Robyn interview
I interviewed Robyn Hitchcock in Edinburgh some ten years ago, for an independent British music magazine which promptly went belly-up just days before this piece was due to go to the printers.

It must have been late 1994 or early '95, but I wasn't very good at keeping a diary back then, and none of my supporting documents - only recently unearthed from my parents' attic - are dated. [EDIT: It was just after he played the Renfrew Ferry in Glasgow, which places it at May 1995]

I have resisted the strong urge to go back through this and rewrite it, or at least polish it a little, to remove some of the more glaringly naive bits. But then I thought, "Ah, sod it." Of course I'd do a much better job if I was to interview him tomorrow, but that's because I've got ten years of experience under my belt these days.

One paragraph in my original transcript that didn't make the final cut reads as follows:

"I talked to some people in Seattle about [a CD-ROm project]. It seems in the end that they're just another excuse to be stuck in front of a screen, and people spend too much time in front of screen as it is. Televisions are breeding like flies, computers are breeding like rabbits; soon it's going to be illegal not to have a screen in the room. It could be done, but I'm not into technology. As Andy Metcalfe said, I am 'impatient with technology'. I'm not interested in machinery, but if someone offered me a lot of money to make a CD-Rom out of my stuff... I wouldn't trust it - I'd have to supervise it."

I wonder what he'd make of LiveJournal? :o)



Robyn Hitchcock is one of our most consistently brilliant songwriters. When he plays live, solo or with Andy Metcalfe and Morris Windsor, every muscle swirls into his music until you can't tell where he ends and the song begins. He has released thirteen albums - including studio, sessions and compilations - since he disbanded the defiantly unfashionable yet hugely influential Soft Boys in 1981. His short stories, used in place of sleeve notes on many LPs, are akin to what would result if Lewis Carroll, Jules Verne and the Brothers Grimm were to conduct a round robin in some hypothetical afterlife. Oh yes, and he paints as well.

Fifteen years ago, The Soft Boys decided to play a few gigs outside Cambridge. In Sheffield, about a hundred people stood at the opposite end of the hall and ignored the set. At the end, one person clapped and one person shouted "fuck off". At the band's last gig, only one punter - an Australian tourist - was left at the end of the set. When Robyn asked if he had enjoyed the show, the Antipodean replied: "No, not really." Odd, when you consider that REM and The Replacements (to name but two) may not have formed without The Soft Boys' influence.

In America, it has always been a different story. However, Robyn's first solo UK tour attracted larger crowds than he was expecting. After years of adulatory treatment across the water, he was finally seeing a positive reaction in his home country. A commuter, he still lives on these shores but travels to America constantly. This is not through choice, or through a desire to spite those who have ignored his work, as he explained...

"I'm not sure if there were enough people here to miss me when I left, it was more an attitude of 'I'm here but you'll never know it'. It's a practical thing, I couldn't have made a living working in Britain."

He said: "It was pretty hard in the old days, and America pays for me to live really, it's as simple as that. I was depressed that I couldn't do anything over here. I suppose the dichotomy between being someone over there and being nobody over here was a strange thing for my ego to accept.

"Coming back to Britain was like putting my ego in a cold shower, because it certainly got a lot of feeding over there. It's probably good for me. Rock'n'Roll egos just swell up so fast and become so ripe and rotten so quickly that it's probably good for me to have mine punctured every now and then. I'm quite happy to play a theatre in the States and a toilet in Britain - I just make sure that I play reasonably nice toilets."

One particularly nice toilet is Glasgow's Renfrew Ferry. A glass ship moored on the River Clyde, the ferry seemed an apt place to watch a songwriter who uses reflections, glass and the sea among his metaphors. Robyn's enthusiasm for the venue extends to a strong desire to grow tomato plants in it.

"There's something about glass buildings in general... not skyscrapers, but conservatories. I've always longed to have a conservatory on a train and grow tomatoes in it and just go around on the outside of a lake, every now and then going out to a jetty and stopping. People would unhook long poles and hang coloured, glowing Japanese lanterns over the water. The train would pause at the end of the jetty, and you could push back a panel and fish in the dark. Those are the things I like - water, glass and reflections. I'm not into football."

There is a strong possibility that a preoccupation with football would have hastened Robyn's progress in the public eye. Instead, his unique vision has left him with the image of an eccentric who is too clever for his own good, who has "quirky" song titles and an unhealthy fascination with seafood and invertebrates. I guess some people will always prefer Parklife to pondlife, never suspecting that the joke could be on them. Through accident rather than design, his songs are slowly moving up the evolutionary ladder. Tracks written for the forthcoming Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians LP, tentatively titled 'Shadowcat', have "probably started to grow hair instead of scales". As far as public perception is concerned, his creative exile and the lack of information about Robyn himself doesn't help matters.

