Robyn Hitchcock 'n' the Egyptians changed perspectives and touched the parts you couldn't reach with the surreal swirling sullen entropy of this lost document of the cold cruel justice of this world. Fresh on the heels of 'Globe of Frogs', their debut for A&M Records, Robyn Hitchcock and Andy Metcalfe went into Greenhouse Studios in Vancouver to produce 'Queen Elvis'. The sessions featured Robyn Hitchcock on guitar, lead vocals, art direction, backing vocals, and piano; Andy Metcalfe on bass, keyboards, backing vocals, acoustic guitar, percussion, and triangle; and Morris Windsor on drums, electric guitar, percussion, and backing vocals; with Peter Buck on guitar and electric guitar; Quartet Zu on strings (Audrey Riley on cello; Jocelyn Pook on viola; Sally Herbert and Sonia Slany on violin); Harvey Brough and John Miller on string arrangements; Dave Woodhead on trumpet; Jessica Corcoran as recording engineer; Pat Collier as mix engineer; Arnie Acosta as mastering engineer.
Hitchcock looks back: "My favorite album with me and the Egyptians was probably...'Queen Elvis' was good, but I haven’t heard it for ages. I might sound like Mickey Mouse! (Laughs) I know that, when I do play old records, I’m always amazed at how much faster we played them back then. We’re definitely slowing down…and I have affidavits from R.E.M. – certainly from Peter – that they’ve done the same. But there you are: you wade into the treacle until you become it ... 'Queen Elvis' was a very dense record, and we'd made three records exactly the same way. I wanted to get a record out that didn't have to cross-refer with anyone else. I felt like there was an enormous gap between how I felt and what actually came out, as if I was trapped by my own method of songwriting. I still feel that, to a large extent."
The title of the album comes from the song that doesn't appear on the album but would later surface on his solo album 'Eye'. Hitchcock says: "That song isn't about coming out, either. I could imagine Morrissey singing it. It's about a dead star, but not about a star death. 'Queen Elvis' is my 'Ziggy Stardust', but I couldn't be bothered to make a whole persona out of it."
'Queen Elvis' was never released in the UK and remains out of print. Robyn quips: "It belongs to Universal, who swallowed Polygram, who swallowed A&M, who originally paid for it. They as yet have no interest in making it available again. But I do have a spare cassette if you want it."
http://www.robynhitchcock.com/
"Madonna of the Wasps" – 3:05
"Madonna" is about an artist with a long, straggly beard who's kept in a white room in a castle somewhere in France. It's one of those castles where ... there are 31 doors but there are 32 windows, and if you hang a handkerchief out of each window, there's still one room that doesn't have a handkerchief hanging out of it. In other words, there's a doorless room. And trapped inside this this doorless room is a very emaciated artist, and every night ... he sits there painting. He's got a kind of hotel suite, so he's not lying there in his own shit or anything like that. But he doesn't get around much. Anyway, he's trapped up there, and every night this woman comes to him. As her head and shoulders come through the window, he thinks, "Great," but her abdomen is that of a wasp, and it's a kind of two-foot-long beautiful black-and-yellow abdomen with rings around it. And she comes in and she sort of pins him to the bed, and she sticks her tongue in his mouth, and she arcs up her abdomen and he goes, "Unnh, Unnh, Unnh." She just curls this thing around and stabs him in the navel, and he gets a lethal dose of wasp poisoning. And he just passes out, and the next morning he wakes up and he's OK again. Like Prometheus, he's had his kidneys taken out. Anyway, he doesn't know why he's in there. He doesn't know what his relationship with the Madonna is, particularly. I mean, she's very attractive in one way, you know, but repellant in another. And then one day, he wakes up, and he's not in the room anymore. He's just walking along in the fields in France, all these sort of flat fields. And it's early morning in November and there's a frost, and he sees this sort of shape lying on the ground, like a crashed plane. And it's the Madonna. She's dying like wasps do in the autumn, and she stretches her hand out to him and says, "Will you forgive me?" And then that's where it ends. There's the option: Is she actually going to whip up and sting him again, finally, or is he going to forgive her, or what? So we leave it there... Well, it's very long, so that why I had to make the song completely different, but that's the concept behind it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cuc742MaQNI
"The Devils Coachman" – 2:33
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nkMhU1SulM
"Wax Doll" – 4:12
http://vimeo.com/54794109
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TTCAtR6lcU
"Knife" – 3:24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOGM0nB3gn4
"Swirling" – 3:38
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWh4DasRDGM
"One Long Pair of Eyes" – 4:57
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHidT1r96WE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NREMXva4Kfo
"Veins of the Queen" – 3:24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzgDik8clsQ
"Freeze" – 4:46
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4qgW-JT5_s
"Autumn Sea" – 4:23
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaKc4ZIShlI
"Superman" – 3:48
http://vimeo.com/55182801
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaBYDr7pfWE
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