Robyn Hitchcock had the nerve to execute the personal signals of this visionary acoustic catharsis in the sweetest death of an agony of pleasure. After five albums ('Fegmania!' 'Gotta Let This Hen Out!' 'Element of Light' 'Globe of Frogs' 'Queen Elvis' 'Eye' all on his own in the same stripped down vein as 'I Often Dream of Trains' Robyn reveals: "Every so often you wonder what it would be like if you weren't making decisions by committee. I just wanted to be on my own, without anything else, as naked and simple as possible ... It was a conscious attempt to make a record without involving other people. Because The Egyptians, with A&M and everything, there were managers, there was a band, and even before we got a producer, the songs were sort of… They were still mine, but I had less control over how they turned out and what happened to them. And the awful words “radio single” and things had become a fact of life. We were just having to deal with what other bands had to deal with. But I was going to San Francisco a lot and, just with my own money, I started recording this record in Hyde Street. I was breaking up with two people at the same time, and it was a pretty epic point in my life. And I was spending most of my life on planes ... I was looking at my set list, and I realised that when I play solo acoustic I actually play more songs off of Eye than any other record. And so in terms of a collection of songs, it seems to be my own personal favourite. It’s quite an unfinished record, the vocals aren’t great… I don’t know if it’s the way I was wearing the headphones or something, but I sing quite strangely on that one. Trains Eye was much rougher, it was recorded almost as soon as some of the songs had been written, but it is quite instant. It’s a more intense show than the Trains Trains Trains Eye is probably more powerful, in some ways...I think it did [seem to sum up the end of an era]. Because jangle rock and the return of the Anglo-American folky sound, or whatever it was — which may be back again, for all I know — the curtain came down on that in ’91, with Nirvana. And certainly that was the end of that period for us. But it was just a way of re-legitimising hard rock. Those bands were loud and heavy, and the Americans love to rock. The British always feel they should have an excuse, and it needs to be a bit ironic, but the Americans are very happy to just plunge straight into it. And so grunge came out of there. And the word alternative was no longer affixed to people like REM and the Violent Femmes and 10,000 Maniacs and The Replacements, and indeed me and my band. It was affixed to much louder people, like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and beyond. And yeah, it changed. But when I made Eye I had no idea that was about to happen, and it wasn’t done with that in mind ... I think it's perhaps my strongest collection of songs. Not the best arrangements or performances -- it's a very unadorned record and not as worked out as I Often Dream of Trains Eye is in some ways a skeletal predecessor of Britpop, of people writing songs like David Bowie, the Kinks, or my great musical hero, Syd Barrett...I'm very pleased with Eye. It's got the basic thing but not much else. A lot of records have got everything, they're beautifully done, but you don't know if there's anything at the heart of them. All Eye really has is its center -- there's nothing else on it...My songs are basically bottled moments of time, moments of my life that I reserve. Some have an insight into my life that I didn't have at the time. The songs tend to be a little bit wiser, like I'm trying to tell myself something but not listening. There's a lot of post-it notes to myself on Eye . It's my voice in my own ear, a sort of Greek chorus about what was happening to me. When I sing it, I sort of feel like I was younger and a fool in lots of ways, but in my folly the voice in my ear had some wisdom, still...Now I can re-inhabit August, 1989, by singing "Glass Hotel," or December, 1988, by singing "Queen Elvis" or April, 1989, by singing "Cynthia Mask." San Francisco was much in my thoughts, and that's why I recorded it there, at Hyde Street Studios."
Hitchcock did all of the vocals and played all of the instruments on 'Eye' himself, producing the sessions with engineers Wendy Bardsley and Simon Kunath. His soon-to-be-fiancee Cynthia Hunt did the p hotography and accompanied him on the tour. The album refers back to his last two albums, as "Flesh Cartoons" was the working title for 'Globe of Frogs' while "Queen Elvis" is the title song that was not included on 'Queen Elvis' . The liner notes also include a short story: "Legends Of The South Wight: 2: The Glass Hotel" .
http://www.robynhitchcock.com/ http://www.fegmania.org/ "Queen Elvis"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7CNICueuBY VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm1Pi7AF7BE VIDEO "Beautiful Girl"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-d9U_-AgCA VIDEO "Raining Twilight Coast"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tpgNokW8h0 VIDEO "Glass Hotel"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf4trad-kwo VIDEO 'Eye' full album:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL68C2DBE79D992245 VIDEO All songs written by Robyn Hitchcock.
