Known for his offbeat humor, absurdist lyrics and stream-of-consciousness riffs, singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock returns to Sundance Channel in this original concert film shot in New York in late 2008. Here the cult favorite — dressed in a polka-dotted shirt and matching guitar — is joined by Terry Edwards on keyboards, horns, bass and piano and Captain Tim Keegan on guitar to perform songs from his 1984 album I OFTEN DREAM OF TRAINS, including “Cathedral” and “I Used to Say I Love You.” John Edginton directs.

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Robyn Hitchcock has been contributing his ideas for preventing climate change in two recent GREEN BLOG posts. His trip in the arctic continues and he recently performed at the launch event for his Cape Farewell Arctic excursion. He wrote some new lyrics for the popular song “Cocaine.”

Check out his performance now. You can find it here [blip.tv].

This post is part two of an ongoing commentary on the arctic and the general environmental disaster facing the world. Robyn Hitchcock really cares about climate change and he focuses his unique artistic style on his writing about the subject. You can read the first part of his dialogue on climate change here [www.sundancechannel.com].

Two standard responses to the problem of global warming are that
either it’s not really happening or, if it is, there’s nothing we can
do about it now so why not leave all the lights on? Well, it is
happening, and the sooner we tame our energy emissions, the sooner
the earth can return to being habitable for the citizens and other
creatures of the 22nd century. Time is unlikely to stop when we die,
it just seems that way sometimes. It’s true that we on this Cape
Farewell expedition used aviation fuel and diesel to get here, but we
will take the story back with us and spread it like butter on the
toast of our item-rich society. As the scientists aboard research the
effects of ice-melt on the ocean bed, and trace the possible mutation
of the Gulf-stream through salination tests, we artists are being
exposed to a landscape that cannot fail to affect our work.

Slugs leave trails, sheep leave droppings, bees make honey, and
humans leave two things: art and garbage. Where these meet is called
entertainment. Like others on this ship, I am an entertainer. Last
night some of us played in Murphy’s bar in Illulissat, a small
Greenlandic town which has a post office, fire station, and much
laundry out to dry, despite being under a foot of snow. Some young
local musicians played a fine set of blues rock, aided by KT
Tunstall, Feist and myself with a couple of scientists from the
expedition on backing vocals.

Earlier in the day, I was lucky enough to see Marcus Brigstocke half
way up a snowy crag, doing a stand-up routine in his corduroy suit.
As this was for the cameras, we were told not to laugh, which made
his show even funnier. As his fingers froze, Marcus ranted on the
malevolent spirit of Londoners in traffic, cursing into mobiles about
other cell-phone users at the wheel. In the distance behind him
stretched miles of slowly crumbling blue icebergs, a terrain most of
us had never seen before and, if we leave it more than 10 years, will
never see again.

Just prior to that, as we reached the summit, we discussed The Edgar
Broughton Band and the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival: the more majestic
the ice-scape around us, the more we sheathed ourselves in pop culture.
We are stardust, we are golden, and we make one hell of a mess.
Greenland has been assaulted by alcohol (’mad water’) and
Christianity, now it has the chance to make some money selling its
oil. This would be like giving a terminal lung-cancer patient a
consignment of duty-free cigarettes.

The great Isfjord is home to a glacier that has lost 15 kilometers in
as many years. The icebergs shed by this float around Illulissat
harbour, shot through with a luminous blue and looking edible,
somewhere between ice cream and cheese. Like those other endangered
killers, the polar bear and the human, the icebergs can look very
attractive. Scattered on the sea or washed
ashore, each one has a shape that suggests something: a pie on the
horizon, a body under a sheet, a giant nose set free from its face,
or a grinning frog’s head. Deep blue veins run through them, water
that has entered the cracks as the glacier sheds itself and then
frozen. The ever-shifting Arctic light gives the colours of the
icebergs a range from pink to grey, but the blue luminescence that
suffuses them is their most magical quality. The purpose of human
existence may now be simply to go shopping, but a glint of meaning is
to be found by anyone lucky enough to see these floating apparitions.
Look but don’t touch.

Robyn Hitchcock, one of the great contemporary musical talents of the world, provides a poetic recounting for some of the sights that he encounters on his arctic trip. We hope you enjoy.

“I cannot begin to start or stop describing this place. To say something is grey means little, it is green also. And white. What we imply by ‘god’ is a being with no perspective, no point of view, but eyes that peer from everywhere. This ship is full of eyes. It docked today in Qeqertarsuaq, a fishing town at the southern tip of Disko Island.

This morning my spectacles fell off my head into the sea as I clambered aboard a zodiac (a low-in-the-water black rubber boat that seats 12 and one helmsman).

