Suburban  Chicago.  April 1985.  My life changed.

Peter Zaremba (of the Fleshtones) was hosting MTV’s The Cutting Edge, a weekly show devoted to persuading Americans to shun the Top 40 and instead embrace alternative music.  I was sitting in the stuffed, brown plaid chair in our den (the room with the plastic brick walls and gold shag carpeting), breathing in the fumes of the kerosene heater.  I remained sedate, eyes glued passively to the images on the television.   Then It happened.  One minute I was staring at Peter Zaremba’s handsome face, and the next I was trying to decipher what I thought I saw on the screen.  Was it a man?  Did he have a lightbulb head?  Was he really singing about masturbation?  The singer addressed my questions directly:  “I’m the man with the lightbulb head.  I turn myself on in the dark.”  I grew tingly.  Exhilarated.  This wasn’t the usual Cutting Edge-type video.  This wasn’t R.E.M. or Guadalcanal Diary.  This was Robyn Hitchcock. 

 

I went out the next day and bought Fegmania!, by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians.  My excitement grew as I listened to “Egyptian Cream,” “My Wife and My Dead Wife,” and, of course, “The Man with the Lightbulb Head.”  I became obsessed.  I bought more albums.  I went to concerts and saved the sweater upon which Robyn Hitchcock had dripped his holy sweat.  People began to think strange thoughts about me and ask questions about my odd behavior.  Why did I like this guy who sang about death, frogs, sex, religion, love, fish, and vegetables – sometimes all in one song?  Why didn’t I just listen to Van Halen like everyone else?  What the hell was wrong with me?

 

My response was, simply, what the hell was wrong with everyone else?

 

Hitchcockesque = Grotesque? 

Robyn Hitchcock’s first taste of semi-success in London’s music scene was in the late 1970s as the lead singer of The Soft Boys, a quirky punk band that attracted the attention of such notable musicians as Peter Buck.  After the Soft Boys broke up in 1980, Hitchcock decided to go solo, recording Black Snake, Diamond Role in 1981.   His obsession with the grotesque was evident from his days with the Soft Boys, but as a solo artist he was able to pursue actively his penchant for things that just weren’t quite right.   

 

In 1984, Hitchcock wrote and recorded thirteen songs for I Often Dream of Trains, a haunting album for which he played every instrument and sang every part.  The result is a brilliant composition that mixes his burgeoning skills as a versatile musician with his cynicism about life, fascination with death, and obsession with finding the absurd in everything.  The album is introduced by “Nocturne,” a beautiful prelude that belies the juxtaposition of extreme madness and luminous insight that is evident throughout each successive track.  The prelude leads immediately into the singer’s wish that he “was a pretty girl,” so he could (mumble) himself in the shower.  In later recordings of this song, Hitchcock replaces the unintelligible mumble with “shoot,” but on this album the listener is left questioning.

 

The confusion, though, establishes the appropriate mindset for listening to the rest of the album.  After the haunting “Cathedral” of the mind, in which “all the worshippers are blind,” we are startled by the upbeat, a cappella “Uncorrected Personality Traits,” a discussion of how early-established neuroses affect us as adults.   His preoccupation with childhood psycho-traumas continues in “Sounds Great When You’re Dead,” which leads to a list of horrible ways humans die in “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus,” a mock country song that questions the concept of Jesus (whose knights, by the way, look extremely tired for some reason).  The rest of the album retains the disturbing melancholic quality of the prelude.  The only exception is “Furry Green Atom Bowl,” another a cappella adventure that foreshadows Hitchcock’s style on subsequent albums with its circular discussion of the devil, meat, roots, vegetables, and eggs.

