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Robyn Hitchcock
And when the sun goes down on her
So beautiful, my heart just stops
Robyn is one of my very favorite musicians. I liked his early records a lot as a kid, then mostly forgot about him, and rediscovered his music as an adult.
He has a huge catalog of records; the two that played possibly the largest role in rekindling my interest were Moss Elixir and Perspex Island.
Nearly all of Robyn's lyrics are online at The Asking Tree. You can download a huge number of live recordings for free, from Archive.org.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I found another pretty spectacular cover version of "Satellite of Love" -- this one is by Robyn Hitchcock and Grant Lee Phillips, I'm assuming from the same tour (possibly the same concert) documented in Elixirs and Remedies. A beautiful performance, and I just love the camerawork way the visual frame is composed.
It's not available yet -- going to be released in February. But you can listen to some of the tracks at Proper Records.
Hm; hard to make a judgement of the record based on these clips. I am glad to see the songs from The Fifth Beatle appearing here, because I think they are lovely songs; but I have no idea whether I'll like the Venus 3 versions better than the solo versions I've heard. I will say, that is one of the nicest Robyn Hitchcock album covers I've ever seen.
"This music is a place that cardinally does not and never has existed." -- Robyn had opened the concert with some pure music, "Sometimes I wish I was a pretty girl" playing on a tape recorder as he walks in wearing a top hat, sits down at the piano and starts playing with the tape speed. He quickly tires of that, turns off the tape and plays "Nocturne"; then Terry Edwards walks out carrying some wind instruments and they perform "Flavor of Night" together. It was kind of a somber opening, I found -- but after Robyn started talking about his music, things warmed up a lot. Captain Keegan came on stage while he was describing the process of dissecting his lyrics as similar to looking at magnified pictures of rotting tomatoes online, wasting valuable time when you could be sending e-mails, and they launched into "Sounds Great When You're Dead" -- this is Photo by Dave Kaufman when the dim blue lighting became bright and red, and everybody started smiling and moving. "These songs are basically subtitles," said Robyn, "they flash up underneath while life is going on" and serve as a means of translation between understanding and feeling, or words to that effect. And played "I Used to Say I Love You." He had some technical difficulties with a loose wire during this song but recovered from it very gracefully -- the final line of the chorus is "And I've lost my illusions about you now", but instead he said as his amplifier crackled and retched, "And I've... ah, really fucked up this guitar, keep it going for a minute you guys, I'm just going to plug this in really deep here,..." and came back to reprise the chorus. There was a lot of chat about editing thrown in at various points during the show, because it was being filmed for inclusion in a documentary of the tour, for instance IIRC Robyn said something about editing out that bit with the recovery from the technical difficulties. I hope they would not; that was one of the really key lovely moments in the show. (Also lovely: in the program was a chronology of Hitchcock's life and work from his POV, similar to this one but expanded through 2009.) Robyn made his first of many references to the recent election when he said of November 4th, "suddenly the scheme of things did not suck." He talked about how he wrote IODOT during the Reagan/Thatcher years when there was not much to feel hopeful about, but he had flashes of hope such as the one that led him to write this song: and played "This Could Be The Day", with "Nubian slaves" inexplicably edited to "Nubian Dave". Then Edwards gets up from the piano and takes Robyn's electric guitar, the black one with white polka dots that matches his shirt, and Robyn says "This is gonna be in C. C, the mother of all keys..." and talks for a while about key signatures and editing -- "We've just survived 8 years of faith. Let's see where a little disbelief can get us." And the three of them sang "Sleeping Knights of Jesus", with some great edits to bring the song up to date a bit. Talked for a while about railroads as an embodiment of love as an intro to "Trams of Old London", and then talked about the physical skeleton of the city, as an intro to "My Favorite Buildings". "Catholicism is best described as a form of insurance. ... Oh crap, did the Lord cut off my mic? -- It's back, someone must have given him something." And they played "Mother Church", and Terry and Tim left the stage, and Robyn played a solo "I Often Dream of Trains" on electric guitar with all of his enormous personality focused into the microphone -- this song was stunning and brought a standing ovation, one which brought everybody back out for some encores. In the encores they played a song I didn't know but which I loved, and have asked the Fegs to identify for me;* and both songs from "Rachel Getting Married" (which Ellen hopes gets an Oscar for its music); and "Listening to the Higsons". And a special extra encore, after everybody had gotten up and started moving toward the exits, of "Goodnight I Say" -- which was funny and nice, because I had been thinking before the show about how this would be the ideal closing number. Anyway: too long and too unfiltered a post; I just wanted to get some of this down while I still remembered it.
