ROBYN HITCHCOCK

Comedian Eugene Mirman tours the US regularly headlining shows, performing with Patton Oswalt’s “Comedians of Comedy” and opening for bands such as Modest Mouse and The Shins. As a longtime fan of Hitchcock we thought the two would pair perfectly for a one-on-one conversation about Hitchcock's career.

Eugene: Where are you now?
Robyn: In Seattle which is a place we often stay when we’re in the states. Have you been here?

Eugene: I have. In the last maybe six years I’ve gone a lot, because both the record labels that I’ve been on have been in Seattle.
Robyn: Oh, right. You made albums for Sub Pop?

Eugene: Yes. Also Suicide Squeeze, both of which are Seattle labels. But my albums are comedy because I have no rhythm or anything.
Robyn: So you mean because you’re arrhythmic or dis-rhythmic?

Eugene: I am arrhythmic and potentially atonal. I don’t really know. I’ve never really gone to a doctor of music. I have no musical skill.
Robyn: Would you like to?

Eugene: In a sense yes, but not enough to take whatever steps people do to learn. I do love music but I’m just incapable of it, so I do comedy.
Robyn: Well, that makes sense. Music and comedy - they’re sort of branches from the same tree or trees from the same branch or something like that.

Eugene: Yeah, I’m not sure which analogy to use, but one of those two.
Robyn: And you know, people who like one tend to like the other. Certainly people with no sense of humor don’t like -– well, they don’t like what I do.

Eugene: No?
Robyn: I suppose my stuff is fairly untypical. I’m not sure.

Eugene: Is humor very purposeful in your music, or is it sort of a byproduct?
Robyn: It’s an ingredient and if it falls below a certain level then a red light comes on. So I never consciously try to be funny, if I go for three-and-a-half minutes and there’s nothing remotely funny about what I’ve said, then I’m in trouble. Because the chances are I’m not producing three-and-a-half minutes of undiluted genius that needs no wit to make it palatable. In some ways, the worse things get, the funnier they need to be in order to be able to sort of stand it. Not that I’m telling anybody anything particularly - any drastically new bad news. My bad news, like the golf ball, has been around forever. You have those people trying to tell you “Hey, have you heard the good news?” For me, I’m supposed to be the bloke on the corner saying, “Have you heard how terrible it is.”

Eugene: So not particularly sad, but funny.
Robyn: I think so. Technically I would have been a comedian - but my dad was a comedian. My dad was funny, but he was quite shy and he didn’t get out and schmooze.

Eugene: Did he ever perform comedy?
Robyn: No, but he was funny. His books were funny and his letters were funny and everything he did essentially resolved itself in the absurd. But he was a little bit overprotected and he didn’t get out enough and induce his humor in folks. He was a charming and often very funny chap, but he thought he was antisocial.

Eugene: Are you far left antisocial?
Robyn: Yeah. I mean, I have my sociopathic streak like any artist;

Eugene: You mean sometimes you can’t feel other people’s pain?
Robyn: I think sometimes I can’t feel other people’s pain enough. I don’t know. Do you think you have that trouble?

Eugene: I guess it depends how far away I am from them.
Robyn: (laughs)

Eugene: If they’re very close by I can -– it’s very easy. If I can see them or they’re really close I definitely can feel it. If they get further away then I can sort of extrapolate what it must be like.
Robyn: You’re probably quite empathic.

Eugene: At times.
Robyn: I mean, you have nice eyes.

Eugene: Yes…………..Wait, did you say I have nice eyes?
Robyn: I said you’ve got nice -– yeah, both of them.

Eugene: Thank you very much.
Robyn: It’s not like, you know, one of your eyes is nice but the other one I’m not so sure about. Was there a point in time when you might have become a doctor?

Eugene: No. Why?
Robyn: I just wondered. I could imagine Dr. Mirman.

