Photo via Robyn Hitchcock - robynhitchock.com
Robyn Hitchcock
Robyn Hitchcock
Starting an interview with Robyn Hitchcock, I tell him about the last time I saw him.
A few years ago, I was doing my radio show on WMSE, and Hitchcock came into the studio without me noticing it was him. He was to do an interview after my show to promote a performance that night in Milwaukee. At some point, I ventured into the office on the way to the restroom to find him fast asleep in a chair and no one else around. Is that, is that Robyn Hitchcock? He’s tall. Holy crap. Quite an unusual, though certainly happy, surprise to find a musical legend knocked out and dreaming a few feet from you.
Hitchcock, who plays the Vivarium on Friday, June 6, says he always tries to “have a snooze” before his performances.
“It sort of drains the toxins from the brain,” he says. “There’s something about being awoken that is refreshing. It helps me perform, I think. I really like to have a fresh head before I perform yet.”
Why Slow Down Now?
Even for non-performing reasons, you can’t blame the 72-year-old musician for needing a regular nap considering how busy he stays. In addition to concerts, the ever-prolific Hitchcock is constantly writing and recording new songs, some of which end up as bonus material for subscribers to his Patreon.
He’s also started writing regular Substack posts, began as a way to promote his book from last year: 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left (Akashic Books).
“The book is simply about me turning 14 in a sort of esoteric British boarding school,” Hitchcock says, “and all the various characters that surround me, a lot of whom are very much what Americans think Brits are, you know, sort of eccentric perverts and lonely old maids and sort of mad colonels and all the rest of it, coupled up with some very bright kids who run into and befriend a young Brian Eno, who is a student at the local art school. So, we experience the sort of Eno, the Eno mindset before the rest of the world does. And this all happened in ‘67.
“Meanwhile, all this incredible music's coming out. And the book starts with me being 13 in 1966 and discovering Bob Dylan. And you know, you’ve got Revolver coming out, and all those great records that I’ve lived in the shadow of, or aimed for and missed, you know, however you want to see it. So, it’s about the origins of me as a songwriter, why I became a songwriter.”
Recording With His Wife
It was his wife, Emma Swift, who suggested Hitchcock focus his memoir on just one year. He and Swift do an internet music show, Live from Tubby’s House, most Wednesdays at 8 p.m. CST. They also run their own record label, Tiny Ghost Records, which has released their individual work and work together. A new reissue of the Soft Boys classic, Underwater Moonlight, is also coming on the label.
Hitchcock was in the middle of recording an album with Swift in Los Angeles when reached for the interview. He says the songs he and Swift are recording are mostly songs he has written, but Swift “customizes them.”
“They could come out with very different phrasing and words changed here and there. And, you know, she’s a great editor,” he says. “So, they would appear quite different, in some cases, to how I originally demoed them.”
The recording process is causing him to “up his game,” specifically his vocals, which he describes as one of those loud, rock’n’roll voices that “cuts through lousy PA systems.” Swift has a beautiful, much more emotional voice, Hitchcock says.
“You know, I’ve got that sort of sarcastic British rock’n’roll attitude in my voice, which is great for some things, but not everything really,” he says.
“I’ve always thought of myself as a performer first and a singer second, really as a songwriter first,” Hitchcock adds. “I mean, I don’t even think of myself as that much of a singer, but I haven’t covered quite a lot of songs over the years, so I’m still trying to sing and learning to sing, you know.”
Living in America
Since 2015, Hitchcock and Swift, who is originally from Australia, have lived in Nashville (mostly – they returned to London for a while during the pandemic).
Hitchcock says he loves the city and hopes to continue living there despite the unprecedented changes that have occurred in the country since President Trump took office in January.
“I think it depends, as long as it’s, you know, politically survivable,” he says, “because we don’t really know what's going to happen now, because things are basically out of control. We no longer have we no longer have the rule of law, and it’s hard to know quite how the domino effect of fascism is going to play out. Will it affect people like us or not? Will it affect everybody? Yes, I love it in Nashville. I would definitely stay there indefinitely, but who knows.
“I'm used to having to move around, as long as Emma and I can stay together and take the cats with us. You know, we just hope wherever we go is congenial.”
Customizing the Past
On his Substack, Hitchcock wrote of being in Los Angeles and his first visit to the city in June 1985: “Los Angeles, to me, was truly noirer than noir. Raymond Chandler and Jim Morrison had mapped it out long before I arrived: the stronger the sunlight, the darker the shadows. The lonesome cravings of the spectral bliss-hound, barking by the tomb of the extinct pharaohs. You know that dog, Medusa: you had his image on your keyring, next to the pyramid eye. The little girl in the Hollywood bungalow, dead or alive: you were her once, weren’t you?”
Hitchcock says he enjoys writing about his past and explaining things more than he did earlier in his career. In his book and on Substack and Patreon, he tries to share stories he believes people want, but he knows not everyone involved has the same view of what happened.
“Inevitably your view of what happened is subjective, and you customize your past in a way that helps you live with it. You know, you can’t really live with yourself if you think you’re the major villain in everything. Nor can you really live happily if you’re constantly blaming everybody else for what’s happened. You know that makes you bad company.
“So, you have to kind of find a way of, yes, let’s call it customizing your past, even if you’re not going to tell other people about it. I, being a visual person, and somebody who likes stories and movies, that’s what I'm doing. I’m just making it a bit more exotic.”
Robyn Hitchcock performs at 8 pm. Friday, June 6 at the Vivarium, 1818 N. Farwell Avenue.
