Comic panel from "Grin And Bear It" by George Lichty, 1937
Robyn Hitchcock never really went away, but lately things have been going really well for him. He is currently on tour with the Decemberists (and played on their most recent record), and his touring band includes longtime friend/fan Peter Buck of REM. He played a song in Rachel Getting Married. His last two albums in Yep Roc Records have gotten good reviews. And, best of all, the best albums of his post-Soft Boys career are now back in print after years of being unavailable. In 2007, Yep Roc rereleased his solo albums from the '80s, and these records show Hitchcock's surrealist-folk side at its best. Last year, they put out the first three albums he made with the Egyptians, a band composed primarily of former Soft Boys.
It's great to finally have access to all these records, and I've been most impressed with 1984's I Often Dream of Trains and 1985's Fegmania! The former is Hitchcock in his starkest, stripped-down folk mode, taking the listener through a singular and creepy dreamworld of nightmare imagery and bizarre whimsy. The latter is Hitchcock at his poppiest, delivering a Technicolor splatter of hooks and instruments and embracing a variety of styles all at once. It's amazing that he made these records back to back. Fegmania! appeals to my sensibilities more, and it may be my favorite Hitchcock release. It has plenty of straight-up pop songs, from the eastern-tinged "Egyptian Cream" to the transcendent album closer "Heaven". It also has a handful of creepy lyric-oriented songs as well, like "I'm Only You", "The Fly", and the menacing "Goodnight I Say". The best songs on the record, though, are the ones that combine the pop hooks with Hitchcock's creepier surrealist tendencies, like "My Wife and My Dead Wife" and "The Man with the Lightbulb Head".
My new favorite Hitchcock song, though, is "Strawberry Mind" - this song blew me away the first time I heard it. Robyn Hitchcock doesn't usually go for genre experiments because his music comes from a unique personal place - at times, it seems like his throat is a doorway to a world where language functions very differently - so a zydeco-style pop song was the last thing I expected to hear on Fegmania! The lyrics are Hitchcock doing what he does best, conjuring vaguely sexual imagery that just seems a little off, and the chorus hook is a lot of fun. It's a stand-out track on an amazingly consistent and fun pop record from one of the UK's best songwriters.
"Strawberry Mind" by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians
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