(Oh, I forgot, something I really liked: the last thing Robyn said at the end of the first encore, and I think as all the musicians on stage were playing the final notes of "Higsons", was something like, "Things never end. But for the purposes of editing, we're going to stop here." And the sound cut off, and the musicians exited. The extra musicians playing on the encore were Gaida Hinnawi on vocals and Amir El Saffar on horn, both from the cast of Rachel Getting Married.)
(Another thing I just remembered: After Terry and Tim had left the stage at the end of the set, before Robyn played "I Often Dream of Trains," he spoke for a bit about the concert ending -- "This is the needle lifting from the dusty groove" -- he likened the end of a record or concert to the transition from sleep to wakefulness, the music being a remembered dream, and the transition from "then" to "now." "But this is still then," and started playing.)
*And the responding Feg says, Robyn played this song on Wednesday too (at World Cafe Live), and she thinks she has never heard it before. Which I take to mean it's a new composition.... Another Feg says, it is called "I'm Falling" and is written for the soundtrack of The Fifth Beatle. It will be track 4 of Goodnight Oslo.
Ohboyohboyohboy! Ellen and I are going out to the Upper West Side and watch Robyn and the boys play I Often Dream of Trains! I've been reading reviews of the tour -- on the web and on the fegmaniax list -- and it sounds like it's going to be really great. Busy day until then -- I'm going out in a couple of minutes to run errands, and when I get back will be working on home improvement type of things until the afternoon. Sorry I haven't been keeping the blog up so frequently over the last week or so, real life has been too busy. I'm definitely planning to post a review of the concert, late tonight or tomorrow morning.
posted morning of November 22nd, 2008: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Music
Robyn Hitchcock is releasing (with The Venus 3) a new album on YepRoc, called Goodnight Oslo. His 15th studio album! Features among other tunes, "Up to Our Necks" and "Hurry for the Sky" -- good stuff! He is interviewed about the record in the current Paste. Here is a performance of the title track:
"Goodnight Oslo" -- at The Iron Horse in Northampton, MA, July 9th, 2008
The latest Robyn Hitchcock tribute record is being released! You can see the track list with links to the performers at glasshotel.net, and pre-order a copy if you need the disc. Otherwise wait a bit and the files will be made available for download. -- Also see that page for links to the previous two tribute discs.
So the reason I wanted to see Rachel Getting Married, was the music, specifically Robyn Hitchcock. And I think the music was probably the best thing about the movie, in the end. But look: the music was sufficiently great that I can say that without denigrating the rest of the picture; it was a really fine movie.
A review I read (maybe in the Times?) criticized the reception scene as killing the rhythm of the movie and its plot, making the viewer lose track of what's going on. This seems like an absolutely baffling response to the movie (assuming I'm remembering it right); the reception was a totally integral part of what was going on (which was after all a wedding), it intensified and crystallized the characters, particularly of Kim and her mother.
Hm, just thinking this post needs a little more -- I finished it in a hurry before dinner -- The reason I chose the title I did is that I flashed on that song at one point in the movie when Kim was watching a car pulling in to her father's driveway. Kim's relationship with cars is definitely a focal point of the plot and of her character. The one thing I really didn't buy in the movie was her accident the night before the wedding -- that (a) was totally predictable and (b) didn't do the work it was supposed to. Auto-accident-as-cathartic-release just doesn't cut it in my book. Her not getting in an accident would have been more compelling; and the fight with her mother fills the need for violent release there.
One of the best things about the Luminous Groove box set is this track, on disk 1 of "Bad Case of History." It is a previously unreleased demo recording (recorded in Yarmouth in 1992), which means The Asking Tree has never heard of it.
This song just seems like a very pure, beautiful melody to me. I'm not sure what else to say about it -- I find the descending run on the fourth and eight lines of the verse rivetting. I lean back and forth between thinking the lyrics are lovely poetry, and thinking they are tritely emotional. The best thing about the lyrics is definitely the ways that the eighth line of each verse leads into the refrain. Possibly what I want to say about this song is, it combines perfectly the style of Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians with the style of Robyn Hitchcock's solo work from later in the '90s -- this is what you might get if you crossed "Raymond Chandler Evening" with "Heliotrope."
The fabulous whisper;
Can anyone hear but me?
The ivy surrounds you
Infinitesimally.
Does anyone love you?
Baby just me.
You're caught in the darkness,
The only place you can be alone
Alone
Alone.
A series of strangers,
Shall we say "absent friends,"
Parading before you;
Into your life she bends.
