In part one of our interview with Robyn Hitchcock we learned about sex, death and the Venus 3: now find out about his experiences at Glastonbury and Bonnaroo, and how he feels about being called "eccentric"...
You played both Bonnaroo and Glastonbury last month and before your set in Tennessee you said you’d not been to a music festival since 1970. What made you decide to “re-lose your festival virginity” this year not once but twice?
I’ve wanted to play at Bonnaroo for a while, likewise Glastonbury. The sanitation has improved since 1970.
Bonnaroo was on the calendar first, so what did you think about your first festival in 39 years?
Bonnaroo totally rocked! We had an ace time, all those groovers thronging in a tent in the afternoon Tennessee heat. Magnificent! I should have done this 25 years ago but I couldn’t.
And Glastonbury?
I saw Madness, Nick Cave, Roger McGuinn and a blast of Blur before playing our set. We managed 38 minutes, which is the length of classic albums such as Revolver, Document, Avalon and Underwater Moonlight. I had my UK power trio: Paul Noble on bass and Rob Ellis on drums. In the course of that time we spun an audience out of those who weren't watching Blur.
Sadly, I couldn't see Blur from our stage. I've been playing with Graham Coxon here and there, he's an excellent guitarist…hopefully we'll do some more soon. I really enjoyed playing at Glasto and it didn't rain until we were well off the site.
One of the most entertaining pieces of your live performances are the monologues that link the songs like verbal versions of Terry Gilliam animations. When did that become such an important component of your shows?
Since I started playing in the folk clubs. Everybody talks there—you have to be both a musician and stand-up comic. The most successful graduates of folk clubs are now comedians, like Billy Connolly. I was doing monologues at school before I could play guitar.
When you’re on the road, how do you prepare a set list from your four hundred song (!!!) back catalog?
Keep playing some of the ones I always play and rotate the others. I’ll retire a song sometimes for a few years, keep it in storage.
After writing such a tremendous amount of music, how do you keep turning out such original ideas? Do you ever unintentionally retrace your steps, so to speak?
Probably, but not too much I hope. Like JG Ballard or DeChirico, returning to the same themes. Hopefully I move in a spiral rather than just going around in circles, so when I revisit a feeling, it’s from a different height.
In the past two years, YepRoc records has re-released some of your out-of-print early work and your Egyptians albums in two five-disc (or eight LP!) box sets. What’s it been like to revisit those records?
The songs sound a bit faster than I play them now and my voice sounds cuter.
Do you ever look back at the music you’ve made and think “You know, I’ve written some damn good stuff?”
Not in listening to the records, but if I can still sing a song I wrote 30 years ago I know it’s good—for me, anyway. Not all of them last.
Which of those albums still resonate with you?
Nearly all. Eye has some of the best songs.
You’ve never been indelibly linked to one particular song. Do you think that’s worked out in your favor, that you’re not expected to go out and sing, like, “Tainted Love” every night?
I do. I’d rather be a no-hit wonder. As you say, I’m not tethered to any one song and that’s great, for me and the song both.
Do you get more satisfaction from writing memorable lyrics or for writing the perfect melody to carry the words?
They work together or not at all. I measure my life in the songs I write. I trained myself to do this and I will always write songs, even if nobody else hears them. It’s what I’m for.
It doesn’t ever feel like just a job?
There are many aspects to my life in show business that are just a job, but songwriting is never one of them.
When it comes to writing, are you in the “sit down every day and stare at a blinking cursor until I type something” camp or the “when it happens, it happens” camp?
Songs sneak up on you when you’re busy. Like cats. Or phone calls. Sometimes I answer.
Do you consider yourself to be the embodiment of your work? I mean, if someone listens to your albums and reads your stories, do they know Robyn Hitchcock?
They know the distillation of me that is in those songs or pictures. But you should never confuse an artist with their art, any more than a hen with her eggs. I wish I was like my songs but I’m in flux and they are alive, but completed.
Are there any songs that you wish you’d written?
“Waterloo Sunset”, “The Crystal Ship”, “The Main Thing”, “Look At Miss Ohio”, “Eight Miles High” and hundreds more.
When you were, say, 10, was the possibility of growing up to become a rock star even on your radar?