Side One
"Cynthia Mask" — 4:35 "Certainly Clickot" — 2:14 "Queen Elvis" — 4:22 "Flesh Cartoons" — 4:22 "Chinese Water Python" — 2:12 "Executioner" — 3:43 "Linctus House" — 5:12 Side Two
"Beautiful Girl" — 2:12 "Raining Twilight Coast" — 4:38 "Clean Steve" — 3:51 "Agony of Pleasure" — 2:23 "Glass Hotel" — 3:26 "Satellite" — 1:43 "Aquarium" — 4:19 bonus tracks
"Sweet Ghost of Light" — 3:07 "College of Ice" — 3:41 "Transparent Lover" — 3:35 "Queen Elvis II" — 4:22 "Century" — 3:41 "Shimmering Distant Love" — 3:21 "Lovers Turn To Skulls" — 1:40 "The Beauty Of Earls Court" — 3:59 live at SUNY, Binghamton, NY 10/2/1990
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZTXkUsUejc VIDEO 01 - Intro Story (cuts in)
02 - Oceanside
03 - Intro to Madonna
04 - Madonna of the Wasps
05 - Clean Steve
06 - Intro to Raymond
07 - Raymond Chandler Evening
08 - The Devil's Coachman
09 - Wax Doll
10 - Wey Wey Hep Uh Hole
11 - Story - Intro to Queen
12 - Queen Elvis
13 - Story-Intro to Autumn (tape flip)
14 - Autumn Is Your Last Chance
15 - Intro To Bass
16 - Bass
17 - Intro to My Wife
18 - My Wife and My Dead Wife
19 - Beautful Girl
20 - Pre-Encore Applause
21 - Intro To I Got A Message
22 - I Got A Message For You
23 - I Thought I Saw Somebody Else (aka Chain Mary to the Bed)
24 - Cynthia Mask
25 - Pre-Encore Applause 2
26 - Sometimes I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl
27 - I Often Dream Of Trains
http://www.2kmusic.com/en/webvideo/robynhitchcock/2HQlMMUfgvg/interview-with-robyn-hitchcock-cincinnati-ohio-october-1990 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HQlMMUfgvg#t=776 VIDEO
"Kung Fu Fighting"
VIDEO
Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians (for a lark) unweaved a mindbending music to implode by with the shimmering surreal psychedelia of this provocative pop poltergeist. After The Soft Boys disbanded, Hitchcock released a trio of very different solo albums ( 'Black Snake Dîamond Röle' , 'Groovy Decay' 'Groovy Decoy' 'Gravy Deco' 'I Often Dream of Trains' ) before forming a new band with former members of The Soft Boys.
'Fegmania!' was recorded by Pat Collier at Alaska Studios in London and features Robyn Hitchcock on vocals, guitars, and bass guitar; Morris Windsor on drums and backing vocals; and Andy Metcalfe on bass guitar, keyboards, and backing vocals; with Roger Jackson adding keyboards on "Strawberry Mind", "Glass", "The Fly" and "Heaven"; and John Kingham playing drums on "The Man with the Lightbulb Head".
Hitchcock would wax: " My favorite Egyptians album is 'Fegmania!' because it was a really good vibe playing together after a long break, and it's the most consistant set of songs ... 'Fegmania!' is, sort of, coming back to life. Groovy Decay I Often Dream of Trains Trains 'Fegmania!' sort of accepts itself. 'Fegmania!' has Thoth -- who's the god of libraries -- on the label...As long as everybody doesn't crowd each other out and everyone's allowed to take time off and things, the band can go on indefinitely. I think Roger Jackson (keyboards) is a very valuable addition to the very original old lineup, which we still have. I think everyone's a bit more stable. We're all quite old now. We're not liable to go zooming around with lots of other people...I've never wanted mass appeal. People keep saying I should. Or why don't I? Or what will I do if I get it? But I'm not really interested in that force-feeding that takes place when you get prime MTV time and your poster is on every wall. There are plenty of people who don't sell millions of records -- people like Richard Thompson, Lou Reed, Captain Beefheart -- who've done brilliant stuff...I just walk downstairs, open my mouth, pick up a guitar and off we go. It's very easy -- my mind never stops. People seem to, kind of, walk around me waiting for it to stop so they can come and examine my head, drill holes in it and find out what's in there. I wish they wouldn't. It's life filtered in one ear and out through the mouth -- like taking a whole load of ingredients and grinding them up not-very-finely, so when they come out again you can still recognize them. Like, 'Oh look. Here's half a car, and here's a piece of green pepper, and here are two people making love in a fridge.' Something like that...Humor is as important as blood, practically. People without any humor are people without any blood, and it's terrifying. I can't see any other reason to exist (he said sadly)." http://www.robynhitchcock.com/ http://www.fegmania.org/ "The Man with the Lightbulb Head"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQGAEY9uXc8 VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wewkYZC7Dr4 VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-H9fd2-7eo VIDEO "Heaven" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QftSXPbwEvk VIDEO 'Fegmania!' full album:
VIDEO All songs written by Robyn Hitchcock except as indicated.
