Robyn Hitchcock life and biography

Robyn Rowan Hitchcock is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. While primarily a vocalist and guitarist, he also plays harmonica, piano and bass guitar.

"I wished for the impossible when I was a kid," British rocker Robyn Hitchcock once told Rolling Stone. "When I couldn't realize it, I retreated into fantasy." Thirty-some years and 11 albums later, the eccentric Hitchcock has yet to fully emerge. With his witty lyrics and surrealist imagery, the singer and songwriter has created an elaborate fantasyscape populated by bizarre life forms--slimy amphibians, antennaed insects, and creepy crustaceans. And in the psychedelic ooze these inventions trail is a devoted cult following; Hitchcock's fans have developed quite a taste for his peculiar brand of primordial soup.

Born in London in 1953, Hitchcock developed an "intense contempt for normalcy in all its forms" at an early age, he told the San Francisco Chronicle. Inspired by Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," he gravitated toward music as a means of expressing that contempt. At 16 Hitchcock discovered William Shakespeare and avant-garde rock figure Captain Beefheart, the two influences that would establish the foundation for his unique musical perspective. In the early 1970s his interest in Shakespeare led him to study English at Cambridge University, while the allure of Beefheart propelled Hitchcock to the coffeehouse folk scene, where he explored his burgeoning musical style as a solo guitarist.

On the coffeehouse circuit Hitchcock developed the distinctive right-hand picking style that Guitar Player called "a kind of finicky folk that's not sentimental enough for the coffeehouses, and too acerbic and sharply poetic for most rock audiences." Hitchcock explained: "There weren't chorus pedals in the early '70s, and it was hard to make a nice noise, so I innately started picking, which makes you sound like [folk-rocker] Roger McGuinn or something. Everybody else was trying to play like Eric Clapton, but when I did leads I tried to play like Barry Melton from Country Joe and the Fish."

Following the demise of his short-lived acoustic quartet, Maureen and the Meatpackers, Hitchcock formed his first recording group with bassist and keyboardist Andy Metcalf and drummer Morris Windsor in 1976. Dubbed the Soft Boys, the art-punk rock band derived its title from two William Burroughs novels, The Soft Machine and The Wild Boys. Its mission: to "avoid cliche whenever possible." That was "our manifesto," Hitchcock told the Chronicle.

It was with the Soft Boys that Hitchcock perfected his signature surrealist style. Although characterized by a psychedelic quality typical of the musicians of his generation, his was a method, he insisted, that was not drug-induced. "I was influenced by people who had taken LSD," he told the Chicago Tribune, but "I didn't take very much acid. I don't think I needed to, really, because I'd already thought myself into that state." The effect of that condition was captured on the single "Kingdom of Love," recorded in the late 1970s. Offering a classic Hitchcockian juxtaposition of the familiar and the bizarre, it laments: "You've been laying eggs under my skin/ Now they're hatching out under my chin/ Now there's tiny insects showing through/ All them tiny insects look like you." Although labeled a "classic paranoid delusion" by a psychologist, Hitchcock explained to Rolling Stone, the song was "intended to describe the way people have an effect on each other and sometimes have kids."

Although the Soft Boys developed a consistent following after the release of the band's first recordings in 1977 and '78, their irreverent pop sound was ultimately drowned out by angrier young men like the Sex Pistols; unable to withstand the punk-rock tide, the group disbanded in 1981.

Three years later the Soft Boys were reborn as the Egyptians; in addition to Hitchcock, Metcalf, and Windsor, the group counted two new members, Otis Horns Fletcher and Roger Jackson. The band fared well stateside in its new incarnation. The albums Fegmania!, Gotta Let This Hen Out!, and Elements of Light, on the alternative Slash and Relativity labels, rated high on college radio playlists. The band's reputation was enhanced by the enthusiastic endorsement of R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, with whom they began a lasting musical collaboration. In 1988 the Egyptians recorded Globe of Frogs, their first album on the major label A&M. Queen Elvis and Perspex Island followed in 1989 and '91, respectively.

