Saw Robyn Hitchcock doing "Brenda's Iron Sledge" on Old Grey Whistle Test and took against it. Witnessed a support slot for R.E.M. in '87 and that sealed the aversion. Then I'd run into college rock types in America and be mystified by their veneration for his Eighties albums. Even hardheads like Forced Exposure - who usually disdained college radio lightweights like Let's Active - reckoned Robyn to be some sort of visionary.
But in recent years I have found myself warming to the honest way Hitchcock describes himself as a man out of time, an epigone, someone gleaning up in the wake of visionary pioneers. Viz his memoir part 1...
In a recent Guardian interview around his memoir part 2, Stranded in the Future, he says:
“Although my prime influence was Bob Dylan and Dylan showed me what I wanted to be, Syd Barrett showed me how I could be it. And I actually wound up sounding like John Lennon. To me, the Beatles are at the beginning and the end of everything. But my role has always just been to carry on a certain kind of music, which appeared in 66 and 67. My influences are all those old dead English blokes, basically....
"I didn’t invent this field of music, but I’ve perpetuated it. I wanted to maintain a tradition and do new work in that tradition. But the guys I worship were innovators. I’m the opposite. I’m sweeping up after them. It’s like, ‘Oh God, here comes Hitchcock with the broom.’”
That's admirably clear-eyed, isn't it?
About his Eighties success in America:
"It’s funny when people think of me as an 80s artist because I think of myself as a 60s artist. I literally am the last to hatch out, I think. I should be in a museum with Ron Wood. I was never actually a pop star. I was on MTV quite a lot in the States in the late 80s and early 90s, but that’s a long time back. I always manage to dodge the extreme limelight. You know, in some ways I’ve avoided both success and failure. It’s fantastic. And it’s always a bit of a shock when somebody identifies me. Mostly they think I’m Nick Lowe, which is great. But then occasionally people then think Nick is me. I’ve signed an autograph as Nick Lowe once or twice.”
I can feel myself relenting... actually considering listening to the solo albums.... perhaps even "Brenda's Iron Sledge" will get its second chance!
I will say, Hitchcock did record, with The Soft Boys, at least one stone classic. And it doesn't actually sound that 1967, it feels very much of whatever the year it was it came out.
Talking about wanting to destroy someone... over at Pantheon I discuss the mystery of a missing Soft Boys song, "The Lonesome Death of Ian Penman".
Going back to this idea of being an epigone, the honesty and even honour of accepting that you are a secondary artist, tilling terrain opened up by pioneers....
An intriguing thing that emerged in another recent Hitchcock interview, with Mojo, is that although he is an overtly psychedelic artist, he was relatively inexperienced with psychedelics:
“I hardly took any acid at all. I don’t think I need hallucinations. Sometimes I just feel I am one.”
That adds another dimension to the idea of being a "secondary artist". You skip a stage in the process...
Instead of "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to" - the mission statement and modus operandi of Spacemen 3 - you absorb it via the sonic encoding of hallucinatory experience in select Sixties recordings. The music is the drug.
In a piece on Rock and Self-Destruction in the new issue of Vice, I wonder the extent to which this was widely the case with the Still In A Dream groups...
A phrase I use in the book for the era is "a second psychedelia". But in quite a few cases, I imagine it was also a second-hand psychedelia.
Some of the groups were doing acid. For a few, harder drugs. Spacemen 3 energetically explored the whole pharmacopeia (Sonic Boom even experimented with chloroform!). But I'm guessing that a possibly surprising number were getting it indirect, vicariously, via the records and the records alone.
Prompted by the way the music was going, I got into using Sixties lingo in my writing - mind-blowing, kiss the sky, blissed out, far out, tripped out - for quite some time before I could answer Jimi's question in the affirmative...
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