Robyn Hitchcock?

akm, moss elixir is one of his best records i'd say

ha, yeah, i think i was at both early shows that weekend in 95 ... i believe my friend has a tape of one of those nights, too!

Drop me a line with your e-mail address and you'll receive something soon...

hey, how'd that happen ... that mccabe's show is now up on my blog: http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/ also! Just saw this Kimberley Rew solo album is being reissued ... I've never heard it, much as I love the dude. Worth getting?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B003DC87VG/ref=nosim/largeheartedb-20

I've heard a different Kimberley solo album - post-Jewels that was okay. Never heard this but, like you, I'm intrigued.

seems like it *should* be good, given that both the DBs and the Soft Boys are on here ... i'll have to find some samples.

I've always wanted to hear Bible of Bop...I remember people telling me it was great, but I've never seen it.

i will rep mossy liquor as the savior of that era's questionable arrangement decisions. did i say that like 5 yrs ago?

^ Bible of Bop is great! surprised that wasn't available on cd until now. now i have to go put it on.

"Bible Of Bop" is on CD? I had the other solo Kimberley albums ("Tunnel Into Summer", "Great Central Revisited") but recently sold them - they just never moved me

Have I mentioned that some days I just shuffle "Invisible Hitchcock", "You & Oblivion" and the detritus I skimmed from the "I Wanna Go Backwards" box? There's just something innocent and charming about the cast-offs from that period.

I know what you mean-- sometimes I'm specifically in the mood for that bedroom psych 4-tracker sub-oeuvre. Think I will make a playlist of just that shit.

You & Oblivion is probably in my top 5 RH records ...

I have a playlist of Invisible Hits, Invisible Hitchcock, You & Oblivion and Shadowcat that probably gets more play then any particular Hitchcock album. He admittedly has no clue what his best songs when he puts an album together, so these odds & sods collections are arguably better than any planned release. Invisible Hitchcock was my go to introduction to Robyn for newbies and I'm crushed I can't recommend it as a starting point anymore.

eye deserves a mention alongside the likes of invisible hitchcock, you & oblivion and mossy liquor. think i most love the solo/acoustic/home recorded hitchcock.

i used to really love eye but I find it really lacking these days. I think it has maybe three great songs and a bunch of stuff I want to skip over when I put it on. It really pales next to "trains".

i still love Eye -- but I think it's done a disservice by always being compared to Trains. Despite superficial similarities (green cover, mostly acoustic) the songwriting seems really different to me. Definitely more filler on Eye, but still some great stuff ("Linctus House", "Glass Hotel", "Raining Twilight Coast") ...

Back in the 90s there were some mailing list-produced live odds and ends cassettes put together (Uncarved Pumpkins, Unhatched Crablings) that took the best unreleased live bits and covers and cobbled them together. Has anyone gone to the effort of picking through the plethora of bootlegs from the last 15 years and done something similar?

i did a little mix of covers grabbed from archive.org ... not comprehensive or anything, but some cool stuff.

If someone wanted to make a playlist of this I'd be happy...

http://www.jh3.com/robyn/base/songs.asp?qq=10

I love the Asking Tree.

haha, that is quite a list ... might be fun to put together some "Robyn Sings" comps ... Floyd/Barrett, VU/Reed, Beatles ...

He's done at least three whole shows covering specific albums, I think all as benefits; I have the White Album, Sgt. Pepper & Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The Sgt Pepper one has some extra goodies at the end - "Waterloo Sunset", "Are You Experienced?", "Hey Bulldog" and "All You Need Is Love".

i think i listened to the sgt. pepper show -- was it kind of ... bad? maybe just super loose.

Kind of very not good; it isn't a work you can try to approach all slack and ramshackle. The White Album is by far the best of the bunch.

white album show is on archive.org? i should check it out.

Is it? I think I got it from that Cones site - he shared a ton of Hitchcock a short while ago, including the best show I was ever at - The Ram's Head in June '98.

yeah, i'm still catching up with that cones site. doesn't appear to be on archive.org ... listening to that all Floyd show now though -- sounds amazing.

The Floyd is good. Only the Pepper show is really suspect.

where can I find the Piper one?

The Piper one is on archive.org--

http://www.archive.org/details/robynhitchcock2007-05-26

Gerald McB-B are you on Fegmaniax?

Jon - not for years. The signal-to-noise ratio is way to much for me. I do, however, peruse the digests a couple of times a month to make sure I don't miss anything important.

Guess it pays to be connected...got a package in the mail today including a completely unexpected and unsolicited promo CD of Bible of Bop! The LP plus 3 unreleased bonus tracks. Hearing it for the first time...so far it's impossibly amazingly good. Minimal liner notes, a few paragraphs from Rew followed by some reviews and credits.

What label?!

CGB records, I think it's essentially self-released.

I had a tape of "Bible Of Bop" years ago, the samples on Amazon really brought it all back. Ordered! Thanks, Dan!

after a month and a half, my copy of Propellor Time finally showed up last weekend. Note to self: do not order direct from Yep Rock ever again.
but anyway! this album is sounding GREAT. Upon first listens, "Star of Venus," "Ordinary Millionaire," "John In the Air," the title track and "Primitive" are the standouts for me. Whole record has a wonderful sound though -- organic/rootsy w/o being boring. With the last two records, I've been glad that there are still some surprises up Robyn's sleeve. Some of this stuff sounds like nothing he's done before. Of course, something like "Born On The Wind" I think he has done before, as "Serpents At The Gates of Wisdom," but oh well.

