Robyn Hitchcock
The Atlantis, Washington DC, October 25, 2024
Among all the veterans of college rock radio, it’s actually odd that I’d never seen
Robyn Hitchcock before; I have a moderate amount of his material and quite like him. But somehow the thought of seeing him in concert never quite worked out.
More important, when Hitchcock was as close as he would become to a pop figure, his reputation as a willfully enigmatic weirdo made me tend to shy away. I knew of his work back when I was still in high school, because of the close associations he had with R.E.M., and his music was sometimes on college radio when I was running a station. But the attraction of his jangling melodies was frequently undercut by the surrealist humor; mind you I like XTC, but sometimes Hitchcock’s lyrical blend of idealistic naïveté, insightful and cutting analysis, and blithe stupidity just grated on me. (Case in point, the devastating first half of this couplet, and the dumb second half: “And it rained, like a slow divorce / And I wished I could ride a horse.”)
Anyway, back to Hitchcock! He was playing the Atlantis, which is surely a pleasant and intimate venue for someone of his calibre and tenure, and he gleefully poked fun at its genteel cosplay of the original 9:30 Club on 930 F Street (without the rats, he noted, or much of the less savory elements). Of course, given his tenure, he had played the original 9:30, the latter 9:30 at the current location, and memorably, the HFSestival in 1991 when he came closest to the mainstream, with “So You Think You’re In Love” and a host of collaborations with R.E.M. and others closer to pop stardom. (I vividly recall R.E.M. putting “Arms of Love” on a CD single as a b-side.) All of these recollections on the margins of popular music were grist for Hitchcock’s unwinding commentary over the course of the show.
Hitchcock took the stage promptly after a strong opening set by
Imogen Clark, a sensitive Australian songwriter whose sturdy pop-influenced songs showed her roots in folk and country of the antipodean variety. She is worth checking out.
Hitchcock appeared as regal and devotedly, eccentrically English as ever despite decades in America, weaving between his songs and his legendarily digressive stage patter, which I’m convinced must be largely rehearsed and practiced aforehand. Not surprisingly, he went back to many of his records with the Egyptians along with his solo material, but very little from the Soft Boys. To my surprise the opening track was the old Egyptians track “My Wife and My Dead Wife,” and I checked and it seems like every show he puts on, he
mixes up the material impressively. (After decades perusing concert data on the internet, I’m still a sucker for a musician who mixes up the setlist each night.) I don’t follow latter-day solo Hitchcock closely so I wasn’t familiar with “1974” or “Shuffle Man,” but he returned to his older Egyptians material amidst his solo material.
For every Robyn Hitchcock song I find uncannily elegant or perceptive, there is probably another one I find relentlessly grating and willfully off-putting. So yes, the “Yip Song” and “Viva! Sea-Tac,” which fall in the latter category, were also in the set and I winced through them in turn. But he also did some of his most transcendent tracks including “Madonna of the Wasps” and a touching “Chinese Bones” as a tribute to Phil Lesh, with the note that this was the only song of his that the Grateful Dead ever performed, just once (
via Suzanne Vega) for a fundraiser. And there were moving story-songs like “No, I Don’t Remember Guildford,” about his childhood suburban home and the streetcars and rail lines that connected it to distant London. Apparently this appears on the soundtrack of the 1998
Storefront Hitchcock movie that Jonathan Demme did? It was new to me.
Hitchcock’s wife and longtime singing companion Emma Swift joined him onstage after about ten or twelve songs, and did the rest of the set with him. I was only vaguely familiar with her but she served as both an able harmonizer as well as welcome straightwoman for Hitchcock’s ruminating. She did vocals on “Glass Hotel” and “Queen Elvis” from
Eye, the aforementioned “Yip Song” (yuck), the Venus 3 song “Up to Our Nex" which I’d never heard, and “Queen of Eyes,” the lone Soft Boys song in the setlist. And of course, they did Hitchcock’s best-known love song, the almost unnervingly direct “So You Think You’re In Love,” from
Perspex Island. Seeing the song sung as a duet between two life partners offers a weird moment of art-imitates-life, since I always thought of the song as a friend challenging another friend to recognize the latter’s affection and take action on it, rather than song sung between two lovers.
(By the way, Tom Breihan’s
Alternative Number Ones column on “So You Think You’re In Love” is delightful work; I had utterly no idea it was a #1 hit, even on an obscure Billboard chart, for so long, and that it was by a significant margin the only song of Hitchcock’s that ever reached that kind of audience — when he was 38 and far older than the whippersnappers whom he was competing with. And it is so out of step with the music that was surging to the top of the charts soon thereafter, the grunge era and the commercialization of mass-market alternative. As Breihan notes, “it was an instant relic,” out of touch with everything that followed.)
Hitchcock got all the way through the main portion of his show without touching on anything from the most recent Robyn Hitchcock record, his book and record
1967: Vacations in the Past, a full length record of music from that epochal year. So three songs from that record comprised the encore: Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play,” the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” and the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” To me the Kinks was the clear highlight; I never listen to Floyd and found “Emily” a pleasant trifle at most. Everyone loves the Beatles of course, and there was an abundance of happy murmuring and harmony singing from the audience, but I still prefer the Kinks.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/30/2024 11:26PM by zwirnm.
