Influenced by punk rock and Pink Floyd, English songwriter and guitarist Robyn Hitchcock has carved out an enviable career as a cult artist, from The Soft Boys in the late 1970s through last year's Olé! Tarantula, recorded with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and Young Fresh Fellows' Scott McCaughey. Hitchcock's recent work still ranks among the best of his career, but this year, he's also playing archivist with I Wanna Go Backwards, a new box set covering three of his critically best-regarded solo albums—Black Snake Diamond Role, I Often Dream Of Trains, and Eye—plus a two-disc rarities compilation, While Thatcher Mauled Britain. Another set covering his albums with backing band The Egyptians is slated for 2008, as well as another new album with most of the Tarantula crew. Hitchcock recently talked with The A.V. Club about the death of the album, new and old songs, "quirkiness," and why Seattle is Hitchcock's favorite U.S. city.
Robyn Hitchcock: Have you heard [the songs on the box set] yet?
The A.V. Club: Digital streaming of the albums, yes, but not the rarities discs.
RH: There's so much of everything, really. But that's what it is, it's an archive. It's one of those things—when you're a kid, you don't burrow out of your hole and get your little fingers on a box set and gleefully drop the needle on Disc 1 and sit there rapt until the end, 16 sides later. So I don't know whether anyone will listen to this all the way through. I certainly haven't. I suppose it's just there in storage.
AVC: At an in-store performance you played in Minneapolis in 2004, you introduced several of the songs by saying, "Here's another one that's out of print." It must be a pretty good feeling to have the albums coming out again.
RH: That's a good point. I suppose that's the last time this is going to happen, because next time, it won't be a physical matter. When these deals expire in seven years' time or something, there won't be, as far as we know, compact discs and things coming out. So no one's going to come up to me in 10 years' time and say, "how about putting out Element of Light with some bonus tracks." It's probably there on the 'net anyway, if you want to burn it.
AVC: Do you think that the idea of the album is dying, that maybe in 10 or 15 years, we won't even talk about an artist's output in terms of a discrete collection of 10 or so songs?
RH: Well, it only appeared to begin with because science and technology gave us the long-player. Somebody said in about 1946, "Oh, look, we don't just have to have these two-sided Bakelite discs. We can have one symphony on two sides, or 10 jazz cuts, or 10 blues tunes." And so the LP was there. The single was a thing that drew people to buying the LP; the LP was a store of tunes. In the world that made money, I guess the LPs were sold on the basis of singles, but what really mattered were the singles, because the best tracks were always singles. That's how it was when I was first listening to records, 40 years ago. And then the psychedelic revolution happened, and people started making music that was seen as a whole LP's worth. It was no good just getting one song.
The Beatles very deliberately made no bands [between songs] on Sgt. Pepper. If you looked closely, you could just about see where one song began and the other ended, but the idea was, it was a piece. You weren't going to buy a single—you weren't supposed to buy a single, you were meant to buy the LP. Coupled with that was also the change between listening to stuff on squeaky little transistors and nice treble-y hi-fi sets, and actually listening to things on stately, sculptural Bang & Olufsen twin speakers, or a big soothing headpiece clamped over your ears while you smoked a doobie and listened to the music pinging back and forth, left and right. It all became much bigger. At that point, the LP really was fully inhabited. The idea was that if you picked up a pen and a guitar and a piece of paper, you weren't writing a song, you were writing an album. I remember going around to my cousin's place and saying, "Bet you £2 I can't write an album in a week." To write an album, that's what I thought you did. I was 17 in 1970, so that's where people like me came in. You didn't write songs, you made albums.
Then with the CD, that changed. It suddenly wasn't two 20-minute sides that made up an album. The album became scarily infinite. It could actually go on for about 75 minutes, which got way too long. And now, as you say, even that confine is starting to disappear. You can have an infinite amount of music, and you don't even have to pay for it, really. So in a way, you might just as well have one single. You're almost back to 1965 again. So it probably will be sooner than five to 10 years. Already, the album is no longer a relevant unit.
