haunting Velvet Underground/Galaxy 500 drone on the demos.

The early version of "The Man Who Invented Himself" from his debut is hugely better than the released version too - nails the Between The Buttons sound, you can see the idea was to pay tribute to Syd in the style of his favourite record.

Reminds me of R.E.M. putting down flawless versions of "All The Right Friends", "Ages of You" and "Romance" for Murmur - and canning them all!

scarecrow

If I ran a label, my priority would be to release a set that accurately documents a Hitchcock live performance. It's really weird that there isn't already something like this available. Storefront Hitchcock has some good performances, but it captures him coming out of his fairly middle of the road major label period, and the riffs between songs feel a bit forced and self conscious as the cameras roll. It's a shame, for I really feel he's one of the best live acts around.