The boat rolls on the rolling sea. Lemn wonders if we are going somewhere or is it only the sea that is moving? We are going one way and the sea is going another, I assume – and we have to make that work, to get to our destination.

Which is Jakobshavn, tomorrow, where a great glacier has infinitesimally crumbled into the sea over the centuries; less infinitesimally of late – the glacier has lost 15 km over the last 10 years. It becomes thousands of luminous blue icebergs. One of them appeared outside our porthole, in the sea, this morning. We all photographed it, as if it was a firstborn child. Now the icebergs pepper the horizon, squeezed out like gorgeous, lethal children, never to return. They must float till they dissolve.

So far, I know, this is Arctic Lite – we are as yet below the 70th parallel; it isn’t necessary to wear thermal underwear and our breath does not crackle in the air. There are no polar bears, cute and deadly, and the giant ‘bergs are yet to come. This endangered world can still slay us, but we humans are lining it up to kill in our sights; have already pulled the trigger, it seems, whilst aiming for something else.

The oily green-grey sea swells to the blue-grey, pregnant sky. The luminescent icebergs, magically lit from within, patrol the waves. We photograph them as the ship sways. In the bar we sit like generals, tapping our memoirs out on the laptops that click as they inherit the earth and tell you what you’ve misspelt. As the ocean growls and some folks’ stomachs do likewise, Ray LaMontagne and the Doves play to us in our cosy warren. Such a thin line between being and not being. As you reach the border, life lights up. It gets more vivid as you near the edge, and picnic there.

Today we walked around Godhavn, at the bottom of Disko Island: blue, green and lilac-painted houses, with their washing drying in the rain, roost at the foot of heather-clad hills that rise up into the clouds. From afar, the heather is rust-coloured`; from close up, it is purple, pink, and orange, shot through with miniature green plants that look like Arctic cacti, and red & yellow leaves from boot-level micro-shrubs. Springy underfoot, interlaced with icy streams and minute ponds. Above us, pterodactyls soared around the snowy crags, and as I looked back to the bay, a lone plesiosaur thrust its tubular neck and blunt head through the bonsai waves among the icebergs and turned to face the shore. As Nathan and I watched, it yawned open its capacious mouth and then dove back underwater before Nathan could adjust his telephoto lens.

Later, as Marcus, Michèle, Hannah & I discussed Chuck Norris and ate sandwiches on a stone out-crop, the clouds began to dissolve, revealing snow-patterned hills that looked hallucinatory in the still cold air. Out in the bay, the icebergs clustered as if they needed feeding; up on the hill we sat, endangered killers – like the polar bear and the iceberg – enjoying a picnic at the edge of the world.”

By Robyn Hitchcock

Read the second part [www.sundancechannel.com] of Robyn Hitchcock’s views on the arctic part of the world.

The current climate-induced peril the world is experiencing can often be described in very drab, academic jargon that only a scientist would understand. This “members only” quality of the environmental movement presents a major barrier to involving a huge segment of the population in a concerted effort to reverse climate change. There are still people out there who feel human beings are not the cause of climate change (apparently dense scientific reports are not convincing or even approachable enough for these individuals).

Image from Cape Farewell website that depicts a google map that takes you through the expedition

David Buckland [www.capefarewell.com] created the Cape Farewell Project with the express intent of bridging the gap between science and art in the attempt to educate people about climate change. David recognizes that some people respond better to scientific education and other people prefer some type of entertainment aspect to be a part of their learning process. He decided that the combination of art and science could create a more widely accepted message about the need to understand and then take steps to create a healthy planetary environment.

The Cape Farewell Project is a yearly excursion of around 40 artists, scientists and educators. The ‘creative team,’ as they are called, get in a large sailboat and head up to arctic areas of the north pole. They call this region “The Front Lines of Climate Change.” On September 24th, the seventh excursion is scheduled to begin.

Some of the celebrities going on the trip include Feist, Laurie Anderson, Martha Wainwright, KT Turnstall, Robyn Hitchcock, Marcus Brigstocke and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Find out more details on the crew here [www.capefarewell.com].

If you are interested in getting more info about this noble enterprise, then you can head over to the Cape Farewell Website [www.capefarewell.com]. If you are looking to get periodic updates on the most important information, and would consider putting a Cape Farewell Widget on your own website, then you can find all the details about embedding this widget here [www.capefarewell.com].

We hope you enjoy and remember to leave a comment on this blog post if you have any thoughts on the information presented here.

Robyn Hitchcock gives us a look at the man behind the mask in an exclusive interview. Catch more exclusive videos and Comedian Eugene Mirman interview with Hitchcock in our Spotlight [www.sundancechannel.com] section.