No, I knew being grown up was on the other side of a barrier that I had yet to pass. Once I reached 15 I knew I wanted to do this.
What were you like as a kid?
Easily scared but quite brutal sometimes. I learned to make people laugh.
Do you remember the first song you wrote?
Thankfully no.
Is there a law that requires every article about you to use the word ‘eccentric’?
You’ve forgotten ‘quirky’. My wife is quirky too, and so is our cat.
On a related note, when the Soft Boys are discussed, they’re frequently in the same sentence with the term ‘underappreciated’. Is that fair?
Does it matter? We were great musically, but our personalities would never have allowed us to make it big. No, that adjective is no more necessary than the e-word.
Do you think that, based on your work—and all of those ‘eccentric’-filled articles—people expect you to behave a certain way? Like if you’re at the grocery store, you’re supposed to be muttering to the artichokes or something?
You can mutter to the artichokes all you want, they won’t mutter back. Or are we all deaf?
Have you ever been asked to sacrifice your...Robyn-ness in an attempt to become more mainstream?
If I stop being me, I’m not there. So I can’t function. What some people like about me may grate with others, and it’s hard to balance it all out sometimes. Yet I feel that I am doing just that, mysteriously.... I don’t think I am marketable per se, but I make a good living at the moment.
In the Sundance documentary Sex, Food, Death...and Insects, you said “At heart I'm a frightened angry person...I'm constantly, deep down inside, in a kind of rage." Do you still feel that way?
We all come from the sea, and sea has many moods. That statement was edited out of context – I had said some other stuff too that didn’t make the cut, which would have put that remark in context. I was trying to emphasize things that weren’t generally perceived about me. Maybe I’d just acknowledged that layer in myself. I can’t say I’m a ball of fire though.
Do you think it’s a necessary component of your art?
Humans are designed to struggle. If we can’t find anything else to struggle with, we struggle with ourselves. Artists are humans, to their own exasperation.
Have you reached the point where you start considering what you’d like your legacy to be?
I’m part of the continuum. We all mulch down and are forgotten, like dead leaves. And from them grow all kinds of other plants. At best, we are a link between here and there. The culture lives on while the individuals melt away. I’m part of the musical & philosophical strand that originated in the 1960s with The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Maybe I’m the last one to hatch out.
I’d like to make people think, and make people feel. To be part of a seam of songwriting, of perceiving things.
Speaking of Dylan, do you listen to his new stuff?
Not much. His voice is not as attractive as it was, and he tends to garble his lyrics—which can still be great. He used to grab you—now you have to inch up to him and listen closely. But maybe in twenty years time I’ll love what he’s doing now. I’ve just about caught up with Time Out Of Mind.
You’ve frequently referenced the role Syd Barrett had in shaping you as an artist—and he’s often used as a touchstone when others attempt to describe your work. When did you begin to align yourself with him?
When I was about 18 I listened seriously to his second solo record and recognized something there that was in me but had been realized fully in him. Ironically, he was in the process of erasing himself; soon there would be no Syd, only Roger, his host body.
Did you ever feel like you were meant to finish what he started?
I would have loved to have carried on where he left off, but that road leads to a brick wall. So let’s just say that I work in the same vein as him.
Other than Dylan and Barrett, who or what are some of your more unexpected—or lesser known—influences?
Ray Davies, Martin Carthy, Philly soul, Jim Morrison, David Bowie and Bryan Ferry.
Last fall, you joined the Cape Farewell expedition, traveling to Greenland to see firsthand the effects of climate change. Did your experiences in Disko Bay lead you to change or reconsider any of aspects of your day-to-day life?
It emphasized certain things I knew already. It hasn’t made me a climate-change policy expert, but I am helping organize some Cape Farewell concerts at the London South Bank Centre in January. We all know what we should do but we’ll need a lot of help to do it. The money spent invading Iraq would have funded a lot of solar panels.
You’ve also had a habit of designing your album covers with your own original artwork. Do you still paint?
I don’t have time. Too many emails.
Is are there any other music-related things that you haven’t done yet that you still hope to do?
Many. If you could become multiple headed, you could take parallel and diverging roads. But you might not have many friends.
How do you spend your time when you’re not on the road?
Living.
Image via Michele Noach