Certain Songs

Certain Songs #1958: Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians – “Acid Bird (London 04-27-1985)”

November 16, 2020 by Jim Connelly Leave a Comment

Album: Gotta Let This Hen Out!
Year: 1985

. . .

The 1980s were not a good time for live albums.

When the subject comes up, of course, people usually cite Stop Making Sense, but in my TED Talk, I will show that while Stop Making Sense remains an absolutely superlative concert film, the original issue of the album remains underwhelming. Not only did they repeat three titles from 1982’s superior The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, two of them — “Take Me To The River” & “Life During Wartime” — were inferior to the the ones they captured with the Adrian Belew version of the band.

Certain Songs #1957: Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians – “Sometimes I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl (London 4-27-1985)”

November 15, 2020 by Jim Connelly Leave a Comment

Album: Gotta Let This Hen Out!
Year: 1985

. . .

Last week, I pointed out that one of the charms of the songs on Robyn Hitchcock’s I Often Dream of Trains was that you could tell that he was still kind of writing some of them for a band, which is totally borne out by how easily “Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl,” the opening track of his 1985 live album, the extraordinary Gotta Let This Hen Out!, translated to a full band.

Certain Songs #1956: Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians – “Goodnight I Say”

November 13, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Fegmania!
Year: 1985

. . .

It wasn’t until Robyn Hitchcock’s fourth album that he broke through in America.

Of course, by “broke through,” I meant “had an album released,” as none of his first three records were released here. And by that time, he’d hooked up with an official backing band, The Egyptians, two of which — drummer Morris Windsor and bassist Andy Metcalfe — had been in the Soft Boys (though Metcalfe left before Underwater Moonlight.)

Certain Songs #1955: Robyn Hitchcock – “I Often Dream of Trains”

November 12, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: I Often Dream of Trains
Year: 1984

. . .

Framed by an interlocking pair of ghostly electric guitars, the title track of I Often Dream of Trains is a weird will o’ the wisp of a song, so understated in it’s presentation that you don’t even realize how funny it is.

Certain Songs #1954: Robyn Hitchcock – “Autumn is Your Last Chance”

November 11, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: I Often Dream of Trains
Year: 1984

. . .

“Autumn Is Your Last Chance” just might be my favorite Robyn Hitchcock song.

One of the things I love about Robyn Hitchcock is that he’s written some of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard: things like “Airscape,” “Madonna of The Wasps,” “I Am Not Me” and “Raymond and The Wires” are just lovely. That said, I’m going to have to go with “Autumn is Your Last Chance” as The Prettiest Song Ever Recorded, Robyn Hitchcock Division.

Certain Songs #1953: Robyn Hitchcock – “Sounds Great When You’re Dead”

November 10, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: I Often Dream of Trains
Year: 1984

. . .

Of course, just because I Often Dream of Trains was recorded as a drumless album doesn’t mean that the arrangements totally reflected that. After all, up to that point, Robyn Hitchcock had always written music for a band to play behind him, and so there were several songs on the album where you could hear how a band could flesh them out.

That was part of the fun, actually: hearing in your head how some of the songs could have sounded with a band. (And, in fact, Robyn opened his first live album with an absolute killer arrangement of “Sometimes I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl” that we’ll get to in a few days.)

Certain Songs #1952: Robyn Hitchcock – “Uncorrected Personality Traits”

November 6, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: I Often Dream of Trains
Year: 1984

After his fine solo debut album, Robyn Hitchcock went straight back into the studio and made one of the worst records of his career, 1982’s Groovy Decay, which had a couple of decent songs, but that’s pretty much it. Which sucks, because that’s a great album title. And in fact, he had such a terrible time recording it, he quit the music biz for a couple of years.

Certain Songs #1951: Robyn Hitchcock – “The Man Who Invented Himself”

November 5, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Black Snake Diamond Röle
Year: 1981

. . .

Had Robyn Hitchcock disappeared from the face of the earth after The Soft Boys broken up, he still would have been remembered in certain circles for being the main architect of one of the greatest psychedelic guitar albums ever recorded, the still-immortal Underwater Moonlight.

But he didn’t, and in the intervening decades — four of them, actually — since that amazing record, Hitchcock has had a career that is up there with the all-time greats. Or at least if you’re a member of his cult.

Certain Songs #1950: Robert Pollard & Doug Gillard – “Pop Zeus”

November 4, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department
Year: 1999

. . .

And so the conceit of Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department was pretty simple: current Guided By Voices guitarist Doug Gillard would play all of the instruments and Robert Pollard would do all of the vocals. Most of the songs were Pollard’s, but some were co-writes, including the towering “Pop Zeus!”

So, because of that, I don’t know who is responsible for the melody of “Pop Zeus!” but I can report that its an absolute killer. Obviously the words and vocals are Pollard’s and the guitars — oh holy god those guitars! — are Gillard’s.

Certain Songs #1949: Robert Pollard – “Far Out Crops”

November 2, 2020 by Jim Connelly

Album: Kid Marine
Year: 1999

. . .

Recorded around the same time as Do The Collapse — the album with Ric Ocasek where GBV discovered that even with polish, they were too weird to fully break big — with the only real difference in personnel being that Pollard handled all of the guitars, I honestly don’t remember a fucking thing about Kid Marine, except that it was the first in what Pollard called his Fading Captain Series. Or maybe that was the label. Or maybe both.

Oh, and “Far Out Crops,” one of the weird experiments on Pollard’s solo albums that well and truly worked.