Robyn Hitchcock: In Search Of The Holy Revolver

As long as popular music has been a concept, artists have struggled with a particular conundrum: the more singular they sound, the harder they are to market. Some try to solve the problem by shoehorning themselves into ill-fitting genres; others mangle adjectives into what they hope will become new ones.

But no one has been able to find an appropriately sticky label for Robyn Hitchcock. And he’s fine with that. After four decades of sonic output variously described as art-rock, psych-rock, pop-folk and surrealist (not to mention eccentric), the wry British expat still finds it easier to define his music by what it isn’t.

“You can’t dance to me,” the silver-haired, polka-dot-loving Nick Lowe lookalike notes cheerily, speaking from his Nashville home. “I’m kind of top-40 proof, and always have been.”

He definitely eschews inclusion under the “time-capsule” Americana umbrella.

“There’s a lot of great musicians playing in bars in East Nashville, and the thing they’re most likely to be playing is ‘Cortez The Killer.’ The year zero here is 1975; it’s like punk has yet to happen,” he jokes dryly. “But this is also because it’s an era in which musicianship flourished, rather than attitude.”

His formative influences hark back to when “all the glorious beasts that became classic rock began to stalk the earth”— among them Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Brian Wilson.

“You could just say that I write classic rock, but it’s actually new,” Hitchcock offers, then demurs, “I suppose that’s like saying, ‘Well, yes, he tries to paint like Vermeer, only it’s 300 years later.’ Not that I have that level of technical genius.”

Though one might be more tempted to align Hitchcock’s oeuvre — from his Soft Boys and Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians eras to his newest (and first self-titled) offering — as more akin to Donovan’s sun-drenched, acid-laced “elec-trical ba-na-na” pop-rock than Dylan’s acerbic folk, it’s the latter Hitchcock claims as one of his biggest influences. Besides the Beatles, of course.

Dylan made him think about being a musician, and in 2002, he released a double album of Dylan covers. But Hitchcock admits he would summarize his career thusly: “I’ve spent 40 years trying to make Revolver. And I will go out continuing on that quest.”

Then he suggests he does fit into a genre of sorts, a nameless one encompassing Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde, Pink Floyd’s The Piper At The Gates of Dawn, Small Faces, Traffic and XTC. Melodic music, made “below a certain volume … by people of a certain age.”

Whatever one calls it, Robyn Hitchcock is a fine example of what he does best: clever, sometimes whimsical, often humorous and, even when shadowed with dark undertones, frequently charming songs.

Produced by Brendan Benson and featuring Nashville friends including guitarist Annie McCue, bassist Jon Estes, drummer Jon Radford and harmony vocalists Gillian Welch, Grant Lee Phillips, Wilco’s Pat Sansone and Hitchcock’s partner, Emma Swift, it clips along crisply with witty, well-enunciated lyrics and enough variety to keep it intriguing.

One of its most amusing moments is “I Pray When I’m Drunk,” which seems to cross Johnny Cash with the Beatles’ version of  “Act Naturally.”

“Actually, I was thinking more of ‘Dr. Robert,’” he says. “It’s like a Beatles-Kinks backing track, but with Cash over the top.”

Though he made a point of sticking with electric guitar, Hitchcock plays a tweaked acoustic on “Mad Shelley’s Letterbox,” a musical version of alternative reality à la Alice In Wonderland. He also used pedal steel player Russ Pahl on a few tracks, including the trippy-sounding “Sayonara Judge.”

But perhaps the trippiest track is “Autumn Sunglasses,” which evokes that Revolver Holy Grail with a cello intro conjuring the tambura drone of “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It also references both Shakespeare’s Macbeth (“by the pricking of my thumbs”) and Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass.

“I’d never read Through The Looking Glass and found my father’s old copy of it,” Hitchcock explains. “I was between the Isle of Wight and Sydney, Australia, and I was actually living in a flat that Charles Darwin had lived in for a season.

“That bit of the Isle of Wight was a cultural center like 150 years ago. Tennyson lived up the road and Charles Dodgson — Lewis Carroll — came and stayed. And there are theories that he based some of the characters in Through The Looking Glass on some of the people that were in the Isle of Wight; possibly Tennyson’s in there. You know, the cultural circle.”

But he denies there’s any political intent behind the reference. Despite being extremely well-versed in world affairs and not shy about predicting, “The human being as it is, is too flawed to carry on much longer,” he explains, “I’m glad if I’ve managed to get a few of my thoughts or beliefs actually into my songs, but I always feel like songs have got a mind of their own. They don’t want to be saddled with your opinions.”

This article appears in the July/August 2017 edition, which hits newsstands July 11. You can read the July/August digital edition on americansongwriter.com here with a membership log-in. You can also purchase the iPad version in iTunes, and the Android-compatible version through Google play. Subscribe to the bimonthly print edition here.