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Wednesday, November 5th, 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.
posted afternoon of November 5th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
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:
posted afternoon of November 11th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
 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
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(Note: lots of great pictures of the show at brooklynvegan's blog, and more from Dave Kaufman. And another review at The Song In My Head Today.)
(Update: woj has the full setlist and links to a tape of the show at Internet Archive.)
"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.
posted evening of November 22nd, 2008: 4 responses
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Thursday, December 11th, 2008
 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.
posted morning of December 11th, 2008: Respond
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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.
posted evening of December 11th, 2008: 2 responses
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Saturday, December 13th, 2008
 Listen to the song available on this page, while looking at the image on this page. Fun, right?
 (Thanks to a couple of people on the Fegmaniax list...)
posted evening of December 13th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, January 30th, 2009
This seems a little weird to me, but I've been seeing news squibs for the past couple of days claiming that Robyn Hitchcock is planning to produce a musical stage adaptation of Magnum Force -- the only Hitchcock-Dirty Harry connection I really knew of already was the song (from Olé! Tarantula) "(A Man's Got to Know his Limitations) Briggs" -- now I see him quoted as saying, "It's a film that seemed to be on all the time when I was on tour. By the fifth time [I saw it], I became addicted to it. It's taken a very strange hold on my life." Interesting... Here's the Grauniad article, which is the most detail I've seen so far. (Not much but still.)
posted morning of January 30th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
YepRoc Records has posted video of Robyn and friends singing "Up to Our Nex", from the November 22nd show at Symphony Space -- presumably this is part of the documentary film they're making of that tour.
On stage with Mr. Hitchcock are (from left to right) Amir El Saffar, Terry Edwards, Gaida Hinnawi, and Tim Keegan. The song will be released on Goodnight Oslo. Thanks for the link, Woj!
posted afternoon of January 31st, 2009: Respond
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Monday, February 9th, 2009
Robyn Hitchcock's playlist this morning included a Beatles title I didn't recognize, "Rain" -- I asked Ellen about it this morning and she hummed a few familiar-sounding bars; I thought I'd look into it. Turns out "Rain" is the B-side of "Paperback Writer" from 1966. It is by John; it was not released on an album until "Hey Jude" in 1970. According to Wikipædia, it is the first commercial recording to feature backwards vocals. Sweet sounds! Here is video of the boys inventing MTV:
posted evening of February 9th, 2009: Respond
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