From andyh@cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 17 01:26:37 1993 Date: Mon, 16 Aug 93 12:40 BST From: andyh@cogs.susx.ac.uk (Andy Holyer) To: fegmaniax@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: Article in August '93 "Vogue" Here it is - all neatly scanned in. I've OCR's the text, appended below. There was a photo too, which I've scanned in. However it's 300K before uuencoding it, so I'm not posting it (especially since we seem to get everything twice...) Mail me and I'll send you the .gif. (Only in monocrome, I'm afraid). If you're *really* nice to me I might get my Fegmania! poster from its frame and bring that in to scan, too.... -&. ------------------------------ Cut Here ---------------------------- ROCKIN' ROBYN After years on the college circuit, Robyn Hitchcock has finally broken through. By Barney Hoskyns If there were any justice in the world, Robyn Hitchcock would be an English cult hero. But it's the very English middle-class-ness of the man which has made it so tricky for this determinedly quirky character to gain any sort of foothold in the British pop scene. If it's perfectly acceptable for Suede to crawl out of semi-detached Haywards Heath, it's somehow always been unforgiv- able that Hitchcock's legendary post-punk band, The Soft Boys, formed at - pause for blushes - Cambridge University. In the US, though, Hitchcock and his Egyptians - comprising ex-Soft Boys Morris Windsor and Andy Metcalfe - encounter no such invertedly snobbish obstacles to acclaim. Over there, college students (and Robyn's pals R.E.M.) treat him with the kind of reverence reserved for Brits such as Richard Thompson, helping him shift albums in six-figure quantities. (He now lives for most of the year in Washington DC.) Hitchcock's latest A&M album, Respect, provides clues as to how he's managed the transition from left-field Limey odd-ball to credible Nineties rock artist. Chock-full of sparkling tunes and harmonies, therecord shows how far the man's comefrom the unconvincing sub-Syd Barrett psychedelia of his earlier waxings and how moving a melodist he can be when it suits him. "I'd been wanting to write more emotionally direct songs for years," he says. "It only occurred to me fairly recently that I wasn't. I think maybe I just let my- self get a bit too wrapped up in my own wacky aesthetic, and that aesthetic didn't communicate to people." If the fey, playful voice is still there, the songs - the lovely "Railway Shoes", the stark "Then You're Dust" - betray a new, fortysomething maturity. The death of Hitchcock's father last year seems to have made him readier to risk the odd note of seriousness. "Our humour used to mask the fact that we're actually pretty good musicians," he says. "And maybe underneath we were scared of being taken seriously. So we were always flippant and people took it the wrong way." But then, lest we start taking Hitchcock and his Egyptians too seriously, they wind up Respect with the irresistibly daft "Wafflehead", boasting such unforgettable lines as "Her calabash is where I crash/When I escape the bitter lash..." At which point we realise that Robyn Hitchcock will always be a kooky Englishman at heart.