Eugene: There wasn’t really a time where I could have particularly become anything else because I feel like my ability to focus on things slowly disappeared and now mostly I can just write weird jokes. That’s what my skill set has become, but I rather enjoy it so it’s not bad at all.
Robyn: It’s what comes most naturally to you?

Eugene: Yes and it’s also a way of channeling both joy and frustration, I guess.
Robyn: Well, it’s what you think and feel, I suppose. We’re obviously pretty similar. I suppose I do what comes most naturally to me, although I didn’t have any musical ability as a kid. I could make people laugh - but I couldn’t make them cry and I certainly couldn’t make up tunes or anything.

Eugene: In the documentary “Sex, Food, Death and Insects” on Sundance Channel, you mentioned that you never had formal training. How did you learn to make up a tune?
Robyn: Willpower. My parents did give me a guitar when I was fourteen. The legendary psychedelic bar mitzvah of which I’ve spoken in 1967. I didn’t even know how to tune it and my parents didn’t either. Their goodwill extended to giving me this guitar, but I don’t think they were that desperate for me to learn it. Then I found these records and I just sat there picking along to them. About six months later a man with three bent back fingers who was virtually unable to play and was about 80 was hired to give me some guitar lessons and he showed me how to tune it. At that point I got hold of the Bob Dylan songbook and realized that you can play A, E and D really effortlessly.

Eugene: Did you just start learning Dylan songs?
Robyn: Yeah, because he was my sort of main obsession then. It was the 1960s and Dylan was at his peak and to a fifteen-year-old he was pretty much God.

Eugene: Have you ever met Bob Dylan?
Robyn: No, have you?

Eugene: No, I haven’t.
Robyn: I know people who have but on the whole I feel like he’s just there to kind of get the better of you in some way.

Eugene: Meaning he’s a trickster?
Robyn: I think it’s very difficult. If you’re somebody that everybody in the world has wanted to meet for forty-five years, you’re social skills are going to dwindle a bit.

Eugene: I imagine it would be incredibly overwhelming.
Robyn: The last thing you’re going to want to do is meet a new person. And everybody comes up to him looking like they’re the salad and he’s the cream. I imagine it must be tempting to play with people. I think that’s what he does. I think Dylan needs to be met by people who either don’t know who he is or don’t care. People who are not that interested in his legacy and his art and he’d probably get on with them fine. But anyway, he’s still there and I learned Dylan chords and then the Beatles and then it went from there. I was lucky to be growing up listening to all that stuff. I was sort of there from 10 to 16 as the Beatles went from “Please, Please Me” up to “Let it Be”. By about the end of the ‘60s I could feel that the bloom was beginning to die and that what was left was a lot of people with long hair making noisy music that went on too long. So I just decided to become a sort of complete fatalist and decided that everything was all over and I might as well retire. And only the need to make a living and the fact that I hadn’t physically died prevented me from just sitting in my parent’s attic for the rest of my life.

Eugene: Did you consider anything else or did you just basically go from 14 to the Soft Boys?
Robyn: I went from 14 to wherever I am now, 54. I had odd jobs and I had odd and not so odd relationships. I had interesting bands working their way up to being the Soft Boys. In a way my life has been –- I mean, there’s been a lot of turbulence but I don’t think I’ve ever changed course.

Eugene: It seems like you have the control you probably want over the music you’re making. Is this true?
Robyn: I think I mostly had -– there have been a couple of periods when I was perhaps a bit compromised by the company I was in and the label I was on, but never enormously. No one ever said you’ve got to make a rap record or something like that.

Eugene: Did anyone ever say, “We need this more Robyn Hitchcockier?” Is that something that happens when you’re on a big label?
Robyn: Not “more”….but I think the problem with being on a big label was that people didn’t know exactly what it was about my work that appealed to people.

Eugene: Did you ever particularly try to please the label or did you mostly try to sort of please yourself?
Robyn: I tried to please myself but there were points when the label was suggesting what the singles would be. We had a song called “So You Think You’re In Love”, which they spent about as much money on promoting that as you’d spend on the entire Soft Boys and Robyn Hitchcock.