Yeah I love how it's definitely an 'acoustic' 'rootsy' album and yet the sound picture has no lack of weird little production details, like the claps on 'John In The Air'. It's almost like the fully fledged version of what all those little jon brion marginalia were trying to accomplish on Jewels FOr Sophia tracks like 'I Feel Beautiful'.

yeah, definitely a lot of layers -- "John In The Air" has the neat effect of sounding like it's running backwards without actually having any backwards sounds on it. And the vocal on "Ordinary Millionaire" is really nice. Not sure how I feel about the decidedly un-subtle "Evolove", but it's got a nice melody for sure. And the line about giving Jesus a high five is lol-worthy.

He was almost deprecatory about 'evolove' in a recent interview. Like 'I know this is basically just a polemic, think of it as a bonus track' kind of.

yeah, almost seems like an NPR assignment or something -- "write a song about atheism" ... but that said, it is lovely sounding. Overall, this record has me pretty excited -- very cool that he's got such a good band behind him, and is sounding inspired.

It beats the living shit out of 'Dear God' I'll tell you that much.

true! that reminds me though -- is that Partridge/Hitchcock collab dead in the water? I remember reading that it was put off because Partridge's hearing problems, but that was a couple years ago ...

It was implied they had written more songs than just the one... and in an interview last year Partridge basically he said he was waiting for RH to find time to come see him to do more. Didn't know he was having hearing probs. Not tinnitus is it?

here's something (not very promising) from Partridge
PM: What happened with this collaboration you were doing with Robyn Hitchcock?

Partridge: Well [deep breath], I must admit that I’m not holding out any great hopes for this because Robyn seems to be permanently on tour. We started this a couple of years ago, and he’s just been permanently around the globe somewhere, and I think we’ve had about four get-togethers in two years, which to me that’s not hot off the press. I’ll ring him up and say, “Look, spare some time to get together?” And he’ll say, “Well, I’ve got a tour of Scandinavia,” or “I’m going around America with a matey from R.E.M.” or “I’m touring England.” He just seems to be permanently out on the road, and I think four days of getting together and trying to write is not intense enough for me. I would have liked to have done like four days a week two years ago for quite a while until we had enough material to say, “Well, let’s throw half of that away, and this half is a great album.” But right now we have something like four half-finished tracks that are just kind of OK-ish.”

PM: Are those demos you were doing?

Partridge: Well, we were sort of recording as we were writing. It’s not a process I’m crazy on, because I like to get a song finished up and working as a solid piece of architecture before you’re even taken into the studio. So I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. I actually sent him an e-mail before he went off on his latest U.S. tour saying, “Do you think this is going to happen? Is this thing dying of apathy?” So I’m going to be honest with you. He’s going to have to show some phenomenally frightening commitment I think for it to get finished.

PM: What was his response to your e-mail?

Partridge: He left me a phone message which I missed, and then a confused e-mail back from him, and then I got a postcard from him in San Francisco saying, “Hey, when I get off this tour, let’s record some more.” And I’m thinking: Ohhhhhhh. Can I even remember who he is or what he looked like?

PM: What was the driving force behind that project?

Partridge: I liked him. I got together with him one day to write something for an album of his, and we came up with about six ideas, one of which he finished up, and it was called “[‘Cause It’s Love] Saint Parallelogram,” and he put that on an album of his. He is so quick witted, and he is a very creative fella. No sense of rhythm. He’s very creative. He just grabs stuff from the air, which I find very stimulating because that’s kind of how I tend to work as well. So to some extent it was like dealing with a mirror reflection of myself creatively. Maybe this is why the thing is not happening. Maybe we’re too alike.

PM: Except for your work habits.

Partridge: No, no, I like to get in there and get working, and we’re doing an album, let’s do it. But I think he’s addicted to globetrotting by the sound of it. I don’t know. Like I said in my e-mail, it could be that thing where it’s two forces that get together, one fire and one ice, and all you end up with is lukewarm water.

sort of funny, partridge complaining that robyn is too busy to record -- how many albums have you put out in the last ten years, Andy?

SHOCKHOUND: Word has it that you’ve also been collaborating with Andy Partridge on some songs.

HITCHCOCK: Andy Partridge has invited me into his studio, his shed. He’s been off for a couple of years because he had a terrible hearing accident. He had his headphones on in the studio and the engineer was unaware of this and fed him high treble tones at full volume, and it pretty much drove him insane. He’s managed to find some hearing aids that fool his ears into thinking they don’t hear the high-pitched whine. Anyway, he’s back to doing some music, so I’m recording in his shed.

SHOCKHOUND: On paper, you seem like two guys who would drive each other completely nuts. How has it been working out?

HITCHCOCK: It’s a small shed, but so far we’re getting on well. So that’s happening…

While I worship every scrap from both men, I don't know if I can get mega-excited about the prospects. Separate thread, but what collaborations like this have produced great records? Dali's Car (Mick Karn & Peter Murphy) and Jack Frost (Steve Kilbey & Grant McLennan) jump immediately to mind.

Man. Andy strikes me as a guy who would not cope well with tinnitus. That's too bad.

'No sense of rhythm' LOL it's kind of true of RH I guess. The Drums n Wires/Black Sea/English Settlement was Andy's high watermark for me and it's all because of that incredibly strong rhythmic profile XTC had in those days.

yeah i don't know if the Partridge/Hitchcock thing would work, though it seems interesting. I guess I'd be most pleased if Robyn sort of took the reins as far as songwriting and Partridge took the reins on production/arrangement.

New interview with Kimberly:

http://popdose.com/popdose-interview-kimberley-rew/