Robyn Hitchcock has found a niche for himself with a very polite, unassuming brand of psychedelic folk music, where surreal imagery goes hand-in-hand with wry observations of the everyday, and sharp lyrical wit sits alongside wistful nostalgia. His psychedelic side seems to arise more out of natural eccentricity than drug use, and he writes songs that owe as much to Lewis Carroll and Monty Python as to Syd Barrett; songs that wouldn’t sound out of place in a country garden (Not that I've ever actually seen a country garden, of course. But I get the general idea – croquet, parasols, pink lemonade, cucumber sandwiches, those frilly dresses that present the ladies' breasts like a pair of ripe cantaloupes sitting on a tray, etc, etc.). He's the sort of artist who has a cup of tea brought to him onstage, who lists tram-spotting as one of his hobbies ("because there aren't any"), and whose rambling, free-associative interludes are almost as much a feature of his stage show as the songs themselves. A crisp Tuesday night found him in the genteel surrounds of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where a well-heeled, celebrity-studded crowd (and one scruffy BCR hack) have turned out to see him perform his 1984 acoustic album I Often Dream of Trains.
Rather than follow the now-familiar Don’t Look Back formula of running through a whole album in order (usually with grim expressions and minimal stage banter), Robyn tells us that tonight we'll be hearing a "director's cut" (boom boom) of the album, a version of the album as he'd like it to sound. This gives him license to more or less do what he likes, and so he does - kicking things off with a superb rendition of Roxy Music's "More Than This", explaining that Avalon was an inspiration for I Often Dream of Trains. Or, at least, that Avalon made him want to make it "a dark green album" – I still haven't quite figured out what he meant by this. Mind you, over the course of the evening he also variously held forth on Frank Sinatra's quadriceps, the voices in his head, and the possibility of Mary J. Blige covering one of his songs, so maybe it's best not to give it too much thought.
The rest of the set meandered through Trains in no particular order, with a few tracks left out, a few from other albums thrown in (notably the brilliant "My Wife & My Dead Wife"), one Incredible String Band song and plenty of Robyn's wonderful asides in between. After a few songs he was joined by guitarist Tim Keegan and multi-instrumentalist Terry Edwards, who came and went as they were needed, and at one point all three downed instruments for a barbershop rendition of "Uncorrected Personality Traits". The performance as a whole felt very intimate and relaxed, especially for a show at the South Bank, completely unlike the rigid, forced feel of some nostalgia shows. It leaves you with the remarkable impression that they actually enjoy performing this material, even a quarter of a century on.
A five-CD box set of Robyn Hitchcock's 80s material, is out now on Yep Roc Records.