I suppose what they'll do, you'll maybe pay 35 cents a song, import as many as you want… or pay nothing. The other side of it is, it depends on what exactly is going to fund songwriters and musicians in the coming years. Will they attach some kind of levy to the Internet or to computers so that you have to pay a sort of tithe, like you pay ASCAP and BMI in the States, or PRS here [in Britain], where a little bit is taken off to go to the songwriter? Or will they just have a kind of TV license, like they have here? You know, they'll just say, "It's going to cost you $2 a month to have iTunes," regardless of what you listen to, just so that everybody gets a certain amount of money? And this would be instead of actually paying for records. Either way, it points to the dissolution of the record.
AVC: When you were putting together the B-sides compilation for the boxed set, you must have gone through a lot of material that you hadn't listened to in a long time. Did anything jump out as being better or different than you remembered?
RH: They've been subtly mutated. What I actually hadn't listened to in a long time was the albums themselves, like Black Snake Diamond Role and I Often Dream Of Trains. The rarities and outtakes on While Thatcher Mauled Britain, because they never came out at the time, I heard them subsequently in various forms while I wondered what to do with them. Some of them have come out on previous compilations, but in different configurations. So I just noticed the different sounds. I Often Dream Of Trains sounded quite fast and quite harsh, whereas I'd always thought it was a fairly dreamy, chimerical sort of record.
AVC: Don't most people think of Trains as dreamy and chimerical?
RH: That's the received wisdom about that record. Maybe I've just read the reviews, so I thought of that as my dreamy and chimerical album, but I always think of [Trains] as a product of, let's say, detachment—even more detached than I usually am. Almost hermetically sealed, in fact, at that point. But actually, it sounds like some young nasal guy who's quite angry and quite fast. It sounds like, not exactly a punk record, but sort of a punk-folk record or something. But I guess that just shows how much I've got older and slowed down. Eye sounds good, that was better than I remembered it. I always liked Black Snake Diamond Role—I just have fond memories of making it.
AVC: If someone were to run across your collected works in a vault 2,000 years from now, what do you think they'd think of it?
RH: That depends on what they were used to hearing. If this was the sole representative of late-20th-century rock music, then it would be quite a good ambassador, because I was so saturated in the greats, Bob Dylan and The Beatles particularly. You can see my career, if you like, as kind of a postscript to them: sweeping up after the big guys. In terms of the emotion in it, it rather depends on whether they'll need that emotion. People in the future look back on primitive machinery or technology or painting, and in some ways, it always seems amazingly intricate and finely wrought. People from the past always seem to have much more time to create beautiful, intricate, delicate things that often reach the future in a kind of curled-up, capsized state. Old crumbling scrolls and moldering books and beautiful paintings with bits flaking off them, or old glassware, or intricately threaded beads. Maybe my stuff will just seem like that. They'll think, "God, why did that guy spend so long doing all those things? Didn't he have a machine that could just make it go whoosh, like that?" I'd be happy if it seemed like that.
AVC: A lot of your music strikes a balance between light-hearted whimsy and darker, angry undercurrents. How consciously do you think about that as you're writing a song?
RH: I don't think about it while I'm doing it—I'm more aware of it afterward. You go over the dateline of rage and despair into humor. If you want to see it as a kind of spectrum, you might go from anxiety to fear to rage to humor to regret to acceptance… and then possibly even to some kind of happiness, and then 'round again. I'm good at maybe one or two of those particular hues on the spectrum. People often complain that I was covering up my emotions by making a joke of things, but humor is also what makes stuff bearable, and I think one of the things I hated about early-'70s singer-songwriters was how humorless they were. It was my kind of punk [attitude], you know, "Jesus, I hate this self-pitying shit." I really didn't like that kind of mellow from-the-canyon self-involved crap.
Obviously, I grew up to be just as self-involved as the rest of them, but I felt that a joke would at least justify that. Just because there are jokes in my stuff doesn't mean that I don't fundamentally take it seriously. But feelings travel, thank God. You don't stay in one mood forever, and you find yourself drifting across those datelines. I think some of the really great songs have many moods overlaid on them. I don't know how much I've achieved that, but I always think back to things like "Visions Of Johanna" by Minnesota's own Bob Dylan, and how it's a sort of fundamental sadness with a lot of humor applied as a glaze over that, and then over that, there's a lot of anger and questions being asked: "What do you mean? What's all that for? You've got a lot of nerve"—that usual Dylan stuff. The whole thing comes out as a kind of meditation, as a sort of acceptance. Those are my favorite songs, where different emotions are layered on top of each other. I suppose the trick is to get the feelings to flow correctly from each other when you make a record or write a song. But Jesus, if I thought about that, I'd never write anything!
