“The general political malaise isn’t good for songwriting,” says cult singer and songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. “Unless the sight of Nigel Farage galvanises you into producing some demonic piece of modern protest punk.”
Six decades into his music-making journey, and despite the societal volatility, Robyn has kept his music full of uplifting power pop, surreal lyrical insights and psychedelia. As co-founder of seventies act The Soft Boys, and as Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians in the eighties, he’s become a prolific solo artist with his latest record, The Confuser, his 25th solo effort.
Now aged 73, the joyous collection marks a significant creative milestone and shows he’s clearly still got plenty of appetite for the songwriting craft.
“Well it’s what I do,” he smiles from his American home on his continuing creative journey. “If you carry on like I’ve done, you’re inevitably going to get to album number 25. Unless you’re someone like Kate Bush or Bryan Ferry, who thinks very hard about what they do and has the money to sit on top of projects for ages. Someone like me just churns them out.”
Robyn is as self-deprecating and as charming as his music, with our conversation sparked with off-kilter humour. When not in the studio, he’s on the road, keeping the wheels around his music spinning via the Tiny Ghost label, run by his wife and artist Emma Swift.
“I’m more blasé about my songwriting than I was,” Robyn explains of where his musical mojo is currently at. “I’ve learned over the years that songs appear to me. If a song is there, it’ll let you know and you have to receive it. It’s like getting a phone call, if you don’t pick up, it’ll go away and won’t leave a message. Some songs are like cats, they’re subtle, insidious and likely to stalk you.”
The Confuser is Robyn’s first album in four years and latest in a musical career that sprang to life during the mid seventies. His band, The Soft Boys, formed in Cambridge inspired by the songwriting of Syd Barrett and the Beatles. Their 1980 psyche classic Underwater Moonlight is now regarded as a classic of the genre.
Over 45 years later Robyn is still busier than ever, with The Confuser written and recorded in his home in Nashville, the capital of songwriting.
“Living here hasn’t influenced my songwriting but it has affected who I record with as there are so many great players in the city,” Robyn says. “There’s a huge level of empathy and professionalism among the musicians. Nashville wears a Stetson hat for publicity purposes but it’s also a very good place to make a psychedelic rock record.”
The new album bursts with many of his perennial themes - the transience of life, death and his own sense of self alongside lyrical oddness.
Recorded at various Nashville studios, The Confuser features crack accompaniment from Music City session players including guitarist Jeremy Fetzer, bassist Todd Bolden, and drummer/percussionist Eric Slick. Special guests include cherished friends Gillian Welch and Kimberley Rew, Robyn’s Soft Boys co-founder.
“On the album, I love My Dead Astronaut and Ghost in Sunlight is another I really like with Gillian Welch on harmony and Kim playing guitar and me on piano,” he says.
“Gillian came and overdubbed her voice, we spent a long time on it, it’s the most worked on song from the record. Building from the Ruins is a funky jam, I’ve not done anything like it before, I was making it up as I went along and shouting the chords out to the others. It was more experimental than most of my songs and I’m pleased with how it came out.”
Robyn’s wife Emma is a vocalist and has applied some new methods around the recording in order to get the most out of the album’s songs.
“Emma made me go back and redo some of the vocals, she’s a great singer and also quite strict and has said how my voice has been out of tune on some of my records,” he states. “In the days of Underwater Moonlight, the attitude was more important than the take. On some of my music in the eighties, my vocals were horrible but full of attitude. Us Brits are really great at it, you can see it in Liam Gallagher and Ian McCulloch. But now as a kindly old gent, I’m just trying to sing in tune. I think The Confuser features some of my best vocal performances.”
One of Robyn’s ongoing musical preoccupations surrounds human existence and the inevitability of death. It’s a theme that's only increased in prevalence as he’s grown older after being a staple concern throughout his career - My Wife and my Dead Wife, Sounds Great When You're Dead and The Face of Death are just a few songs that have the shadow of mortality hanging over them.
“The less time I have, the more active I feel and thankfully in my later years, I can still get up, tour and wave my guitar around,” he laughs. “Rock and roll is for senior citizens now. However strange one feels, you can just look at the Stones who are far older and further down the path to oblivion. Sooner or later, they, McCartney and Dylan will discontinue so spry youngsters like myself in our early seventies [can take over], there is still that canopy of boomer pioneers waiting to go over the waterfall.”
The Soft Boys formed in 1976 with one of the original concepts being that a robot would front the band, then Robyn would be the guitarist. It was a futuristic idea that never came to pass, in part due to his lack of technical know-how.
“I’m absolutely and practically inept - I did learn to change a plug once with my parents’ gramophone but I generally couldn’t put up a shelf, never mind build a robot,” he continues.
“This was 1976 and I moved to Cambridge, and was beginning to find great local musicians. I wanted to be the Robbie Robertson style Svengali figure behind the band where we’d have this handsome android fronting it. It would have fitted slightly with the science fiction concepts that were percolating, Bowie had a bit of it, but I became my own frontman.”
