The Surrealist Next Door

About Last Night and Days of Future Past

I have been a fan of Robyn Hitchcock since the 1976-1977 school year, when I was doing a term abroad at Trinity College, Cambridge University in England. His band, The Soft Boys made a kind of music that aligned with my particular sense of humor, and entertained me in the “it’s got a beat you can dance to” vein, except for me, it was “it’s got jangly and angry, angular guitars and surrealism;” Magritte meets Syd Barrett with a soupcon of Lennon/McCartney at their most rock & roll. The Soft Boys were at once past and future; they drew upon their influences, played them back with added weirdness, and equal parts respect/homage and transformation. Plus they had the balls to cover John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey.” They didn’t release an album for a couple years after I’d seen them play, but when I saw it in the import bin at the hip record shop where I worked in California, I was thrilled. I couldn’t afford to buy most imports, but I did get to play it during my shift!

1976/77 was as vibrant and eclectically electric time of neo-psychedelia and punk having simultaneously explosive bursts into a music scene just a little tired of straight-forward pop and rock music. It will be no mystery that a Venn Diagram of the artists and their influences, influencers, influenced, and friends form a chain of bubbles around the British Invasion and American garage rock. But where did all the whimsy come from?

Robyn Hitchcock answered that question last night, and if you weren’t there, the answer is in his newly published memoir, 1967.

Robyn Hitchcock reading from 1967 at Parnassus Books, July 18, 2024

Since I’ve yet to dive into Robyn’s memoir, this post is sharing my memories of him and his music over the decades. But you can count on me coming back to discuss his book and its associated album (due for release in September).

My punk rock self cleaves to the Soft Boys song “I Wanna Destroy You.” I think the reason I instantly loved The Psychedelic Furs’ 1981 break-out single, “Pretty In Pink” is that its whole vibe was a sideways love song version of 1980’s “I Wanna Destroy You;” both songs used chiming power chords in a pop way to deliver a message not exactly in line with the lovely, lilting English accents of their erudite singers. I have to thank Bob Dylan for influencing both Robyn Hitchcock and Richard Butler. (fast forward, in case you didn’t know, Robyn recorded a cover of the Furs' “The Ghost in You.” )

“I Wanna Destroy You” came on to my radar at the same time the Republic National Convention did in the Summer of 1980. I vowed then if Reagan was elected, I would promptly leave the United States. He was, and so I left. For England. But until the results came in November, The Soft Boys gave me a refrain for the Summer of 1980.

By the mid-1980s, I was splitting my time between England and the USA. Still based in Los Angeles, some of the highlights of concert-going always included Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians. There’s a show they did at Club Lingerie in the Summer of 1985 that is indelibly etched in my mind - the show that everyone attended, the show when the band was on-point, the show where I bought the t-shirt, the show that had the best “function at the junction,” which was the term my friends and I used for the backstage after-party.

I moved to NYC in time for another presidential election. Reagan’s VP, George HW Bush was running to continue the GOP reign, and the Democrats nominated Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis to run against him. Buoyed again by “I Wanna Destroy You,” I stayed in the US. (you know the results; you now know why “I Wanna Destroy You is on just about every mix tape and playlist I have put together since 1980.)

Ten years on, my friend, the late, great filmmaker Jonathan Demme, also a fan of Robyn’s, organized a live show in a storefront on NYC’s 14th St., which he filmed and released as STOREFRONT HITCHCOCK. Instead of covering the window that looked out on the street, the foot traffic of 14th St. became a background character. It’s been many years since I saw the finished film; I remember more the entire live show and how back then, Robyn chatted and told stories for as much time during his set as he played music. He always tells whimsical, absurd but completely topical stories, which, if you click on the STOREFRONT HITCHCOCK link above, you’ll end up at YouTube, and that clip keeps rolling on to more STOREFRONT clips. Hear the surreal stories with your own ears!

Not unlike the French surreal/imagist poet, Gerard de Nerval, Robyn has a penchant for lobsters. Nerval’s friend Guillaume Appollinaire (another Surrealist) wrote about it too (which is how we know about it).

Robyn Hitchcock & lobsters?? During the lockdown timeline of COVID, Robyn and Emma Swift entertained their house-bound fans in weekly streamed unplugged performances from their home that included appearances of their cats and stuffed animals, like Perry the Lobster. Time-wise, however, just before COVID was declared a pandemic, Nashville, where I live and as do Robyn & Emma (at the time, we were neighbors - their house was maybe a 30 second walk out my back gate and across a street), was struck by a tornado - this area historically has been a tornado target it seems.

On March 3 (which is Robyn’s birthday), a tornado swept through metropolitan Nashville, including our neighborhood of East Nashville. The Nashville death toll was 5, and at least two of those were people who worked at an East Nashville bar. Robyn and Emma staged a fundraiser through a live stream platform, and a couple weeks later, when the whole world was locked down, they continued. They helped us through that plague.

Robyn, Emma, their cat Tubby and below, Robyn introduces Perry the Lobster

What Robyn said during his reading at Parnassus Books about living in Nashville is spot-on. There is a lot of music here, and a considerable population of musicians. You see them in your daily life. It’s always exciting to run into a neighbor backstage at a concert here, especially when that neighbor is a musician whose work you love, and you’re both at a show of another musician you both love.

In 2015, I ran into Robyn at the Elvis Costello show at Ascend Ampitheatre. Elvis & The Imposters were opening for Steely Dan. If Steely Dan is headlining, there’s no need to SEE them, as they sound EXACTLY as they do on their recordings, so I spent the entirety of the time after Elvis’s set visiting with the Imposters and my friends who were also there. But for a moment, let me say a couple things about the set. As the opener, it was a short 14 songs of “hits.” As usual, Elvis closed with “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding.” His rendition of this Nick Lowe composition never fails to move me, and in August of 2015, when the buffoon “billionaire” Donald Trump decided he was running for President and had begun unleashing his brand of venality on the world, “Peace, Love and Understanding” was the balm we needed.

I digress, but not really. Backstage, chatting with Robyn, he was accosted by a dame (his words) who insisted he was Elvis. Robyn said something like, no, it’s the glasses. She continued to insist, to which he replied he was often mistaken for Nick Lowe, and that name went completely over her head (ironically, in Music City). I joined the chat and said, “Actually, he’s the Man With the Lightbulb Head.” At least with that, she wandered on her merry way!

And then we posed for a surrealist photo (fruit was involved).

As always, these posts/memories are sketches for my memoir. Robyn’s music has been a comfort and an inspiration to me for decades, and I am fortunate to have shared some fun times in his presence. Yes, there are more stories to come. But for now, his memoir is our assignment for book club!