When the punk rock era sought to tear them to pieces, Robyn Hitchcock held onto the hems of Dylan’s, Lennon’s, Sid Barrett’s, and David Bowie’s garments and wove them all together into something of his own. By 1976, his band was called The Soft Boys, a William S. Burroughs-derived name more subtle than the inviolable rage of pistols, clashes, slits, stranglers, or damned near anything to do with no future, year zero orthodoxy.
Hitchcock’s stand against convention was a different beast altogether, becoming a fixture into his solo career. His own brand of alienation was much weirder, more angular, and certainly as potent as the best of his peers. In songs about trams, food, insects, land masses, and ghosts, listeners find the raw stuff of human experience: bewilderment, ecstasy, and utter absurdity when contemplating what it is to be alive. Here are twenty great Robyn Hitchcock songs to consider out of a prolific and uniquely rewarding catalogue to illustrate that.
***
I Wanna Destroy You
Sounding like the angriest peace and love anthem ever written, Hitchcock’s highest profile song with The Soft Boys from 1980’s Underwater Moonlight carried the Spirit of Seventy-Seven into a new post-punk frontier. More akin to The Byrds than to Bauhaus, The Soft Boys crafted a specialized brand of refitted Sixties psychedelia instead. This was unfashionable during punk’s heyday, but became something of a stylistic slow burn in the dawning 1980s.
They delivered “I Wanna Destroy You” into a world thrust into another refurbished 1960s movement; the Cold War and the pernicious interests behind it — worthy targets to see destroyed if there ever were any. Achieving cult status, its sound inspired a new generation of angry and bright guitar bands, that description as indicative of the musicians as their music. This certainly included R.E.M. with whom Hitchcock would later tour and subsequently collaborate.
Listen: I Wanna Destroy You
Brenda’s Iron Sledge
Employing a kind of Eastern European surf guitar riff to kick it off, “Brenda’s Iron Sledge” defies you to make sense of it as it careens down a sonic slope. This cut is like a theme song to the visceral sensations of being alive; disorientation, fragility, and the rush of passing time as it’s felt in one’s bones, tumbling toward who knows where.
Featured on 1981’s Black Snake Diamond Role, Robyn Hitchcock with The Soft Boys who appear here in all but name lay down a thumping groove to accompany the hurtling imagery and tonal juxtapositions of humour and brutality. Its odd, wonderful rhymes (“please don’t call me Reg …”) capture the essence of what a life can sometimes feel like — out of one’s control. It’s absurd, shocking, and hilarious all at once. What better way to frame humanity’s lot in life?
Listen: Brenda’s Iron Sledge
Trams of Old London
Capturing his imagination since he was a child, the shape and design of trams and buses feature prominently in Robyn Hitchcock’s songwriting and artwork. “Trams of Old London” taken from 1984’s I Often Dream of Trains is a prime example while also being love letter to Hitchcock’s native London; the familiar environs of his upbringing when his imagination became ignited by that city’s symbols and its myth.
As angular and surreal his material would be elsewhere, this one is a celebration of the familiar places and things that provide a center of spiritual gravity. Hitchcock captures a Lennonesque quality in a stripped back arrangement that poignantly reveals the affection for treasures long gone and what it is to be passionate and sad about a place and its accouterments. As always, this is expressed in romantic but never hackneyed terms.
Listen: Trams of Old London
My Wife and My Dead Wife
The emotional complexity of human relationships provides songwriters with seemingly endless prompts to craft tales of conflict, heartbreak, and the inability to move on when it’s time. Very few songs capture these deeply felt human experiences in quite the same way as “My Wife and My Dead Wife”, a song that is a marriage between Scary Monsters-era David Bowie and the farcical charm of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit.
In addition to the compelling and highly amusing (and British!) narrative, the song featured on 1985’s Fegmania! is a musical delight, complete with a ghostly singing saw to reference the dead wife upstairs, still wearing flares. As lighthearted as it is, the song is a masterclass in examining the human tendency to cling to the past, carrying the longing and regret that often goes along with that to the detriment of one’s present life.
Listen: My Wife and My Dead Wife
Airscape
Drawing on his love for Revolver-era Beatles, Hitchcock’s “Airscape” from 1986’s Element of Light with the Egyptians captures the suggestion of its title — a flight of fancy that dances on the very element it namechecks. It’s also a celebration of England as a physical place, those landscapes built upon buried and submerged eras and their people. Here, it’s all still present as one exercises the imagination to conjure them.