Eugene: I remember seeing the video on television.
Robyn: And you know, they spent -– God knows what they spent on that one. We used to do videos for 200 pounds which is like $400 or something. Even the “Balloon Man” video which got a lot of showing on MTV, I think that only cost us very little. We had a budget for some helium - so we blew up a rubber glove.

Eugene: In the documentary you mentioned that you feel more comfortable in the spotlight now than you did before.
Robyn: It was a weird thing. I mean, I sought it out but then when I had it, I kind of felt uncomfortable with it. It was a funny mixture of fearing that I wasn’t going to be able to hold people’s attention. Do you get that when you get on stage? Thinking oh God; they’re just going to see through me.

Eugene: Yes. I’m always afraid that people will think I’m a bit of a shamble of lies.
Robyn: A shamble of lies?

Eugene: Yes. But then sometimes - you really connect and they really like it. You feel like you’re really getting across and it all sort of melts away and becomes great. But if not that, then you’re filled with this sort of terror. I guess by claiming you are professional you become it and then you’re not sure. I feel like a lot of people are made up of different levels of hidden insecurities.
Robyn: Actually in the very early days when I first came to America, I’d had an operation and I went out on the road for my first proper U.S. tour way too early and I was still recovering. It was a kind of mysterious operation in the abdomen area for some sort of -- something that looked like a caterpillar somewhere in my lower abdomen which no one else ever seems to have had. And it never came back, but it had to be taken out and I had a very powerful anesthetic and I was still limping. I was still groggy and of course we got to New York, you know, stayed up ‘til seven in the morning for three nights. Everyone was pleased to see us and we thought “Yeah! We’ve arrived.” I got to San Francisco and I just keeled over in this restaurant. I sort of came to and then it seemed alright but the next morning I got up and I was scampering down to breakfast and suddenly I felt like a plug was being pulled inside me. I couldn’t stay through the sound check because I couldn’t hold my guitar. I’d gotten to this weird overtired state where I couldn’t sleep and I had no physical strength. And then I started getting panic attacks. I then developed this phobic thing that I was going to die on stage - so while the other guys were all dying to get back and do encores I’d be thinking “I’ve got to get off. If I get off stage now I won’t die”, and I don’t think that really helped my stagecraft.

Eugene: What year...when was this?
Robyn: ’85, ’86. That initial period when we were kind of popular in America, I was actually kind of...

Eugene: Terrified?
Robyn: I was terrified. I may well be snatched away by a giant eagle when I get on stage and I may well pass away on stage - but I no longer dread that anymore than passing away at LAX or whatever it is. Now I just think “great, I’m really pleased that I’m doing this.” You know, I’m also really glad I’m doing it and that I’ve got Scott McCaughey and Peter Buck helping out.

Eugene: How did you originally meet Scott?
Robyn: Scott came in to my life at a time of great exaltation and fear in the form of a support act. He was in the Young Fresh Fellows. They were opening for me and the Egyptians actually in my sort of panic attack phase in early ’86 and we started having lots of fun in the midst of fear. It was glorious in a way and terrifying in another. Anyway, Scott and the Fellows were opening for three dates in California so I met him then and we gradually became more in touch to the point where in ‘94 I was supposed to be recording with Peter - but Peter had gone over to Europe. So I couldn’t do the stuff with Peter, but Scott was there so we did a gig and we’ve been good friends ever since.

Eugene: Did Scott play with you on any of the post-Egyptian stuff?
Robyn: Both Scott and Peter played on “Jewels for Sophia”. In fact that’s basically the Young Fresh Fellows with Tim Keegan and Peter Buck.

Eugene: That’s was such a beautiful record.
Robyn: Thank you.

Eugene: You’re welcome.
Robyn: Hang on a second. (Interruption.) We have to go to sound check now, unfortunately.

Eugene: Alright then. Thanks for taking the time.
Robyn: Not a problem – take care.

Eugene: Bye.
Robyn: Bye