Underwater Moonlight turns 46 this year and is still one of the highlights in Robyn’s rich and sprawling catalogue. Its ten tracks were populated by Hitchcock's finely drawn characters and served as a blueprint for eighties college rock that dominated the next decade.
“In some ways, it’s a lifetime ago as life can sometimes be very slow, then suddenly, time is gone in a flash,” he says. “Underwater Moonlight was made in what is a vanished world of ashtrays, dial phones, turntables and cassette machines. Other things haven’t changed. It’s still Fender Telecasters and SM58 mikes, so some of the essential ingredients are the same but rock is so history driven these days.
“The great thing is how Underwater Moonlight has lasted, it vindicates me as a songwriter and The Soft Boys as a band, we did come up with something great in a low-key, low-budget way. At that point, we’d been written off by the business and it was down to Richard Bishop who formed the Armageddon label just to put our record out.”
Kimberly Rew had his own songs that he was stockpiling and had massive hits with Walking on Sunshine and Going Down to Liverpool. Bassist Matthew Seligman sadly passed away from Covid during the pandemic but was an energetic bass player.
“He had this bouncy bass style, so enthused and very can-do,” says Robyn. “He was insanely optimistic and in about five different bands, he worked with us, then the Thompson Twins, then Thomas Dolby, and played with Bowie at Live Aid. Morris Windsor played drums with me when I formed Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians in the mid-eighties. Kim and Maurcie play with me off and on - that quartet were friends afterwards, it’s a relatively happy story.”
Robyn’s sound is inspired by a template first forged by the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Revolver enmeshed with the whimsy of Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the sprawling chaotic artistry of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. His live sets wear these influences on their sleeve, seeing him dipping into classics including Waterloo Sunset, Purple Haze and A Day in the Life.
“I was aware back when I started The Soft Boys 50 years ago that I was retro, I was flogging the psychedelic horse at a time when it had long left the stable,” Robyn says.
Still, Robyn’s ability to still be writing, performing and releasing music suggests he’s adept at navigating what can be a notoriously fickle industry. But he’s never deliberately set out to storyboard himself as an artist. Instead, an almost puppyish enthusiasm for listening, writing and performing has sustained him.
“I never thought about it as an opportunity for a nouveau psychedelic act, I could be in,” he states. “I didn’t draw myself as an artist, I’m not very savvy at that. I just take my songs round to people to see if they like them and most of them do. Every so often they get picked up. In more recent years, his wife Emma has run the Tiny Ghost label, helping Robyn continue to carve out his own idiosyncratic space with the music industry.
“There’s this thing where the more monolithic things become, the more corporate they become, the more artisanal and smaller enterprises pop up - the big organisms just swallow each other and get bigger while you have all these little creatures moving around in the foothills, and one of them is us.
“I’ve been on various labels, I’ve had music that has been absorbed into the monolith. I’m just grateful that in the eighties, none of the monoliths were interested in us so I never signed away the rights to Underwater Moonlight. My solo albums belong to me and people still buy them, I’m grateful that I have them.”
With hundreds of songs to his name, advice around the creative process is an obvious question. His response veers from caffeine to sea swimming as ways to get the musical juices flowing while hangovers can also unlock new sonic pastures to explore.
“I don’t recommend them or seek them out but occasionally I give myself one,” he states. “I find it’s one of the best times to pick up a piano or guitar, it’s so hard to focus on what you’re supposed to do. Being hungover to me is having my mind scrambled and it’s trying to reset itself - at that point, it’s wide open and anything can appear.”
He’s also collaborated with a wide range of artists including XTC’s Andy Partridge and REM’s guitarist Peter Buck.
“Partridge is the only person who I’ve ever been able to sit down with and write eyeball to eyeball,” Robyn outlines. “As he’s very quick-witted, it tends to be rather cerebral than emotional, it’s like two old chaps sitting down to do a crossword puzzle. He’s a terrific guitarist and songwriting engineer so what we managed to do sounds great.”
REM’s Peter Buck is a prolific guitarist who has worked with Robyn over various projects down the years, including his outfit, The Venus 3.
“He’s very inventive, if you play a song with him, he will put in plenty of neat guitar hooks, he’s done that a few times for me,” says Robyn. “He’s one of the most empathic musicians out there, there’s no denying it.”
As The Confuser has now been released to rapturous reviews, Robyn is now looking to the autumn where he gets to play the songs live. He’ll be moving between full band and acoustic shows across the UK and Europe and cites his love for playing as an element of his forever youthful vim and vigour.
“I love playing so any chance I get to corral a bunch of people together to play too is very exciting for me,” he says. “I will be playing more rock these days. I’ve now reached this august time in my life, I feel like getting the electric guitar, the pedals and the amp and cranking it all out.”
