Robyn Hitchcock

In the beginning there was Syd Barrett. From the early singles of his Pink Floyd, which cranked up the lysergic quotient of the already dosed psych-pop of the Beatles circa '66-'67, to the English band's debut album, a cornerstone of all psychedelia, right through to a brilliant solo career that yielded just two albums, the "crazy diamond" laid the groundwork for eccentric songwriting, thanks to a surreal, off-kilter style that has schooled entire generations of more or less unhinged songwriters. Two cult musicians in particular, running parallel careers, picked up his mantle (not forgetting a worthy third contender, Paul Roland): Julian Cope and Robyn Hitchcock. Both made their debuts straddling the turn of the Seventies and Eighties as leaders of a band: the former fronting Teardrop Explodes, who represented the acid-tinged wing of British new wave and vied for the crown of the Liverpool scene of the era with Echo and the Bunnymen; the latter leading the Cambridge-based Soft Boys, a rare bird during the post-punk era for drawing directly on Barrett-esque Sixties psychedelia (complete with covers of "Astronomy Domine" and "Vegetable Man"), anticipating the similar revivalist stance of the Paisley Underground movement. Both, moreover, disbanded their respective groups after just a couple of albums to devote themselves to prolific solo careers, each amassing some twenty records that, with few ups and downs, continue right up to the present day.

Beyond a shared visionary spirit borrowed from their reference hero, the two nonetheless diverge stylistically: while Cope ranged (and still ranges) across different genres - pop, folk, proto-punk, new wave, space-rock and kraut - over the course of his career, or even within a single record, Hitchcock has always remained faithful to a songwriting style tinged with psychedelia, alternating acoustic settings, especially in his solo work, with electric ones when backed by his backing bands, the Egyptians from 1985 to 1993 and the Venus 3 in the 2000s.

With the Soft Boys disbanded in 1981 (just a year after the release of the masterpiece "Underwater Moonlight"), Hitchcock lost no time and put out his solo debut "Black Snake Diamond Role", a well-crafted record - though perhaps not quite on par with his old band's output - which included the track "Acid Bird", dedicated to his idol Syd. Afterwards, perhaps falling prey to the proverbial "difficult second album syndrome", the follow-up "Groovy Decay" (1982) failed on every front, resulting in a flop with both critics and the public.

As a reaction to the debacle, Hitchcock decided to withdraw from everything and everyone, in a sort of spiritual retreat to a cottage in Sussex. That experience produced not a mystical epiphany, but the recovery of an overflowing creativity, on display in "I Often Dream Of Trains". It's not necessarily his most representative album, but it is his most intimate and heartfelt, the one in which the most hidden recesses of the author's troubled psyche converge. Given its "confessional" nature, the record has been compared to John Lennon's "Plastic Ono Band" (another of his touchstones), but where the ex-Beatle expressed his emotional side in a kind of psychoanalytic session, drawing on the "primal scream" psychotherapy technique he was exploring with American psychiatrist Arthur Janov, "I Often Dream of Trains" feels more like a delirium straight out of a psychiatric ward, made up of the author's obsessions and psychic ghosts, exorcised through a surrealist avant-garde stance and mocking irony. One is almost tempted to approach it with a "psychopathology of everyday psychedelia" mindset, without necessarily wanting to impose a (psycho)logical interpretation on the irrational, but rather with a sense of wonder and bewilderment at the absurd inventions that keep hitting the listener one after another.

It is therefore in the delirious lyrics that the subtle charm of this masterpiece lies, just as much as in the minimal, stripped-back accompaniment, built on voice, guitar (mostly acoustic), piano and little else, conjuring evocative atmospheres with the barest of means.

Turning to the individual tracks, it's worth noting first that the album is bookended by two Nocturnes, brief solo-piano compositions typical of classical music, twilit and minimal in style, vaguely recalling the work of a giant like Satie, evoking a curtain rising and falling on a piece of theatre of the absurd, framing the work within an "other" dimension, personal and unique. Between these two extremes, anything can happen: Hitchcock confesses to wanting to be a pretty girl in order to do something unspecified in the shower (one might think of auto-erotic practices...) in the acoustic punk sketch "Sometimes I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl"; or, behind an apparently cheerful and harmless little tune for solo voice, there lurks a psychodiagnostic journey that, starting from a dysfunctional relationship with parents, leads in sequence to confused sexual identity, psychosis, alcoholism and suicide, with a black humor even more cynical than the self-mockery of "Madcap Laughs"; or the author even flirts with death on "Sounds Great When You're Dead", an obsessive verse and chorus somewhere between Sixties classics and britpop ones, but with an eccentricity and deathly allure that have few equals.

Alongside the madness of these bewildering pieces comes the schizophrenia of an album that alternates them with more composed, reflective ones, like "Cathedral", in which the cathedral in question is that of the mind, a Gothic, intricate construction easy to get lost in, or "Flavour Of Nights", which picks up the classical piano of the nocturnes in spirals that envelop the listener before exploding into a sublime, tear-jerking chorus, one of the album's melodic peaks.

Halfway through the tracklist, Hitchcock seems to catch his breath with the placid country of "Ya Sleeping Knights Of Jesus", before setting off again energetically with "This Could Be The Day", like a resurrected and revitalized Barrett, ready to face the long-awaited day of reckoning - though the seeming optimism is pierced by visionary flashes of bells and tongues of fire, tropical nights and Nubian slaves, archetypal figures that would have piqued the curiosity even of a famous psychiatrist and symbolist like Carl Gustav Jung.

The second half continues in a mix of the serious (the visionary instrumental "Heart Full Of Leaves" and "Autumn Is Your Last Chance", in the vein of Nick Drake) and the playful ("Furry Green Atom Bowl", an old-fashioned vocal spiritual-blues complete with call-and-response, which would have been perfect for the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' grotesque "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"), swinging between sedated Beatles and crystalline folk ("Trams Of Old London"), culminating in the (anti-)climax of the title track, an indefinable song with shimmering guitar work that casts a faint light over its shadowy, evanescent vocal melody, with trains rising to the status of a mythical place in a timeless, metaphysical dimension where one might meet a love lost, for one reason or another, along the way.

Closing the show is the second nocturne, but only in the original edition, because subsequent ones add, besides demos of some tracks, previously unreleased songs slotted into the tracklist that hold up remarkably well, such as the heartfelt serenade "I Used To Say I Love You" and the one parodied with a demented, Frank Zappa-esque voice, "Mellow Together", or the breezy, cocktail-lounge acoustic pop of "My Favourite Buildings".

Syd Barrett's influence on Robyn Hitchcock is evident both stylistically (bare, minimal folk propping up crooked or dreamlike melodies) and lyrically (visionary flashes, tender romanticism and grotesque irony), yet the two figures don't fully overlap in their approach: while the crazy diamond created a style almost unwittingly out of nothing, spontaneously and naturally expressing himself, and accidentally his own distress, his heir seems to play with madness and the mind's distorted mechanisms with a certain self-awareness, turning it into art (though it's hard to say how genuinely balanced he was, psychically, at the time). This isn't meant to reduce Hitchcock's attitude to a mere pose of the talented madman straddling genius and insanity; it's more fitting to think of him as a kind of Salvador Dalí applied to pop music, so much so that the paranoid-critical method used by the famous painter ("a spontaneous irrational method based on the critical-interpretative association of delirious phenomena") could well be applied to the creative process behind a surreal record like "I Often Dream Of Trains" - a masterpiece well worth rediscovering, not least because "often dreaming of trains" has never before been at once so bizarre and so wonderful.

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14/01/2018