Hitchcock's Guide to The Galaxy

Robyn Hitchcock came to Exeter Phoenix on Wednesday 6th March, I interviewed him for the student newspaper 'Exepose'- in case you missed it in print, here's the article with bonus embedded music and pictures.

Read on for Robyn's take on songwriting, psychedelia and the human condition...

Robyn Hitchcock is a busy man. Having released his 19th solo album the day before, and celebrating his 60th birthday two days prior to that, he arrives on a delayed train about an hour and a half before his gig at the Phoenix, and still has time for a chat in the bar. He confirms that his creative juices have been flowing freely since he trained himself to write songs in the '70s, and now it's an involuntary process. If he stops, he says, it will be to due the fact that he cannot go on as an organism indefinitely. This irreverent answer is typical of the charm which has gained Robyn a cult following and provided a continuing demand for his strange and often touching music.

The promotional poster in the Phoenix, featuring his bemused head peering through the branches of a fir tree, proclaims him “One of the UK's most enduring psychedelic treasures”. I ask how he has avoided the tendency among his peers and influences to burn out:

“Or to just die,” he adds, “in that first wave, the great wave of psychedelic artists, people probably went too far too fast, you know? So when I came along I was a lot more cagey about those sorts of things. Whilst I've had my nose in the rock 'n' roll trough, I never went overboard on drugs. I never saw any point in frying my brain, others had already fried theirs. I figured you'd get more out of it by lightly basting it occasionally and then taking it off the boil. I never write on anything stronger than coffee really. Actually, a good hangover - they're no fun but they can be quite productive when your mind is slightly cracked.”

 

As he sips his soy latte, Robyn does seem a world away from the unhinged excess of some of the artists, like Barrett or Beefheart, whom he admires. However, this moderation lends itself to a more grounded, whimsical approach to the universe in Robyn's songwriting which can link everyday objects like tomatoes and squid with cosmic ideas of love and death and time and space. While acknowledging the influence of the psychedelic pioneers of the '60s, Hitchcock is places himself in a more pragmatic tradition than his drug-addled forebears.

“I absorbed the attitude of some of the things inherent in psychedelics, and in pot, a tendency towards hyperrealism, great intensity, things apparently at random seeming enormously significant. Maybe it's about texture a bit. My stuff isn't very textural at all. I should probably subject myself to things and listen to them in that way but I'm too impatient really, I just want to get the song down and move on to the next one.”

Perhaps this is modesty. After all, Robyn's recent work, including his new album Love From London, shows him colouring his songs with a variety of instrumentation. There's even a tabla on the track 'Stupefied'. This seems like a move away from a more sparse streak of records with which he found some popularity in the past towards a more textured 'psychedelic' sound. Nevertheless, lyrics such as “Ain’t no whiskey in the Talbot / Ain’t no sugar in your tea / There’s an answer to it all / But it’s still mystifying me” ensure that his songcraft remains the main draw. He explains that the draw of his music is that it keeps people company, mixing intimacy with a constant surprise at existence.

“It's extraordinary that everything's happening. Agitated molecules, the torture of electricity is producing light, the burning gas in black heavens is producing the blue sky that we wander around, then there's the grey mist we pad around in between as we get more and more addicted to electronic media. The fact is that we're not necessarily an evolutionary pinnacle - if we are something we're probably a stage – whereas the Fender Telecaster or the Shure Mic or the Zeiss lens, these are things that cannot be improved on - I don't think any of us are that finished. We're like a dinosaur becoming a bird, it's got a few feathers, it doesn't know what it is, you look at these evolutionary half-way things and I suspect that's what we are.”

Luckily, unlike the dinosaur-birds, we have the eternally startled Robyn Hitchcock reminding us that all is not what it seems, and that maybe we should have a cup of tea and a little think.