“I can relax in the knowledge that some people just don’t get me at all,”  idiosyncratic songwriter Robyn Hitchcock admits. “They can relax too.”  For well over thirty years, the unconventional Englishman has been cranking out albums that are always introspective, often provocative, but never ever clichéd.  If you’re looking for someone whose career highlights include rhyming ‘heart’ with ‘start’, he’s not your guy. Instead, his carefully crafted songs often explore the underside of the human condition, pointing out the absurdity of it all and illustrating how seamlessly the familiar and the freakish can fit together.  Try rhyming that with a one-syllable word. 

The Cliff’s Notes summary of his C.V. starts in Cambridge in the mid-seventies with the Soft Boys, whose ability to blend punk ethos with pop sensibility was largely ignored until after they’d split.  Their 1980 release Underwater Moonlight was eventually hailed for its brilliance and made a significant impression on R.E.M., the Replacements, and that college radio DJ you used to date.  After a brief stint as a solo artist, Hitchcock repackaged some of his former bandmates to form The Egyptians, who shared his stage for ten years and seven albums.  His current band, the Venus 3, is composed of longtime R.E.M. lead guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Scott McCaughey and drummer Bill Rieflin.

For the uninitiated, there’s never been a better time to add him to your iPod.  His latest release with the Venus 3, Goodnight Oslo, features ten genre-hopping tracks that range in style from Big Star-ish power pop to swaggering country stomps but never skimp on the stellar wordplay that has become his trademark.  Oslo also features the gorgeous “Up To Our Nex” from Rachel Getting Married, one of several songs that teeter between joy and sadness, leaving him wearing his heart on his floral-patterned sleeve. 

While he has some serious musical chops—with a guitar style that recalls the Byrds at their Fifth Dimension-y best—he’s better known for his lyrics, often a surreal casserole crawling with amphibians, insects, unsettling imagery and the most memorable cast of characters this side of the Looking Glass. 

He has admittedly taken double helpings of inspiration from Syd Barrett and Bob Dylan, but he also has a distinct brand of Britishness that serves pathos with a side of humor, seasoned with equal parts Monty Python and “I am the Walrus”-era John Lennon.  Part of the brilliance of his thirty album back catalog is that even the darkest ideas are often sung in a major key, giving his albums a catchy enjoyability best described as—and I’m stealing one of his song titles—sinister but happy. 

Hitchcock’s dance card has been full in the past few months, as he’s strummed his way through the reception scenes of Rachel Getting Married, appeared in a second Sundance Channel documentary, and played both Bonnaroo and the Glastonbury Festival last month. Despite his overstuffed dayplanner, he graciously answered an insanely long list of questions for us, talking about his influences, what he’d like his legacy to be, and whether he’s cool with being a “no-hit wonder”.

Goodnight Oslo was released almost exactly four months ago.  Are you satisfied with how it turned out?  

It was fine the last time I listened to it. It’s good of you to count the months…

What was the inspiration behind this particular set of songs?

Some of them were written for films and the others appeared around the same time. Perhaps songs written in the same time period all grow from the same emotional nutrients, which is an argument in favour of making albums as the songs would have a similar thread of feeling running through them. In this case it concerns the emotional elastic that attaches us to what we need to leave behind, but that involves leaving part of ourselves behind too, if we jettison those feelings. Or can we put them in storage?

So despite all the single-serving options for buying music, you still try to make albums?

I grew up as the LP came into its own, post-Highway 61 and Sgt. Pepper.

So like a lot of songwriters, I think of a harvest of songs being an album: if you write one, you write a dozen.  When I first started writing songs in the early 1970’s, I would try to write whole albums at a time, rather than concentrating on individual songs. They weren’t good. The size of an LP dictated a typical crop of 10 to 14 songs, with a break after 20 minutes, and a total flying time of around 40 minutes. Then along came the CD…

Now the landscape is more like it was pre-1967: back to singles. If you didn’t have a hit single back then, you were off the map for the record business, even if you did OK on the gig circuit. We—the songwriting community—have to accept that hardly anyone wants to listen to albums anymore, let alone pay for them. The effort we put into ten nice little songs would be better invested in one rock-ass one. So things get more competitive.

Maybe a limited LP culture will survive. People may get sick of the random factor of iPods and prefer to hear songs in their original corrals.  Imagine Astral Weeks or Time (The Revelator)  never to be heard as a whole. And hopefully there will always be some talents intense enough that you want to hear all their songs together.

The idea of authenticity appears in a couple of tracks, starting with with those who have it (“What You Is”) before you skewer those who don’t (“Saturday Groovers”). How important is that to you, to channel your inner Polonius and be ‘what you is’?

Didn’t Polonius get stabbed?  I don’t think about it much, but I can tell if I’m using a voice that doesn’t suit me. The words don’t leave my throat well. You are what you aim for, but you’re also just you, chewing gum and feeling the blood pulse through your arteries. You aren’t necessarily what you were, even though you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been.

Throughout your career you’ve sung about sex quite a bit—although not in the same way as, say, Prince—but Oslo features several straightforward songs about love, trust, and relationships.  Where did that shift in tone come from?

Perhaps I’m getting over the shock of being, and beginning to accept that I exist and so does everybody else and that we all feel. Transmitting like a million radios in the dusk, but who’s to hear us? That’s why therapy is so popular.

Along with sex, you’re also known for recording a number of songs about death or about confronting your mortality…until lately.  Why haven’t your releases with the Venus 3 co-starred the Reaper quite as often?

I’m getting closer to him and maybe less inclined to sing about him. Someone told me after the gig last night night that my death would be a great thing for music. A true fan…he was wearing a black cloak and sounded Welsh.

You wrote “Up to Our Nex” after reading the script for Rachel Getting Married and took a similar approach with “I’m Falling” for the upcoming Brian Epstein biopic The Fifth Beatle. Does having to write with a film or feeling in mind change your creative process?

Writing for a film is liberating.  You can write about feelings you have but the song doesn’t have to be about you. Nor should it be; it’s about the people in the movie. I would never have written those songs without those scripts. There’s more to come, too.

How has working with the Venus 3 differed from your previous bands?

Peter and I played together 20 years ago and more, back in the Egyptians days, so he is in a way from my previous bands. Scott, Bill and he are also in R.E.M. and sometimes the Minus 5, so they are an instinctive unit. They are primarily rock musicians where the Soft Boys/Egyptians were more about funk/folk/close harmony, (Soft Boys guitarist) Kimberley Rew excepted. 

Is it even possible to compare them?

Maybe being all English we were more miniaturists, maybe being American the Venus 3 are more widescreen. Or maybe I’m just more inclined to rock out in my 50s than I was in my 30s. They’re all great players.

You and the Venus 3 have had a seemingly non-stop stack of tour dates since Goodnight Oslo came out.  Does playing the songs so often make it harder to be objective about them?

The best way to be objective about a song is to leave it in storage for a while. It may mature in your absence, or just moulder. There’s been no chance to do this with these songs but they’ve been fun to play live.

Image via Michele Noach