"The general perception of me is probably that either I'm insane or I'm pretending to be, neither of which is the case. But I've written all the songs I have, so I guess people have looked at the songs and tried to deduce me from the songs.

"Your material is the best of you... it's kind of distilled in a way... it's how you'd like things to be in a world that you would create. But the rest of you is just stuck here in so-called reality, getting stuck in traffic and going to the bathroom and trying to avoid being stampeded and all the other things that happen to humans."

First impressions stick, you see. When The Soft Boys ventured onto the scene, the band found the music press to be less than supportive. If Robyn, Andy, Morris and Kimberley Rew had abandoned their musicianship in favour of the punk ideal, they would have had an easier ride, but they refused to conform to the non-conformist norm. This stubbornness is still tangible on both sides. Certain sections of the mainstream music press mention Robyn and the band only to stick the knife in. Robyn still refuses to give a damn. How deliciously infuriating.

He said: "That goes back years, to The Soft Boys. Partly because we weren't being punk at a time when you were meant to be punk. We still had long hair and harmonies and guitars, and we were conspicuously middle class.

"Rock journalists at that time were all kind of middle class people desperately pretending that they weren't. I think also that rock journalists want a bit of rough, they want to idolise people who are not like them. They've got to be from America or from Manchester or from Iceland. The press down south was full of middle class wise guys from the Home Counties, and I'm a middle class wise guy from the Home Counties, so they could never idolise me. I wasn't anything that they could project their fantasies onto. I was really just like them, only I happened to be singing.

"I've always been a non-person in the British press. I just have to ignore them and they ignore me, and so it goes on. There's nothing I can do about it because I don't think I did anything wrong - why should I apologise for being myself?"

After signing to A&M in America, Robyn's LPs vanished from British record shops. Aside from early compilations such as 'Invisible Hitchcock' and 'Element of Light', and the wonderful live album 'Gotta Let This Hen Out!', there was a stark silence broken only by the release of 1989's lush 'Perspex Island', and the near-hit single 'So You Think You're In Love?', both on Go! Discs. Meanwhile, Robyn and the Egyptians had opened REM's "Green" tour at the request of ardent fans Michael Stipe and Peter Buck. US LPs such as 'Globe of Frogs', 'Queen Elvis', 'Eye' and the most recent offering, 1993's brilliant 'Respect', were imported and quickly snapped up by British fans.

He explained: "'Queen Elvis' and 'Eye' didn't come out over here and we made no attempt to get them out over here. 'Perspex Island' came out over here on Go! Discs because Billy Bragg was on Go! Discs and the manager thought 'let's do it'.

"But things changed at Go! Discs, and the relationship altered, and Billy's not there anymore. 'Respect' never came out over here. Peter Jenner (Robyn's manager and Sincere Management supremo) imported some copies and sold them through his own distribution company, but it wasn't actually released here. I've just put out a seven-inch single in the States on K Records and that's only available on import over here."

He smiles: "A lot of people enjoy hunting records down. There's the stuff that's in everybody's face - the new Phil Collins, Mariah Carey, Primal Scream - and then there's the stuff that's fallen down behind a crack somewhere. The people that enjoy digging behind the plaster will find those records - and some of them are mine."

The EP released by K Records, which is available through the International Pop Underground network, features three tracks recorded in a fashion originally intended for 'Respect', the album that was recorded at Robyn's old house on the Isle of Wight, and produced by John Leckie.

"My idea was to put a microphone in a bowl of fruit, and have Morris, Andy and I sitting around the table playing, because it was the kitchen that I always used to write songs in. These were the guys that I'd always played with, and we'd rehearsed the songs on the bus on tour in the States, and we'd done a lot of radio shows with Morris shaking coke cans as maracas, Andy with an acoustic bass and me with an acoustic guitar. I thought it was a very organic band sound.

"But what ended up happening was that we recorded the basic thing at my house and then took it away; lots of keyboards appeared and digital drum sounds got in there and I started playing electric guitar on the overdubs, which I wasn't going to do at all - there was meant to be no electric guitar on the record.

"I think it's alright as a record but it wasn't really as intimate as I wanted. I don't think it sounded organically like the band, it just sounded like some songs with various overdubs on them. Paul Fox did 'Perspex Island' and most of that was the band with the traditional guitar, bass, drums. Peter Buck was playing extra guitar on most songs. That was cut live with the two guitars, bass and drums and the voices were dropped in afterwards. But I think it was over-mixed and slightly over-produced. If we'd stopped playing with it earlier, it would have been a more essential record.

"I think what I've learned over the years is that I'm not designed to sound like Peter Gabriel or Bryan Ferry. I don't have the money or the time or the patience. But there are those people who sound good when they themselves are distant. You don't imagine Ferry sitting at a piano in a small room, playing. You imagine him surrounded by exotic dancers and cool musos in nasty suits.