So hollow and lonely,
It's making you see,
You'll only get better
When you've learned how to be alone
Alone
Alone.
(instrumental)
What does it matter?
You're seeking the eyes long shade.
I brought you some onions;
Cry now, don't be afraid.
They're walking towards you,
The angels from everywhere;
The ghost of your body
Is bringing you back to her alone
Alone
Alone
Alone
Alone
Alone.
↻...done
Two things I like very much from the re-issue of Fegmania!: the final track "Lady Obvious," which appears never to have been released before (and which I spent a few minutes wishing could be called "Lady Octopus"); and the live version of "Heaven." I transcribed the lyrics to the former, and the intro to latter. If anybody knows the provenance of this recording of "Heaven," please let me know. (According to Miles Goosens, it is likely from the 1992 Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians tour.)
I haunted you once
You haunt me still
On a hill, I sighed, I cried...
You wanted me once
I want you still
I'm so ill, I wail, I flail...
Come down, Lady Obvious, come down
Come down, Lady Obvious, come down
I touched you once
You touch me now
And how, I feel, you there...
You loved me once
You love me now
And how, I care....
Come down, Lady Obvious, come down
Come down, Lady Obvious, come down
You loved me once
I turned away
But love and pity never mix
I'll see you when you're 36
Come down, Lady Obvious, come down
Come down, Lady Obvious, come down
Patter before "Heaven"
This here: this is a floating, a floating cathedral prayer song, used to be sung by the old prospectors when they were waiting for the cathedral to arrive. Back in the 20's, when the Bechtel corporation used to take cheap labor out into the desert to complete its massive projects, big dams and so forth. The men weren't paid very much, and they couldn't get any liquor, so they used to sit outside in groups, in circles, and they'd wait for the cathedral to come by. Big floating, transparent glass cathedral, lit by columns of light from underneath. When it came by, they'd all stiffen and howl. You've got heaven...
↻...done
I've been been listening to Fegmania! a lot over the past week (in its reissue in the Luminous Groove box set), and finding some things I really like about this record, which I had previously considered one of Robyn's weakest efforts. Today I've been getting very interested in the song "The Bells of Rhymney," which I'm embarrassed not to have already known is a classic of the 60's folk revival, written by Pete Seeger and performed variously by The Byrds, Judy Collins, The Alarm, and others.
I think Pete Seeger's is my favorite performance that I've heard so far:
(I think, but not quite sure, that this recording is from the Newport Folk Festival of 1959.)
And The Byrds are lovely and silly, standing gaily on the beach singing about mining disasters. I believe it is their version that Robyn is covering, as he sounds very similar to this:
The song is based on a poem from the book Gwalia Deserta, by miner-turned-teacher and poet Idris Davies, which Seeger found in a book of Welsh poetry compiled by Dylan Thomas. The poem (as near as I can understand) deals with the failure of a mine-workers' strike in 1926. Two other of Davies' poems can be seen in manuscript form at Welsh cultural history site Gathering the Jewels: "Rhymney", and "Rhymney Hill". David Librik gives more detail about the origins of the poem at this link (midway down), including this tantalizing couplet from Gwalia Deserta:
O what is man that coal should be so unmindful of him?
And what is coal that it should have so much blood on it?
Oh what will you give me?
Say the sad bells of Rhymney.
Is there hope for the future?
Cry the brown bells of Merthyr.
Who made the mine owner?
Say the black bells of Rhondda.
And who robbed the miner?
Cry the grim bells of Blaina.
They will plunder will-nilly,
Cry the bells of Caerphilly.
They have fangs, they have teeth,
Shout the loud bells of Neath.
Even God is uneasy,
Say the moist bells of Swansea.
And what will you give me?
Say the sad bells of Rhymney.
Throw the vandals in court,
Say the bells of Newport.
All will be well if, if, if, if
Cry the green bells of Cardiff.
Why so worried, sisters why?
Sing the silver bells of Wye.
And what will you give me?
Say the sad bells of Rhymney.
Note: I found (at The Mudcat Café) some updated lyrics to this, composed by Mr. Steve Suffet, with help from Pete Seeger.
Bells of Kabul
"We've had twenty years of Hell!"
Cry the sad bells of Kabul.
"Oppression and war!"
Scream the bells of Kanduhar.
"Did we win? Did we lose?"
Ask the broken bells of Kanduz.
"Will God grant us peace?"
Pray the bells of Mazar-i-Shareef.
↻...done
It's not available yet -- going to be released in February. But you can listen to some of the tracks at 
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