ROBYN HITCHCOCK AND THE EGYPTIANS fegMANIA! "For thine is the kingdom ..." [handwritten] What is FEGMANIA? It has come for your sister. Also for your husband, that kindly man with something poking out of his head. It has come for your arms, and it will change your concept of hygiene. It may be the sound of a plane crash-landing in a ploughed field, or salad cream being tipped out of an attic window. There are stars, winds and judges - people in scarlet rags that pull frogs out of each others' mouths. FEGMANIA RISES! Light pulsing from a bruised sun that eats into tired rugs. Light coursing from a swarming moon that careens in frozen ecstasy across the sky - naked people oozing on warm mud with the radio tuned to Venus. Here is music to implode by. Here is FEGMANIA! A turnip in a silver box. A dromedary lurching through the House of Commons. A bank manager shooting himself in the navel with a waterpistol. A royal baby with permanent amnesia. A vampire at the Cenotaph. Respectable people with uncontrollable urges freed only by the disconnection of their heads. A nun writing her name in marmalade on a soldier's leg. One word. "... And mine is the other bit" R2 71387 c 1995 Rhino Records Inc. "We just kind of fell into the old routines, like people who always grasp the same things with the same fingers." - Robyn Hitchcock With the Soft Boys safely in the rearview mirror and three solo records to his credit, Robyn Hitchcock had no intention of forming a band called The Egyptians when he set about recording _Fegmania!_ Actually, he was altogether free of intentions, having just completed work on _I Often Dream Of Trains_, and really proposed only to make a short film for fun. Still, the legacy of the Soft Boys and their elegant, oddly sophisticated psychedelia - what Robyn today dryly calls "retro-delic" - proved inescapable. "Morris Windsor [drums], Andy Metcalfe [bass], and I had been on a radio show in Cambridge in late 1983, when a posthumous Soft Boys record came out," Robyn recalls, "and it was the first time we'd all been together for a long time. It was quite fun. I'd just made _Trains_ on my own, and it was actually very innocent." All of which was lurking about Robyn's brain a few days after. "I was walking down the Archway road, this dusty, dirty, horrible kind of vein that slides into the north of London," he remembers, "and I'd got two-thirds of the way home and suddenly thought 'Yes, the man with the lightbulb head.' So I went home and wrote 'The Man With The Lightbulb Head,' and I thought there could be a film to go with it. I contacted my friend Tony Moon, who'd been in Motor Boys Motor [who became The Screaming Blue Messiahs], and we decided to make a short film. The original plan was actually to make a series of videos and release them in a packet that looked as if it were soap powder, but actually would hold six low-budget videos." They finished one, a super-8 stop-motion short that featured Robyn's young daughter Maisie and, well, a man with a lightbulb head. "I bought an action man, cut his head off and stuck a little lightbulb in it, and then I wired him up from behind," Robyn says with relish. "We did stop-frame, so that he became the man with the lightbulb head, moving around. You move it a couple of millimeters, click the camera, and then do it again. Anyway, I hate explaining things." The film required a soundtrack, so Robyn paid for a bit of studio time and recorded "The Man With The Lightbulb Head" with John Kingham, then-drummer with the Messiahs. And things simply escalated, though by this point _I Often Dream Of Trains_ hadn't yet been released. "This was the first stuff I'd done with drums for a few years, so I then had a couple of other songs [including "Dwarfbeat," "Some Body" and "Another Bubble"], and I did those with Morris, with whom I hadn't recorded for some time. Then we did a session