"What people seem to like about me is intimacy. When I produce something like 'Perspex Island', they feel short-changed because I sound further away. That's why I did the EP. We just recorded three songs in a day on the eight-track, used reverb and mixed it onto quarter-inch tape. It was all very old-fashioned. We did two songs upstairs, and the someone wanted to cook in the kitchen so we had to move downstairs to the basement."

'Shadowcat' is still something of an unknown quantity. Personal upheaval since 'Respect' was released left Robyn concentrating on his painting for some time, and he says it has taken him until this year to feel as though he has an album ready for recording. He left A&M some time ago, and is currently negotiating a deal in the US that will hopefully see his eleventh studio LP released on both sides of the Atlantic by Christmas. As his songs crawl out of the water and onto dry land, Robyn's approach to life in general has changed over the last three years.

"I was going to get married. But we didn't get married... we split up in the end. I went to Washington for eight months, and while I was there I wrote not one song. So I painted. Basically, if I'm not writing songs then I'll paint or write a short story or do something else. These are secondary things. It's very satisfying, doing a painting, but I always know it always comes back to writing songs.

"But when I feel I can't write songs, when there's nothing there... when there are no songs in the pool... then I do tend to get despondent. I'm happier when things are coming out, and I'll probably carry on like this until I have a stroke or something.

"My approach to life has changed. I can handle my own humanity, now I've got a bit more used to what sort of creature I am. I'm not going to be like this for very long, so I might as well enjoy it.

"My life, my real life, is going very well at the moment, so maybe that helps. My girlfriend and I are moving house - I've been living in her flat for the last 18 months, and it's quite small, its just the two of us and the cat. I'm finally going to be living in a proper, permanent home for the first time in about five years."

A collection of Robyn's short stories is also planned, and will hopefully be published after the LP is released. A spoken word project has now been shelved, in spite of the success of 'Moose Mark and the Prince of Cones', which was broadcast on Mark Radcliffe's show last year.

"I'm going to try to go for it as a published thing. I'd be pleased to get that out, but I basically think that as a writer and a painter I'm a dilettante. My main thing is the songwriting. I'm pretty good with words, so I like the chance to use them, I suppose."

As well as his own foray into the world of literature, Robyn hopes to see the unpublished work of his late father, the novelist and artist Raymond Hitchcock, brought back into the public domain.

"I think the best part of his work is probably unpublished as agents couldn't figure out what to do with it. It was a marketing problem that I've probably inherited to a certain extent. 'Well, Mr Hitchcock, is this science fiction or is it erotica or is it stuff for children?'. His mind moved too quickly, but he was pretty persistent. But he was more disciplined than me... he'd been in the army and he'd never smoked dope or taken drugs or got horrendously drunk all the time, so he was less dissipated than me.

"He was able to sit down and write, which is more than I can do. I get up every time I've written a paragraph. My daughter says she's the same when she writes essays - she writes a paragraph and then rushes up and down the stairs.

"It would be good, because too little is known about him. I've gone out and done gigs and I'm not a household name... but I've never wanted to be a household name. What's a household name? Eric Morecambe? Michael Jackson? Norman Tebbit? Barbara Windsor? These are names that you recognise if you see them, and then you're just famous for being famous."

He added: "I've at least gone out and played to people who want to see me and spread my influence around the world like thin sticky jam - buttering the world before it's eaten."

It comes back to perceptions once more. How ironic that, in a year that has seen Britpop explode through all sections of the media, our most original and most intrinsically British contemporary songwriter still has to go to America to be appreciated. Perhaps Robyn Hitchcock is too much substance and not enough 'style'. Perhaps his powerful imagination and literary charm set him too far apart. Perhaps he is too clever for his own good.

Whatever. Robyn Hitchcock can get away with it, for the simple reason that he is so much more interesting than the other human creatures currently cluttering up our record shops. Large as life and quite as unnatural, Robyn and his songs are important on a number of levels, however you perceive him.

He said: "We don't look the way we see.

"I'd love to appear the way I see things. I'd have coloured lights constantly erupting out of my skin, my head would be changing shape all the time and I'd keep growing a trunk on the end of my nose, and when I snap my fingers, black devil butterflies would disperse into the air. That will come, when everybody goes virtual in 20 years time."

Until then, people will just have to use their imaginations. Robyn's LPs, from 1982 - 1987 are now available on Sequel Records, and a new compilation of unreleased material, 'You and Oblivion', is also available. His work from 1988 - 1993, the albums 'Globe of Frogs', 'Queen Elvis', 'Eye' and 'Respect' are available on import. 'Perspex Island' and 'The Kershaw Sessions' are readily available in this country on Go! Discs and Strange Roots respectively.