Perspex Island, Hitchcock's first recording with an outside producer, Paul Fox, was "mixed on a car stereo in L.A. because it's designed to be listened to in traffic," reported the Chicago Tribune. Here the artist emerged for the first time from behind his well-fortified wall of crustaceans and alien vegetation. "There's a side of me I've been hesitant to reveal in the past," he told Pitch magazine. "I've always avoided being too vulnerable, too open, afraid of coming off maudlin."

The emotional openness reflected on Perspex Island could be credited to Hitchcock's new-found contentment. "I haven't had therapy or anything," he explained to the Chicago Tribune, "I just have a great girlfriend." Peter Buck and R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe also had something to do with the new confessional mode. Hitchcock told Pitch, "They're very into that sort of thing." Buck played guitar and mandolin on eight of the album's 11 tracks, and Stipe contributed vocals to the cut "She Doesn't Exist."

Despite its sincerity, Perspex Island did not sacrifice the surreal imagery so dear to Hitchcock's diehard fans. The album's title, in fact, was inspired by an acrylic material that's used to make souvenir paperweights; trinkets are suspended in the substance, creating a fossilized Jello effect. "Birds in Perspex," one of the singles off the album, "is basically about wanting something that's dead or frozen to suddenly reanimate," Hitchcock explained in an A&M Records press release. In fact, that "something" does come alive on the album's cover, a creature-filled composition of Hitchcock's own making.

Critics were overwhelmingly positive about Perspex Island' s accessible love songs, assuring Hitchcock that his fear of "coming off maudlin" was unfounded. Quickly becoming a college favorite, the album was praised not only for its exacting rhythms and three-part harmonies but also for its disarming candor. The first single, "So You Think You're in Love," rose to the top of the CMJ Album Network, Gavin Report, and Radio and Records Alternative charts.

Fittingly, Perspex Island' s popularity mirrors Hitchcock's feelings about his shift in musical style. "For a long time, I would rather have been ?1960s Pink Floyd guitarist? Syd Barrett or Bob Dylan than me," he told Spin. "It's taken about half my life to actually stagger into accepting being Robyn Hitchcock. My aim now is to write songs that have emotion."

The 2002 double album Robyn Sings comprised cover versions of Bob Dylan songs, including a live re-creation (performed in 1996) of Dylan's so-called Live at the Royal Albert Hall 1966 concert. Hitchcock celebrated his 50th birthday in 2003 with a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London at which his then-new solo acoustic album Luxor was given away as a gift to all those attending, and an original poem of his was read by actor Alan Rickman.

In 2007, he was the subject of a documentary Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death... and Insects directed by John Edginton, shown on the U.S. Sundance Channel and in the UK on BBC Four (and later released on DVD). "Food, sex and death are all corridors to life if you like. You need sex to get you here, you need food to keep you here and you need death to get you out and they’re the entry and exit signs."

He released the Propellor Time album in 2010, containing new material partially based on the "Sex, Food, Death" sessions shown in the 2007 documentary, but mainly featuring the Venus 3. In 2011, he released Tromsø, Kaptein, an album of songs written in Norway, and released physically only in that country. Robyn was chosen by Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel to perform "I Often Dream Of Trains" at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival, to be curated by Mangum in December 2011 in Minehead, England.

Original studio albums:
-Black Snake Diamond Röle, 1981
-Groovy Decay, 1982
-I Often Dream of Trains, 1984
-Fegmania!, 1985 (with the Egyptians)
-Element of Light, 1986 (with the Egyptians)
-Globe of Frogs, 1988 (with the Egyptians)
-Queen Elvis, 1989 (with the Egyptians)
-Eye, 1990
-Perspex Island, 1991 (with the Egyptians)
-Respect, 1993 (with the Egyptians)
-Moss Elixir, 1996
-Jewels for Sophia, 1999
-Luxor, 2003
-Spooked, 2004
-Olé! Tarantula, 2006 (with the Venus 3)
-Goodnight Oslo, 2009 (with the Venus 3)
-Propellor Time, 2010 (with the Venus 3)
-Tromsø, Kaptein, 2011

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