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There’s nobody in rock music quite like Robyn Hitchcock. Come to think of it, there’s nobody quite like Robyn Hitchcock in anything. A childhood fan of psychedelia and the 60s music he spent his teens immersed in, until the dam broke about the time of punk. But instead of being like everyone else and emulating Sid Vicious, Hitchcock and his new band The Soft Boys owed a debt to a different Syd – Barrett, once of Pink Floyd.
In the 80s he ditched the Boys and embraced the new decade by sounding exactly the same, except with a new level of strangeness and maturity. Songs like Brenda’s Iron Sledge perfected Hitchcock’s unique vision. Now he wrote and recorded immaculate guitar pop welded to lyrics that owed as much to Salvador Dali as to Syd Barrett. The result was a growing following that spilt over from British cult to American college radio, and Hitchcock found himself friends with R.E.M. and the subject of his own concert film directed by Jonathan Demme.
Over the years, Hitchcock’s unique blend of guitar pop, classic songwriting and, for want of a better phrase, skew-whiff psychedelic perspectives on life, love and the pursuit of colourful frogs has always avoided the whimsy that sometimes mars British tea-and-cakes psychedelia. His hinted at a stranger, spookier and much weirder art of darkness. Yes, he wrote Brenda’s Iron Sledge, but he also wrote My Wife And My Dead Wife.
These days he’s lived long enough to have published a second autobiography, and is living in possibly the least Robyn Hitchcock-y city on earth, Nashville. What has changed? Only the world. Because over tens of albums, from The Soft Boys to The Egyptians to the shining now, he’s ploughed a furrow that would be lonely if so many of us weren’t drawn to it.
Now, with his twenty-fifth album, The Confuser, he’s produced one of his best, a collection of confident, certainty-filled songs about an uncertain, unconfident world (“This record seems to be about disintegration,” Hitchcock notes). Old themes re-emerge – there are ghosts and there are dead people – but also there’s a sense of someone in control of their talents.
Songs like How To Feel Alright and the brilliantly named I Am This Thing are Hitchcock at his melodic and verbal best. With guest appearances (Gillian Welch, Kimberley Rew) and a production by Brad Jones that’s simple but brings out the best in the songs, The Confuser showcases Robyn Hitchcock’s talent for combining the enigmatic with the concise. It’s his best album this century.