 

1985’s Fegmania!, Hitchcock’s first outing with the Egyptians, follows I Often Dream of Trains, but only chronologically.  The mood is definitely lighter, and the subject matter is more visual and bizarre.  In the bouncy first track “Egyptian Cream,” the main character loves to “smear [Egyptian Cream] everywhere -- on her face, and on her hands, until she feels like she’s a man.”  Eventually, though, the smearing causes hair to “grow all over her skin,” while “thousands of fingers grow out of the sand” upon which she rests (on an ironing board).   A highlight on the first side of Fegmania! is the aforementioned “My Wife and My Dead Wife,” an ode to the speaker’s late spouse who still takes tea and swims with him (and his current wife).  Another psychologically troubled character is “The Man with the Lightbulb Head,” who asks an unknown friend if she still dreams of bees and smears herself with jam.  We never know the answer, but we presume that the mere thought of those activities assists the speaker in turning himself on in the dark.  However, it is the seventh track, “Insect Mother,” that best helps define what is now referred to as “Hitchcockesque.”

 

Lift up your candle dress

Unweave your nylon spine

In velvet and in onions

You will soon be mine

I am your humble servant

Madam as you see

Tonight I am determined

You will lie along with me

 

You are an insect mother

With a black shiny head

That parts your cloak to open

Human you upon the bed

You are an insect mother

I your jammy son

And now we've found each other

There is nowhere else to run

And all to hope for offal

In home countries there we run

 

1985 also saw the release of Hitchcock’s first live album, Gotta Let This Hen Out, an important album in a number of ways.  First, listeners who had never had the opportunity to see Robyn Hitchcock live were given a small taste of Hitchcock’s stream-of-consciousness banter that often precedes, and sometimes interrupts, his songs.  Between “Acid Bird” and “The Cars She Used to Drive,” Hitchcock says:

 

Thanks.  That was about life in the west country before most of you were born and a long time after the rest of you were dead.  This is called, uh, “I suddenly found myself underneath a bucket but there was nobody else there except some cement so I went home wearing the wrong head.”

 

Hitchcock’s banter, usually much longer and more difficult to follow, was one aspect of his performance that attracted Jonathan Demme to film Storefront Hitchcock in 1998.   Before an Oscar-winning director discovered Hitchcock, though, his live album was accompanied by a film of concert footage mixed with music videos, most of which appear to have been shot with someone’s personal video camera and homemade props.  Despite its questionable production quality, the video is another reason Gotta Let This Hen Out is significant.  As already noted, Hitchcock’s songs are extremely visual, and the cheesy portrayal of such characters as “The Man with the Lightbulb Head” provides a disturbingly pleasurable image.

 

Finally, Gotta Let This Hen Out is the first of Hitchcock’s albums adorned with his own art.  The painting – hens, flying fish, morphed fish-hens, jellyfish, a duck, and several conical-spherical structures in water? – is a pastel rendering of an oddly serene future.  Subsequent albums include cover art and album sleeves featuring more of Hitchcock’s fantastic drawings of animal and vegetable life in various forms, and sometimes the art is coupled with even more fantastic stories. 

 

By the end of 1986, the songs on Robyn Hitchcock’s albums reflected his growing popularity on college radio stations around the country.  While still retaining many of the beautifully hideous images of previous recordings, his songs became slightly more accessible to the general public, a trend that continues today.  To compensate for the exclusion of the truly bizarre on his major-label albums, Hitchcock periodically releases collections of extra songs in which he holds back nothing.  The first of these collections was called Invisible Hitchcock, which featured “Eaten by Her Own Dinner,” “The Abandoned Brain,” the country version of “The Pit of Souls,” and plenty of references to the motifs commonly found in his early work (eggs, vegetables, sticky substances, death, cones, etc.)

 

Robyn Hitchcock has embraced the grotesque in his music since the early 1980s and has helped shape a generation of psychologically troubled individuals who dream of a world in which we will meet that man with the lightbulb head, smear him with Egyptian cream, and offer him “some meat in exchange for a good loaf of wax.”  It will be a world in which our obscured faces are surrounded by floating sea creatures and pleasant geometric shapes.  It will be a world in which death and eggs are celebrated as we make love to demons and loaves of bread.  In short, it will be paradise.

 

Elizabeth Renneisen

July 2004