This song suggests the ephemeral nature of human lives contrasted by our ability to transcend them as we recognize beauty, commonality, and connection in the world, even in erosion and decay. In addition to Hitchcock’s jangling and sometimes backward guitar, bassist Andy Metcalfe lays down supportive countermelodies while drummer Morris Windsor provides the percussive accents on this, one of Robyn Hitchcock’s most joyous and life-affirming songs.
Listen: Airscape
Raymond Chandler Evening
Known for his skill in providing alternate routes to exploring common themes, Hitchcock’s “Raymond Chandler Evening” telegraphs images that are all about feelings, not about what each word means. This cut from Element of Light is a rainy night musing that suggests the pulp novel traditions of the titular author, while conveying the desolation and loneliness outside of those literary traditions as a noir of the heart.
Hitchcock’s arpeggiated guitar cascades like rain down a drainpipe, supported by Andy Metcalfe’s warm bass keyboard solo that suggests a meandering excursion of a mind left to wander during a night’s downpour. This is one of those songs that’s over too soon, having created a mood and atmosphere that one could live in for much longer than its two-minute-and-change running time allows. While it lasts, its introspection provides comforting company.
Listen: Raymond Chandler Evening
Balloon Man
By 1988’s Globe of Frogs album with the Egyptians, Robyn Hitchcock’s influence on the musical landscape was much easier to spot. The jangly Sixties-influenced psych-pop of the Bangles was well in the mainstream by then, as was the aforementioned R.E.M. Bands like Grant Lee Buffalo would follow in the Nineties. In the meantime, this song won Hitchcock and the Egyptians some recognition on college radio in the US.
This surreal story-song has Hitchcock’s musical signature all over it; a pop-jangle-meets-country-stomp concoction with American references thrown in that contrast Hitchcock’s unabashedly English voice. Written with the Bangles in mind, “Balloon Man” is grotesque in places and delightful in its execution to make it effervescently weird and charming. This tune just shimmers with joyful energy and spirit. What more do you want from a pop single?
Listen: Balloon Man
Madonna of the Wasps
Love of the idealized feminine has been part of folk storytelling for centuries, the beauty and grandness of womanhood being a source of consternation as much as ardour. Not many songwriters express these themes in such Kafkaesque terms. Hitchcock’s imagery is potent if not conventional in suggesting that love, like nature, can be as alienating as it is awe inspiring where beauty and danger so often meet.
A highlight from 1989’s Queen Elvis album, Peter Buck from R.E.M. contributes his trademark guitar lines to one of Robyn Hitchcock’s greatest love songs, rooted in uncertainty about what love really means, especially when it seems so far removed. On “Madonna of the Wasps”, the question hangs in the air, even if the bright and ebullient music suggests wonderment and ecstasy instead of the great gulf between the lowly drone narrator and his Queen.
Listen: Madonna of the Wasps
Glass Hotel
Characterized by pristine acoustic guitar reminiscent of crystals forming in complex and beautiful patterns before our eyes, this song from 1990’s Eye reveals Hitchcock’s love of late-Sixties and early-Seventies Joe Boyd-produced chamber-folk. It demonstrates his ability to capture that same melancholic wistfulness with a whole new array of textures lent to his most dreamlike and reflective song.
“Glass Hotel” seems like (seems like …) a series of perceptions of a single moment, like snapshots taken from different angles, each one true or false depending on where one stands. Hitchcock performed this for Jonathan Demme’s 1998 concert film Storefront Hitchcock, with at least three points of view represented during the performance — live audience, passers-by from the street, and those viewing the film — bringing this theme of relative perception within the complexity of single moments to life in a live setting.
Listen: Glass Hotel
So You Think You’re in Love
By 1991’s Perspex Island, Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians had been signed to A&M records for three years. This is was during a golden period when major record labels had no idea what the sure-fire formula for success was in the wake of R.E.M and, later, Nirvana. This motivated them to sign interesting artists almost by accident. Even so, “So You Think You’re in Love” is an explosion of pop accessibility, ringing with rapturous, Rickenbacker bliss.
This is another of Hitchcock’s great love songs, exploring how human beings never know what they’re getting into when it comes to love. If we did from the outset, we might never consider it at all. In this, human experience can be understood by our tendency to plow ahead anyway. Are we sure that it’s wise? Well, it probably ain’t. But it feels so good.