with Andy in the summer, and we certainly hadn't played together for five years, not the three of us. "I had these songs, 'My Wife & My Dead Wife,' 'Goodnight I Say,' 'Insect Mother,' and 'I'm Only You,' and I just sort of ran through them. I'd never played them on electric guitar, really, and we all got together in Alaska - where else? [Much of Robyn's best work, solo and with the Soft Boys, has been recorded at Alaska Studios.] We just had one day's rehearsal, we recorded the next day, and it was fantastic. Working with Andy and Morris utterly transformed the songs. So that's about two-thirds of an album or something. Anyway, it all sat there, and _Trains_ was coming out, and I wasn't planning to do any gigs." Having planned nothing, things just kept falling into place. "The Hope & Anchor, a club where the Soft Boys and lots of other people used to play - The Stranglers, The Damned, Ian Dury, all that lot - was in financial trouble, and asked me if I'd do a benefit," Robyn continues. "I hadn't done a gig for ages, but I quite fancied it because I was in touch with Andy and Morris again, so we got my friend [James] Fletcher to come and play sax, and Roger Jackson, who'd been part of the Cambridge music mafia, to play keyboards. "At the Hope & Anchor they'd got behind with their payments and into a bad spiral. They'd had their electricity cut off, so they had their own generator. It was the first gig that I'd done in England for two and a half years. We were thumping away when the fuel ran out, and the generator stopped. There were all these deranged Welsh hippies in front of me blowing smoke into my face, and when the PA went off they all chanted along; Fletcher was wailing away on sax, and Morris was playing the drums - it was a great gig. We raised some money for the Hope, but it closed down anyway." Still, they'd needed a name for the show, and The Egyptians it was. "So, with a little help from the ghost of the Soft Boys," says Robyn, "we'd got the Egyptians going. The big difference was that this wasn't guitar-based. I played the guitar, but we had keyboards and sax; it wasn't going to be a guitar battle like the Soft Boys." Other songs slowly fell into place. "'Insect Mother' goes back to 1981," Robyn says. "I first recorded it for _I Often Dream Of Trains_, but it was kind of sterile, so I did it again with Andy and Morris and that put bubbles all over it." The demo version, presented here for the first time, was recorded in James Smith's flat in North London as part of the first _Trains_ rehearsals; "I think you can hear a car changing gears outside," Robyn adds. The original version of "Egyptian Cream," which also appears here for the first time, was recorded early in the process that became _Groovy Decay_, Robyn's second solo record, in 1982. "That was done at [ex-Soft Boy bassist] Matthew Seligman's place, on one of his machines," Robyn says. "I think he had a keyboard that you couldn't play chords with, you could only play one note at a time. Matthew was basically trying to adjust to what was happening in the early '80s, while I was taking no notice of it whatsoever. Matthew had bought all this electropop gear, got his coif together, covered his demo room with plastic tubes, and glued lots of sexy bin liners to the ceiling. Matthew very much moved with the times, whereas I sank through them like a stone." The final bonus track, the instrumental "The Pit Of Souls," came before the public in a more condensed form on _Invisible Hitchcock_. "This version was a rerecording in '84 with four extra movements: 'The Plateau,' 'The Descent,' 'The Spinal Dance,' and 'Flight Of The Iron Lung," Robyn says. "It was basically an attempt to get something like the flipside of _Low_ or _Heroes_. I'd been listening to a lot of [Brian] Eno in East Sussex. I was interested in seeing whether I could create soundscapes without words." And then there is a bit of thematic underpinning: "A lot of the stuff from _Fegmania!