Album: Robyn Hitchcock
Year: 2017
. . .
The fourth (or sixth, if you count the Tower Records in-store and the song from Big Star’s Third) time I saw Robyn Hitchcock in concert was on May 3, 2017 at the Troubadour in Los Angeles.
Starting off with five acoustic songs and then bringing out his touring band, The L.A. Squires, his set covered his entire career, featuring as many songs (four) from Underwater Moonlight as it did from Robyn Hitchcock.
Which, of course, isn’t surprising: given that he has 21 official studio albums as a solo artist, plus nearly that many compilations and live albums, he’s got hundreds of songs at his disposal. So I went into it not hoping for anything (OK, maybe “Madonna of The Wasps,” because c’mon!), and enjoying every single second.
You don’t know where you’re going
Who says when you arrive
Some people will destroy you
In order to survive
I made it to the Time Coast
I made it just in time
I made it just in time
It, of course, would be a great segue to say that one of the songs he played that night was “Time Coast,” the final song from Robyn Hitchcock. But that isn’t the case.
Which is too bad, because “Time Coast” is a song tailor-made for live performance, kicking off with a chugging guitar riff, and featuring psychedelic curlicue leads over nearly the entire thing.
I’m singing to the ruins
(Ah ah ah ah ah)
I’m singing from the past
I’m singing like a fossil
Time goes by so fast
And if you’ve been paying attention at all for the past couple of months, you’ll know that I’m an absolute sucker for the way he holds out “tiiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmmmmmmmmmmeeee” with help again from Emma Swift and Pat Sansone as drummer John Radford does a disorienting double backbeat on his times. It’s beautiful, catchy and psychedelic.
In other words, peak Robyn Hitchcock. Oh, and on Twitter, as we were discussing our favorite Robyn Hitchcock songs, Hunter told me that Robyn had tweeted that this song is about the same beach he wrote “Airscape” about. So there’s there’s that, too.
This is the final Robyn Hitchcock post — well, until I get to the Soft Boys — and he is probably the most obscure artist that I’m going to go this deep on in the entire Certain Songs project. I’m hoping that those of you who love him enjoyed it, and those of you who didn’t really know him discovered some songs you loved.
“Time Coast”
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I love Robyn Hitchcock and I loved the deep dive.
I was a little surprised at some songs that were left out: Queen Elvis, 1974, No, I Don’t Remember Guildford. But you hit Airscape, which is my favorite, Heliotrope, which is my son’s favorite (I got into RH in 1985. My son was born in 1986. Robyn has been part of the background of his entire life) and Raining Twilight Coast, which is just great.
The last show I saw, when you could still see shows, was Robyn, solo, at a dinner theater in the Flats in Cleveland. He accompanied himself mostly on guitar, sometimes on piano and did songs from the Softboys to his latest and it was great.
Awesome! Thank you! And of course, that’s the thing about Robyn’s incredibly deep catalog: there’s a lot for anybody to love.