AVC: Even the songs that people point to as your "quirkiest" or most eccentric—like "Uncorrected Personality Traits" or "Do Policemen Sing?"—they aren't just novelty songs. There's another level going on, either satirically or psychologically.
RH: Well, it's easiest to deal with that stuff as a kind of music-hall song to make those points. If you clear your throat and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, I am now about to make a serious point," everyone can bow their heads and start burrowing their fingers in their ears and looking for earwax or texting each other or looking pious. "Here he comes—here's a serious point. Boy!"
AVC: Does it bother you when people pigeonhole you as "that quirky English guy"?
RH: I think if I never heard the word "quirky" again, I would be almost as happy as if I never heard the word "Rumsfeld" again. In the end, those definitions are lazy. What do they mean by "quirky"? It's like saying Michael Jackson's "eccentric." Well, explain yourself. I am also apparently "eccentric." Does this mean Michael Jackson and I are bedfellows, as it were? I know people don't have time, but I could do with another definition. I think what they mean is that for me, an idea can come from anywhere, and often, ideas come from unlikely places. They come from under the table or behind the sofa or the back of a cupboard or something—they're not the first places everybody looks. I don't know, I suppose you could call that "quirky," but I wish you wouldn't.
AVC: Your songs often also have a political edge, which you draw attention to with the title While Thatcher Mauled Britain.
RH: Well, I don't know how you put that sort of thing into a song. Politically, I'm very much of the left. I just instinctively feel that I'm a left-winger, rather than a right-winger. I don't advocate Stalinist monolithic state structures any more than I advocate capitalistic monoliths, you know. Unfortunately, human society tends to the monolithic, whether you go to the left or right—you know, everybody in leathers, or everybody holding Chairman Mao's book, and if everybody goes to one end of the pitch, I always go to the other, as I've said before. That was what was so good about Dylan—he didn't say, "I'm a left-winger, I'm a liberal, these are liberal songs I want to put to you." Nor does Billy Bragg, really, but it's no good just going in and saying, "I hate Rumsfeld," or "George W. Bush is even worse than George H.W. Bush." Well, fine, that's great, but we don't need to pay 99 cents to hear that. You'll agree with that if you agree with that. People can wave your songs like flags—"Yeah, these are left-wing songs!"—or march into battle with them for right-wing songs.
I really don't know how you do it. I wish that I was able to write so-called "political" songs. Every so often, I'll slip a little something in, but I don't think there's very much of it on this set from the '80s. Like I said, the miners' strike was going on and all that stuff, and I was busy voting Labour and all the rest of it. My friends and I were all resolutely of the left. We supported Michael Foot and Arthur Scargill and the Miners' Union and Ken Livingstone, and loathed what Margaret Thatcher did, and were upset by nearly everything Reagan did. And needless to say, Bush and Blair have come and made those people seem like the Lovin' Spoonful. But I don't think I've managed to make that appear in songs. I guess my songs aren't really about that kind of thing.
AVC: Seeing the movie 49 Up recently made me wonder what you were like when you were 7, and if you think the person you are now was visible in that child.
RH: I can't remember what I was like when I was 7. I had big brown eyes and I looked kind of scared. I guess I was losing some teeth and growing new ones. I wonder if it was the year before Sputnik? I was just getting involved in dinosaurs, probably drawing aircraft and dinosaurs. There wasn't really much music around. There was a tiny bit on the radio, and my father had a few folk songs, and Bill Haley and things. I just had a lot of bad dreams. I hated songs that say "may all your dreams come true," because I thought, no, no—they were all just nightmares. Maybe I got my dad's nightmares from the war, I don't know. So, you know, I was just another innocent with his first set of teeth falling out.
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