Side one
"Egyptian Cream" – 3:33 "Another Bubble" – 2:46 "I'm Only You" – 4:28 "My Wife & My Dead Wife" – 4:19 "Goodnight I Say" – 3:14 Side two
"The Man with the Lightbulb Head" – 3:05 "Insect Mother" – 1:54 "Strawberry Mind" – 2:50 "Glass" – 3:12 "The Fly" – 3:50 "Heaven" – 4:41 bonus tracks
"Bells of Rhymney" (Idris Davies, Pete Seeger) – 3:30 (single) "Dwarfbeat" – 3:00 (b-side from "Heaven" single) "Some Body" – 3:24 (b-side from "Heaven" single) "The Pit of Souls [I-IV]" – 9:59 "The Drowning Church" – 3:12 "Lady Obvious" – 3:21
The liner notes make plain (or perhaps less plain) the meaning behind the madness:
"What is Fegmania? It has come for your sister. Also for your husband, that kindly man with something poking out of his head. It has come for you arms, and it will change your concept of hygiene. It may be the sound of a plane crash-landing in a ploughed field, or salad cream being tipped out of an attic window. There are stars, minds and judges - people in scarlet rags that pull frogs out of each other's mouths. FEGMANIA RISES! Light pulsing from a bruised sun that eats into tired rugs. Light coursing from a swarming moon that careens in frozen ecstasy across the sky - naked people oozing on warm mud with the radio tuned to Venus. Here is music to implode by. Here is FEGMANIA! A turnip in a sliver box. A dromedary lurching through the House of Commons. A bank manager shooting himself in the navel with a water-pistol. A Royal baby with permanent amnesia. A vampire at the Cenotaph. Respectable people with uncontrollable urges, freed only by the disconnection of their hands. A nun writing her name in marmalade on a soldier's leg. One word. "
'Gotta Let This Hen Out!' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3u8Z9dlKa4 VIDEO 1 Listening To The Higsons
2 Kingdom Of Love
3 America
4 The Fly
5 The Man With The Lightbulb Head
6 The Cars She Used To Drive
7 Leppo & The Jooves
8 Sounds Great When You're Dead
9 Only The Stones Remain
10 My Wife & My Dead Wife
11 I Often Dream Of Trains
12 Brenda's Iron Sledge
13 Heaven
14 Surgery
Robyn Hitchcock found an acoustic autumnal expression of intimate ache in the dodgey nocturnes of this crystal cathedral of pure poetry. After the breakup of The Soft Boys, Hitchcock released two albums, 'Black Snake Dîamond Röle' and 'Groovy Decay' ; but he became so dissatisfied with the music business, he dropped out: "I wanted to see how much I really wanted to do this. The early ‘80s were a barren time for the likes of me on the surface, but little seeds were sprouting in the sheltered cracks below that sprouted into organisms like R.E.M., who, God bless them, made the place more habitable. Meanwhile, I wrote those songs out of compulsion, not because anybody wanted me to make a new album—even me. It’s been that way ever since, really. 'IODOT' , as you put it—one letter short of IDIOT—is its own world, an echo of the world I lived in which is now gone. Even then, I was thinking about a gone world. Now I remember remembering. It’s those spirals again...I go from light to dark, it’s all part of the spiral. I don’t see myself as whimsical. There has to be some basis on which an artist makes selections, and mine are instinctive. They don’t always work, I admit—perhaps that’s when they seem whimsical. The main thing is to tell it like it seems, not as you would wish it to seem. But to tell it like it is might require a sharper eye than mine ... 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!...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!'
Recorded in London, 'I Often Dream of Trains' was essentially a one man show with Hitchcock doing all of the vocals and instruments save for contributions from James Fletcher on saxophone for one track ("Flavour of Night") and Chris Cox adding bass and backup vocals on two ("Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus" and "My Favourite Buildings"). Engineers Pat Collier, Iain O'Higgins, and Pascal Gabriel also assisted in the proceedings. Hitchcock remembers: "I mean, that was pretty cheap. The one they used to like was Underwater Moonlight Trains http://www.robynhitchcock.com/ http://themuseumofrobynhitchcock.tumblr.com/ https://myspace.com/robynhitchcock "Autumn Is Your Last Chance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMnixVOw2Bk "Uncorrected Personality Traits" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5sUfV1Mi7w "I Often Dream of Trains" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4HZkGYXcW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U60yj35FmGs "Furry Green Atom Bowl" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcTlxQOYDYI "Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnPse1Dcrcc "Sounds Great When You're Dead" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr3FX0RD8S4 'I Often Dream of Trains' full album:
http://www.amazon.com/Often-Dream-Trains-Robyn-Hitchcock/dp/B000VO8O44
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOyBJamk0U9ERDfITH4o-sp4hkPGZ3GG6 VIDEO Side one "Nocturne (Prelude)" "Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl" "Cathedral" "Uncorrected Personality Traits" "Sounds Great When You're Dead" "Flavour of Night" "Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus" Side two
"This Could Be the Day" "Trams of Old London" "Furry Green Atom Bowl" "Heart Full of Leaves" "Autumn Is Your Last Chance" "I Often Dream of Trains" "Nocturne (Demise)" bonus tracks "Mellow Together" "Winter Love" "The Bones In The Ground" "My Favourite Buildings" "I Used To Say I Love You"
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' 'Queen Elvis'
Hitchcock looks back: "My favorite album with me and the Egyptians was probably...'Queen Elvis' ... ' Queen Elvis'
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' out of it. "
'Queen Elvis' " 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 VIDEO
"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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