Hitchcock, Unsettling as Always
Thursday, March 24, 2005; Page C07
The Danish poet and scientist Piet Hein wrote: "Everything's either concave or -vex, so whatever you dream will be something with sex." It's an observation that would sit well with Robyn Hitchcock, that British bard of birth, death and all the messy, freaky stuff in between.
"Seventy-eight percent of my songs are about the shock of existence," Hitchcock declared Tuesday at the Rams Head, amid a series of songs whose arcane and sometimes disturbing imagery suggested the contents of a moldy book found on a high shelf of a restricted section of the campus library. "Creeped Out" and "English Girl," from his recent CD "Spooked," presented a repressed American girl and a witheringly unkind British one, respectively. "Victorian Squid," an upright tune about an uptight society, portrayed a time when carnal pleasure, as Hitchcock noted drolly, was restricted to "fairly wealthy white men with good urologists." And the spectacularly weird "Ole Tarantula" combined cowboy motifs with sexual puns and the creepy image of that leggy beast.
Woven all around the naughty bits was Hitchcock's guitar playing, lush, rhythmic and often blushing with psychedelia. He was acoustic for two-thirds of the set and electric for the last third, and for an encore, after quipping, "Many years ago, before there were PA systems, singers walked among you," he did just that, strolling among the tables while delivering a medley of slightly Hitched-up '70s hits (his version of "Kung Fu Fighting" included the couplet, "It's an ancient Chinese art / Like the British playing darts"). Seems there's a romantic under all that eccentric decadence, albeit one who, when presented with flowers, sniffed them, said, "These ones smell really nice," and then held them to the microphone to share.
-- Pamela Murray Winters
