Englishness is an under-rated commodity.
With scum like the BNP laying claim to England’s heritage, it takes mavericks like Robyn Hitchcock to remind us just why the nation’s character retains such potent appeal. With his lilting psychedelia, the songwriter’s output is equally challenging and whimsical – yet always deeply English.
Strangely, though, the singer remains more popular on the other side of the pond. Recently recording a live album in New York, Robyn Hitchcock brought some American friends over to work on some new material.
It helps if those friends as The Venus 3 – essentially R.E.M. in disguise. Laying down some tracks in the songwriter’s front room, Robyn Hitchcock then played around with the music for three years.
Released earlier this month as ‘Propellor Time’ the result is a wonderful blend of gentle humour, surreal observations and at-ease camaraderie. ClashMusic sat down with Robyn Hitchcock to find out just why it took so long…
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The sessions for ‘Propellor Time’ took place over a series of months, how did the project begin?
The record itself was done in six days – that was done here, in the living room. My wife Michele gets on very well with the guys in the band: Peter (Buck) and Dylan Scott. We’d done a tour together and we wondering what to do when she said “oh why don’t you get the boys over and make an album?” Us being the boys we needed no second bidding. These days you can fit a recording studio onto half a kitchen table, whereas the last time I made an album at home we were on the Isle Of Wight with the BBC mobile sitting outside. It was about the length of two houses and we needed a license from the police! There were all these wires squirming out and heading into the house, it looked as though some pod had burst open and was feeding on it. This time, the little wire just ran discretely from the kitchen into the front room. We were all down one end of the front room – there’s a good drum sound down there. So the whole thing took six days, we just spent three years fine tuning it.
How did the editing process work?
I just go up to Charlie Francis the engineer; we’d sit in his attic and tinker with it. Edit it a bit. Then leave it for about six months before having another go. There’s really nothing like time to give you a good idea of what to do!
You’ve compared the new album to ‘The Basement Tapes’ – what did you mean by this?
We thought, we’ve only got six days so let’s see if we can get that feeling. We’ll set the gear up and see what we can record. We had a big hoot on the last night where we invited people around, playing some new stuff and some old stuff. Nick Lowe and John Paul Jones came along and we ran through stuff like ‘Blue Moon Of Kentucky’ and ‘Wang Dang Doodle’. We did a ‘Basement Tapes’ song – I’ve got that somewhere. We’re going to put tracks from this on my website. That’s more the ‘Basement Tapes’ end of it as there are no overdubs, and we’re probably a bit drunk. The stuff on the finished album is actually quite polished now. It was quite sprawling to begin with.
How do you decide which band are best suited to the material you are writing?
Like James Bond, selecting his revolver! Blowing discretely down the gun barrel. Well it depends on who is around – if the Venus 3 guys are busy being R.E.M. or something and they’re not available. It depends on where I am too, I suppose. You find yourself all over the place, really, and it’s great to have different people you can play with in different areas. I’ve got a British band, who I’ll be working with on the new tour. They’re all Brits but I haven’t taken them outside Europe. I tend to work with the Venus 3 in the States. Occasionally they’ll come over here. It sort of depends where I am really.
How collaborative was the songwriting on ‘Propellor Time’?
I write the songs on my own. Peter is very prolific, so sometimes he’ll be sitting there playing something and it’s not too hard to sing over the top of it. But we don’t sit in a room and say “now we write a song” I just tend to ask him what it is, or just start singing. It’s very organic. Johnny Marr sent an instrumental, he sent over a backing track and I made up some words. Then I played it to the boys and we recorded. I tend to write own my own, although I have worked with other people as an experiment. When it’s a nice day I tend to go up on the roof and finish off these songs. But I think the fact that we had a recording session was, in a way, an excuse to finish these songs and start some other ones.
The new album comes out on cassette, was this your decision?
We wanted to do all formats. We’re only doing a limited edition of 100 cassettes – they’re thirteen guineas each and I’ve signed them all. You can always buy it as an art piece. I don’t know if CD, LP or cassette will disintegrate first. I wanted to do all four formats, downloads too. Cassettes are like ash trays – they’re just slipping out of people’s consciousness. I like the idea of promoting the fact that this is what we did until fairly recently. It’s quite civilised – cassettes are quite small, and when they get a bit wobbly they can have a nice guitar tone on them. I wanted to make it available to those who wish to hear it. If we sell our hundred cassettes maybe we’ll do a second edition, I don’t know.
There’s been a flurry of activity recently, what lies behind this?
Well ‘Trains…’ was re-released and it seemed like a good idea to take that on tour. That was also Michele’s idea. We kind of take a lot of interest in each other’s work and she has a perspective that I don’t have because I’m so involved in it. She’ll say “why don’t you bring a live album out?” Then John Edginton, once again popped up and asked to film it. Maybe we’ll do another tour like that sometime. You’ve got all eternity in which not to exist so I like to keep busy while I can.
What prompted the final track ‘Evolove’?
It is a definite anti-Creationist song. It is mission specific, I wrote it with that in mind. I put it last as it is one of the most pointed songs, it doesn’t function on any other level it is just a comment on Creationism. Songs boil themselves down in different ways, and I find that often I’m addressing a few different people or topics at one time. It can be quite condensed so sometimes it’s not that obvious what they’re about. You know what songs are about in terms of mood, which you can tell straight away. It’s the most important thing and is largely to do with the music and not the lyrics. ‘Evolove’ is just a party political broadcast on behalf of the anti-Creationists. I’m really glad we put that one in.
The song perhaps has deeper resonance in the United States, does your prominence there surprise you?
It’s been like that for 25 years. At one time I was massively more popular there than I was here. Now – well, it’s a bigger place so there are literally more people to buy my records. There are more gigs to do. Rock ‘n’ roll as we call it has always been an Anglo-American thing. Until the last decade when it suddenly became cool to come from Scandinavia and all sorts of other places which is great. The Anglo-American monopoly has begun to dissolve a bit – the franchise, the coalition of the willing is perhaps loosening its bonds. It is Anglo-American, and I know a lot of American musicians but I think one way that it is good we collaborate is when rock ‘n’ roll gets heard by British people, who launch the British invasion, then folk-rock and then psychedelia happening in both countries at once. Jimi Hendrix comes over here to become a British act! Then punk evolves in two different ways, in London and New York. So I’m proud to be a part of that, even though I’m determined to remain English – I eat a lot of Marmite and all the rest of it. I place myself as an Anglo-American act. I feel like I belong musically to both cultures. In a way, we all are. Evolving from the compost heap of rock ‘n’ roll, or whatever it is we have sprung out of. It’s nourished by those twin fertilisers.
Robyn Hitchcock’s new album ‘Propellor Time’ is out now
