ROBYN HITCHCOCK GETS RATIONAL

ROBYN HITCHCOCK GETS RATIONAL

by

Steve Hochman

Groucho Marx was once asked why he made a habit of insulting fans when they approached him in public. The caustic comedian replied that if he didn’t, the well-wishers would be disappointed; People expected him to be nasty, he reasoned.

Robyn Hitchcock chuckles knowingly when told this anecdote. And no wonder. Groucho’s dilemma is something he can relate to. As the creator of songs ranging from the ridiculous (say, “The Man With The Lightbulb Head” from 1985’s Fegmania!) to the sublime (the same album’s “Heaven”), the ex-Soft Boy is expected by some fans to come off as either some sort of oddball acid casualty or as a mystical guru who holds the keys to life’s great mysteries.

But rather than play up to these expectations, Hitchcock finds the whole thing a bit disconcerting.

“I always try to be rational...” he says with a thoughtful pause, reflecting on the nine interviews he had already done this day. “.. .and I try to be straightforward. But no matter how hard you try to break a preconception, people bring it back to you. It’s like if someone holds up a balloon and asks ‘What color is this?’ and you say, ‘Blue,’ and they hold it up again and ask ‘What color is it really?’ ‘Well, it’s still blue.’ ‘Yeah, but what color is it?’ ‘Blue!’ No matter what, you can’t convince them. I am pretty rational. I try to be as rational as I can.

“The thing I resent is that people think I’m loopy or something,” the Hitch goes on in his gentle, elastic English tones. “At some point everything becomes idiotic and you’re bound to be ludicrous six times a day. I accept that. I don’t mind people seeing me as an idiot, but I don’t like people to think I’m stupid.”

And thus, the release of Globe Of Frogs, the latest album from Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians (and the first for a major American label, A&M), is being accompanied by what seems to be a concerted effort to show that ol’ Robyn ain’t much stranger than you or I. In a note on the back of the album cover, Hitchcock fairly directly explains the nature of his work.

“This album does not deal with the conventional problems of so-called ‘real’ life: relationships, injustice, politics and central heating systems,” he wrote.

And the biography sent out by A&M is quite remarkable for its attention to empirical facts, in sharp contrast to the bio that accompanied last year’s Element Of Light, which was notable for such apparent apocrypha as our hero dressing as Binky The Human Lobster and jumping out of a window.

“I just wanted, in a way, to preempt questions people might ask about the record,” he says. “I don’t want to explain the existence out of things, but if nothing else, it puts it in context.”

On the other hand... it’s not like Hitchcock has become some kind of Mellencampian declaimer, laying out his worldview in neat little bits of linear logic to be sucked up like so many strands of spaghetti.

Try this couplet from Globe Of Frogs’ first single, “Balloon Man,” on for size:

And it rained like a slow divorce,

And I wished I could ride a horse.

Yes, Robyn still regularly dips his oars into the stream of consciousness and comes up with series of non-sequiturs that turn out to make sense. Or is it that he puts forth what appears to make some kind of sense but actually turns out to be a series of non-sequiturs?

“It depends on how you look at it,” he says with a hearty laugh. “It probably is both. A lot of things intuitively make sense—synchromcity and karma and that rubbish people talk about when they’ve got a certain amount of money.”

(Take that, Sting!)

“I tend to believe it, probably because I’m an old hippie,” he continues. “But at the same time, the rationalist in me sees the whole.. .urn, there’s non-sequiturs that make sense. What was the other one?”

Apparent sense that really is a bunch of non-sequiturs, he’s reminded.

‘‘Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. Maybe one’s the mirror of the other. I was thinking of a whole series of things that appear to make sense but don’t add up to anything.”

And for all his willingness to be open and candid and straightforwardly rational, there are some things Hitchcock would just rather not discuss. Or at least feels it’s unnecessary to cover. For example, when after a good half hour of conversation has gone by and it’s pointed out that there has not been a single mention of either John Lennon or Syd Barrett—the two music figures to whom Hitchcock is most frequently compared—he seems a touch put out.

‘‘Yeah, and I’m not going to mention them now,” he says with a tone of weary curtness. ‘‘Believe it or not, they’ve hardly been mentioned all day. But I’ve talked about them to CREEM twice. I don’t think

I’ve got anything else to say. Nor have I got anything to say about Van Morrison or Richard Thompson or Captain Beefheart or anyone.”

He is, however, quite glad to say something about R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, who guests on two songs on the new album.

“At one point we were making a record and he wasn’t busy,” Hitchcock says of the long-rumored collaboration. “Rather than sit around and set fire to his house he came over to England, just came whizzing over. He’s on quite a few outtakes. They’ll turn up on B-sides or something.”

And he’s nothing short of ecstatic to say something about Martin Carthy, the astoundingly dexterous and knowledgeable English folk guitarist whose participation on the album had also been rumored, but never happened.

“My God!” Hitchcock exclaims at the mention of Carthy’s name. “I used to go and pester Martin Carthy in the folk clubs. I was a bit of a groupie. I used to go up to him and collar him and rattle on.”

Hitchcock would love to work with Carthy, but seems to demur in a fit of hero-worship at the prospect.

‘‘We’ve never played together and I have no idea how he’d actually blend in with it. But I was very influenced by him, guitar-wise. Things like ‘Tropical Flesh Mandala’—in the choruses—I wanted to get his sound.”

But back to things he’d rather not talk about, there’s the 20-year gap in his otherwise revelatory biography between his birth (March 3, 1952 in London, for those of you who keep track of such things) and his first public performance in 1972 (‘‘in a group posthumously referred to as the Beatles,” reads the copy), the leap in time is dismissed by a line stating that ‘‘infectious amnesia has made details of his early life murky at best...”

A convenient excuse, it turns out.

‘‘It’s not really relevant,” Hitchcock says of his developmental years. “You could probably picture it much more exotically than I could. It’s my own personal business, my family and my childhood and my life. And I don’t really want to bring it into the public eye. I don’t really want people staring into my past.”

But he also admits that, annoying as it can be, the myth of Robyn is something he kind of likes to have around, and too much knowledge of the truth might skewer it.

“That’s the whole object of creating a public figure,” he says. “I mean, if (my fans) really spent a couple hours with me, their interest would wane horribly. If they just saw me washing my hands and eating, going to the toilet and all the rest of the things, pretty soon the mystique would all just evaporate from the bottle.”

And yet, near the end of the interview, Hitchcock begins feeling guilty that he hasn’t talked much about the new album.

"I just realized I haven’t actually promoted the damn thing,” he says apologetically. “But you know what the themes are anyway: sex, death and food.”

Ah yes, food. Especially fish, a recurring obsession in Hitchcockland.

“But I’ve already done that in CREEM; I don’t have to do fish,” he insists with a laugh.

Anyway, doesn’t the record pretty much explain itself?

“It’s meant to,” he sighs. “But by the time you spend 18 hours trying to tell people what you’ve already told them, you kind of assume they’re going to need everything explained five times. So, I don’t know. But don’t forget to give Martin Carthy a big plug. Print a big picture of Martin Carthy.” s