Listen: So You Think You’re in Love
The Yip! Song
Leaning into his tendency for vivid juxtaposed imagery, “The Yip! Song” from 1993’s Respect references Britain’s dark history, prominently namechecking singer Vera Lynn who once soothed a ravaged wartime generation of the 1940s. This is contrasted by the psychobilly chug laid down by the Egyptians that make this an exuberant and terrifying rush of fear, jubilation, relief, and any combination in between.
Hitchcock’s song is both playful and tense, seething with the effects of war on the course of a life even decades after. Harrowing images set inside a children’s rhyme structure create a tension between innocence and experience, jocularity and grief, in one of his most personally cathartic songs. With his father dying at the time, the emotional complexities of Hitchcock’s situation that are impossible to examine intellectually become better expressed by the crash of drums, guitars, and yips instead.
Listen: The Yip! Song
I Feel Beautiful
After somewhat of a hiatus period broken up by 1996’s introspective, stripped back, and Egyptian-less Moss Elixir album, Hitchcock returned with 1999’s excellent Jewels for Sophia. A shining jewel among jewels, “I Feel Beautiful” is the down-in-the-soil love song of bruised experience, sparkling with Hitchcock’s own acoustic strum and shimmering electric guitar, accompanied by Jon Brion’s ghostly marxophone and gentle marimba.
As before, the intricacies of nature are the vehicles for communicating the meaning of love. With lives as seemingly brief as mayflies and dragonflies, love is a miracle to a grateful heart that never expected to feel worthy of it and contented in it ever again. This gratitude is mixed with an overwhelmed feeling of being in the paws of an enormous beast, the actions of which being hard to predict. This makes “I Feel Beautiful” uniquely poignant in its honesty.
Listen: I Feel Beautiful
The Cheese Alarm
Starting as a pan-cultural sonic collage, “The Cheese Alarm” from Jewels for Sophia spills out into a fuzzy, psychedelic fever dream, with shapes, colours, and textures of several cheesy comestibles dancing in a chorus line as Hitchcock names his favourites with urgent, childlike grandeur. Yet this song is political, with simple and comforting indulgences enjoyed by one world living alongside the knowledge of scarcity that’s a grim reality for another.
This song is appropriately blissful and troubled. It’s a celebration of food and of appetite. But it also nods to the problematic dynamics of two sets of truths occupying a single mind, one joyful and the other sobering. The contrast between an unabashed love of something as it meets an awareness of guilty feelings that impact that love provides a sombre undercurrent to this otherwise hilarious and musically vital paean to cheese.
Listen: The Cheese Alarm
Daisy Bomb
“Daisy Bomb from 2000’s A Star for Bram serves as a resolution in the love-is-a-volatile-substance trilogy of songs, joining “Madonna of the Wasps” and “So You Think You’re in Love”. Here, there’s an unabashed embrace love’s uncontrollable and even unknowable nature, inexpressible to another person outside of the chaos of an explosion as it’s felt in a heart. Sometimes, even that is not enough to communicate its impact and import.
This quality is what makes it yet another of Robyn Hitchcock’s greatest love songs, tackling a theme that’s so well-travelled in pop songwriting by finding an alternate route to examine it. That’s always been one of the key characteristics and greatest strengths of his work; his exploration of key forces that drive the human heart which are deeper, weirder, riskier, and more lifegiving than we thought, best captured in imagery and metaphor that’s kinetic and vital.
Listen: Daisy Bomb
Television
Connecting with his friends Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Robyn Hitchcock recorded a spare acoustic album with them in 2003, simply titled Spooked. This cut is a highlight, opening with a disarmingly syllabic intro that belies the song’s themes of alienating and destructive mass media as a vector to loneliness. By now, “television” easily swapped for “social media”.
With Welch and Rawlings in support, this is no po-faced rant about the disruptive nature of mass media and our susceptibility to its effects. Instead, it expresses the cry for love and connection that lies at the heart of every person otherwise dehumanized by artificial social dynamics that separate us. As such, this is less a missive about the deleterious effects of too much screen time. Instead, it’s a call to compassion for those who get lost in the noise so easily.
Listen: Television
NY Doll
A singular addition to the Hitchcockian catalogue, “NY Doll” appears on 2006’s excellent Olé Tarantula with a line-up of renowned musicians including R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Bill Rieflin of Ministry, and The Minus 5’s Scott McCaughey; the band dubbed The Venus 3. This song is a tender eulogy to New York Dolls bassist Arthur Kane who died suddenly in 2004 of previously undiagnosed leukemia.