_ is basically quite sexual," Robyn says. "The topics are muted - it's not like Madonna, it's the reverse. I won't go to any lengths to point out, 'Look, this is sex, folks, why don't you buy it?' but I think there was a lot of squirming sexual activity in _Fegmania!_" Lastly, there is the matter of the fegs. Robyn explains: "We had fegweevils, fegballs, fegmobile, fegism. _Fegmania!_ is really like putting two wild adverbs together and watching them mate, except neither of them are adverbs." - Grant Alden 1. Egyptian Cream (3:31) 2. Another Bubble (2:44) 3. I'm Only You (4:26) 4. My Wife & My Dead Wife (4:16) 5. Goodnight I Say (3:12) 6. The Man With The Lightbulb Head (3:03) 7. Insect Mother (1:52) 8. Strawberry Mind (2:48) 9. Glass (3:11) 10. The Fly (3:48) 11. Heaven (4:40) 12. Bells of Rhymney (3:29) 13. Dwarfbeat (2:58) 14. Some Body (3:19) (_Fegmania!_ was originally composed of tks 1-11, and issued as Midnight Music [UK] #CHIME 00.08, 3/85; Tk 12 was issued earlier on the 12" EP _The Bells Of Rhymney_, Midnight Music [UK] #DONG 8, 12/84; Tks 13 & 14 were first issued on the 12" EP _Heaven_, Midnight Music [UK] #DONG 12, 5/85; Tks 12-14 were later included as bonus tracks on the CD release of _Fegmania!_ [same #], 1986) Bonus Selections: 15. Egyptian Cream (Demo) (4:34) 16. Heaven (Live) (4:53) 17. Insect Mother (Smithsound Demo) (1:40) 18. Egyptian Cream (Live) (5:33) (Tracks 15-18 are previously unissued) 19. The Pit Of Souls (Parts I-IV): I. The Plateau, II. The Descent, III. The Spinal Dance, IV. Flight Of The Iron Lung (9:57) (Originally issued on the 12" EP _Brenda's Iron Sledge_, Midnight Music [UK] #DONG, 17, 2/86) All Songs Written By Robyn Hitchcock & Published by EMI Virgin Songs, Inc. (BMI)/Two Crabs Music (PRS) except "Bells Of Rhymney" by Idris Davies & Pete Seeger, Arranged by Roger McGuinn & Published by Tro Essex Music. Personnel: ROBYN HITCHCOCK: vocals, guitar (1-14, 16-19), bass (1, 2, 6, 13, 14, 19), keyboards (1, 15, 19) ANDY METCALFE: bass (3-5, 7-12), keyboards (3-5, 7, 11, 18, 19), percussion (16, 18), backing vocals (5, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18) MORRIS WINDSOR: drums (3-5, 7-14, 18, 19), percussion (16, 18), backing vocals (5, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18) ROGER JACKSON: keyboards (8-11), backing vocals (8) JOHN KINGHAM: drums (6) JAMES FLETCHER: saxes (13) MATTHEW SELIGMAN: programming (15) JAMES A. SMITH: guitars on "The Plateau" (19) JUSTIN GRIMALDI: congas on "The Descent" (19) Recorded by: PAT COLLIER, IAIN O'HIGGINS (6), MATTHEW SELIGMAN (15) & JAMES SMITH (17) Photos: DELANEY/MOON from The Man With The Lightbulb Head, a MOON/HITCHCOCK film Thanks to JAMES FLETCHER, JAMES SMITH, CAPTAIN SENSIBLE, NICK RALPH, MIKE ALWAY & all at ALASKA ROBYN HITCHCOCK TITLES AVAILABLE FROM RHINO: Black Snake Diamond Role (R2 71820) - Gravy Deco (The Complete Groovy Decay/Decoy Sessions) (R2 71821) - I Often Dream Of Trains (R2 71822) - Fegmania! (R2 71837) - Gotta Let This Hen Out! (R2 71838) - Element Of Light (R2 71839) SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE SPRING 1995: Invisible Hitchcock (R2 71840) - Eye (R2 71841) - You & Oblivion (Rarities) (R2 71842) Reissue Produced for Release by JIM NEILL A & R Assistance: RICK GERSHON Research: PATRICK MILLIGAN & GARY PETERSON Legal Assistance: JONATHAN EARP Remastering: BILL INGLOT & KEN PERRY Reissue Art Direction: COCO SHINOMIYA Design: ART SLAVE Special Thanks: PAUL BRADSHAW/MOD LANG Original Artwork c 1985 Robyn Hitchcock. ______________________________________________________________________ GET ON THE RHINO MAILING LIST Receive our special MAIL ORDER catalog featuring over a thousand critically acclaimed Rhino compact discs and cassettes. 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