ROBYN HITCHCOCK | INTERVIEW
Ruth Seavers talks to cult hero of British psychedelic rock ahead of a rare date in Cardiff.
Robyn Hitchcock first reached prominence in the late 1970s with psychedelic folk-rock band The Soft Boys. Their album Underwater Moonlight is now considered a psych classic of its time and marker of the genre’s era, influencing bands such as The Stone Roses, the Pixies and REM. Breaking up shortly after the 1980 album, Robyn went out on his own.
“It’s the same genre as whatever the Beatles were playing in 1968,” he says now. “Folk’n’roll? Psychedelic music hall?” He’s brought this surrealist slant with him into his personal work still: Hitchcock stands alone as everlastingly imaginative and alternative.
It’s anxiety that drives him to create, he says. Perhaps to extract inner demons and morph them into something relatable and creative. Speaking of his father, Hitchcock junior’s reasons sound similar. “My father was an artist, then a writer, so my male role model was a self-absorbed stay-at-home guy. He was always in the other room, painting or writing. I used to imagine that I’d walk into his studio and he’d be a skeleton, sitting at the easel. He probably felt like that himself, poor man. Before he was wounded in WWII he’d been quite athletic…”
Robyn himself is also a painter, his artwork surreal and provocative. Each is very different but there seems to be a thematic style. “Back to my father,” he says, “Raymond Hitchcock. My first memories of him were him coming home from his day-job as a communications engineer and working on his paintings in the room next to where I was drifting off to sleep. He conjured up primitive, slightly scary cartoon worlds, maybe processing his wartime experiences… but also populated with wedding scenes, wild animals, creepy moonshine, and odd, aloof women sitting as still as crockery on a barbed landscape. So I guess I’m just carrying on the family tradition, in my own style…”
He thanks his father also for his admirably high output of work. “Words and pictures flowed out of him. When he died he had two unfinished novels on his bed, one which he scrawled till he could no longer hold a pen.”
His home now, though, is Nashville airport. “My tendrils stretch around the world – I’m based in Tennessee currently, but I still have a life in Britain, plus close friends in Australia and Norway.” (His wife, country singer Emma Swift, is Australian.) The travelling is the hardest thing about being a musician: “The travel to performance ratio is about 10-to-one – I never thought I’d spend so much time in airports, especially as a kindly old pensioner.”
His biggest following is in the States, simply because of its sheer vastness. “It’s a big place,” he says. “There’s a lot of everything – good and bad. Nashville is rich with musicians so I see a lot of performers. The Americana seam of music is quite old-fashioned: like it’s 1975 and punk has yet to happen.”
Cardiff will be where his European tour climaxes. And he has fond memories of being in and around Wales; “My mum’s family were from the Forest Of Dean, just over the border in England. I first went to Cardiff on a bus from Chepstow, in 1964, to look for single-deck trolleybuses. They were very rare, so to an 11-year-old bus spotter they were worth traveling two hours to spot. That afternoon I glimpsed a depot full of these single-deckers, pulsating like wasps in the shadows. Soon after they were taken out of service; by 1972 the trolleybus in Britain was extinct. Cardiff actually still has a couple, in mausoleums, if you know where to look.”
And his friend Charlie Francis has an attic studio in Cardiff. “He’s worked on a lot of my 21st century records there, overdubbing and mixing. Steve the seagull screams in the garden. They’re demanding creatures, seagulls: if they grew just a little bigger, they’d be a menace.”
Robyn Hitchcock, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Wed 30 Oct. Tickets: £16.50. Info: 029 2023 2199 / www.clwb.net