Hitchcock sings as Kane as the former New York Doll reflects on the forces that determined his path. This approach eschews the sensationalism often employed when expounding on the troubled lives of rock stars. Instead, “NY Doll” is a uniquely humanizing portrait of the man behind the image, expressed in a way that perhaps only another rock star is capable. As one of Robyn Hitchcock’s most compassionate, empathetic, and poignant songs, its affection shines through.
Listen: NY Doll
Hurry for the Sky
Featured on 2009’s Goodnight, Oslo with the Venus 3, “Hurry for the Sky” finds Hitchcock and the band exploring a “Ghost Riders in the Sky” meets Blonde on Blonde-style chug. The result is a cosmic cowboy song that suggests career stress and money troubles, bearing down on Dylanesque musical landscapes before finishing with a Beatles ending.
The usual tumble of lyrics that set the imagination reeling are here, with a lucid gem of a statement that both centers and transforms the whole; you can easily confuse money for success. It might be the rootsy American musical idiom in which it’s placed, often inclusive of folky aphorisms and advice like this. But among all of the imagery of Pharoah’s tombs and hectoring anthropomorphic numbers, maybe the takeaway is a simple slow down and don’t be in such a rush, son.
Listen: Hurry for the Sky
Ordinary Millionaire
Musically referencing the late Sixties folk-rock that influenced them both, “Ordinary Millionaire” from 2010’s Propeller Time is a co-write with guitarist Johnny Marr who wrote the music to Hitchcock’s lyrics. Like “Glass Hotel”, this is a song concerned with perceptions as individual puzzle pieces to an image that we’re never sure will complete a picture that anyone can agree on.
This is a compelling song which may or may not reflect its author’s relationship to his audience. Who are we to our heroes and us to them, putting them in a spotlight as if they aren’t like us in the most fundamental of ways? Is anyone we hold as images and avatars in our minds the real person? No. But, if not, who is? Within these strange and artificial dynamics, to say one is only human becomes a more complicated question.
Listen: Ordinary Millionaire
Death and Love
Matching Bryan Ferry synth sophistication coupled with Hitchcock’s beloved psychedelic jangle, “Death and Love” is a heady “be gentle with my heart” song. A high point of 2013’s Love from London and near enough to Hitchcock’s sixtieth birthday, this is another song of contented gratitude in the spirit of “I Feel Beautiful”, with another very respectful nod to mortality.
Ecstatic beauty and unavoidable doom inform the love between people who speak the same language. In this, listeners are reminded that the most important things in our lives help us mark our time and that the impact we make on each other’s hearts give shape to our existence, with love and beauty we create soon to pass with us one day. While we’re here, why not be gentle with all hearts as we try to get a better understanding of ourselves and of each other?
Listen: Death and Love
I Want to Tell You About What I Want
Kicking off 2017’s later-career masterpiece of a self-titled record, “I Want to Tell You What I Want” is as direct as can be expected from a songwriter who has expressed his worldview through an array of funhouse mirrors. This one is just as vivid and visceral as anything from The Soft Boys onward. But there is more here to love that’s come with greater maturity.
What is also present are some clearly outlined goals for society that are as true to the song’s title as it is possible to be: a fair world characterized by a connection to our own feelings and to those of others, free of dogma of any kind that lock us into cruel economies. This is of course before we concede our place in the world to the inevitable feline dynasty. Hey, it wouldn’t be Hitchcock without that, right?
Listen: I Want to Tell You About What I Want
***
Runners up and bubbling under:
- City of Shame
- Heartful of Leaves
- I Often Dream of Trains
- The Man with the Lightbulb Head
- Autumn is Your Last Chance
- I’m Only You
- Chinese Bones
- Queen Elvis
- You and Oblivion
- Filthy Bird
- NASA Clapping
- 1974
- No, I Don’t Remember Guildford
- I Saw Nick Drake
- Underground Sun
- Sixteen Years
- Primitive
- Stupified
- Autumn Sunglasses
- Shufflemania!
***
Common themes in pop songs — love, loneliness, fear, lust, rage, mourning — are rich planting grounds from which to harvest insights about the human experience. Many songs that touch on them are easily digested. Others come in weirder shapes because conventional language cannot serve them.
In them, wasps and flying ants fill the air instead of doves and bluebirds. They’re funnier, murkier, and more jarring because sometimes life is, too, with a truth to them that cannot be arrived at in any other way. This is the corner of pop’s pumpkin patch where Robyn Hitchcock tills the soil.
Learn more about Robyn Hitchcock at robynhitchcock.com.
Also, check out tinyghostrecords for merch and releases.
