You remember the very last scene of Withnail and I, don’t you? All right, then, for those of you at the back: Richard E. Grant’s alcoholic out-of-work actor Withnail is left alone at London Zoo. Leaning over the wolf enclosure’s railings, he delivers with extraordinary eloquence and bitter personal rage the ‘what a piece of work is a man’ soliloquy from Hamlet. Then this moment of desperate dignity – of, well, sobriety – passes, and the only human beings privy to his wasted talents are us, the audience.
There is a reason why Withnail and I takes place at the tail-end of the 1960s, when woolly, intoxicated hippie mysticism gave way to above-us-only-sky philosophical materialism. With the revolution refusing to show up, the only honest response was to embrace the Absurd, and few musicians have made sense (!) of this turn more adeptly than Robyn Hitchcock. He may be healthy and happy rather than self-destructive, but his free-associative, often hilarious songs and monologues only land as well as they do because of how acutely he comprehends that we’re all fossils-in-waiting.
But on his latest album, a collection of stripped-down hits from 1967, we find Hitchcock shifting his focus to that honeyed year before it all fell to bits. It seems nonetheless appropriate that both Withnail and 1967: Vacations in the Past open with a version of the same song – Procol Harum’s classic ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.
“I wanted this to sound darker,” says Hitchcock. He and Davey Lane pick out that unmistakeable melody on twin guitars with all the touching care of artists restoring a painting as our hero recites the lyrics in a moody hearthside whisper.
There’s not a scrap of solemnity in his ‘Itchycoo Park’, though, and why should there be? Hitchcock colours the trippy pre-Parklife sightseeing singalong with the innocent glee we’ve come to expect from professional-amateurs like Jonathan Richman.
This may be somewhat surprising from psychedelia’s greatest pessimist but the album is a particularly personal project, being a companion to his wonderfully evocative new memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. 1967, he says, is ‘when the world went into colour, and the child I was hatched into a teenager’.
‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’ is especially loveable, the song’s hyper-sensory wonder buoyed up by Hitchcock’s refusal to oil his Ladybird Book pronunciation with transatlantic affectation. It’s this uncalculated delight, too, which shines through his version of Syd Barrett’s signature ‘See Emily Play’. He boils its haunted-house creakiness down to Kimberley Rew’s dissonant slide-guitar twangs and moulds it into a jaunty stop-start structure, breaking into a joyously unrestrained gallop near its end.
‘San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’ is another benefactor of inspired production. Brought closer to earth by Hitchcock’s conspiratorial tones (he murmurs the lyrics like a cartoon spy), its intimate guitar setting bursts open with a swell of backmasked effects and, thanks to Kelley Stoltz, an intertwining rainbow of sitar. And then there’s ‘My White Bicycle’, which is pure playful hippie-dippy fun.
The real draw of Hitchcock giving us a covers album is this – he’s amazing at them. His 1989 reimagining of Roxy Music’s ‘More Than This’ is a case in point, chiselling out Bryan Ferry’s fluttery hedonic swoon to uncover a jaded, heartbroken inventory of the world as a great godless let-down. ‘More than this, you know there’s nothing’ is, after all, hardly a million miles away from ‘this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory’.
Hitchcock argues that ‘these songs are folk songs now […] and I hope they sound like them’. ‘Burning of the Midnight Lamp’ recreates Hendrix’s brain-bending sonic swirls with minimal amplification, and the Incredible String Band’s wry ‘Way Back in the 1960s’ becomes even cuter now that time is catching up with it.
It’s ‘Waterloo Sunset’, above any other song on the record, which sees Hitchcock triumphantly grasping the Holy Grail of interpretation. There’s something tragic about the slow cultural flattening of what Robert Christgau called ‘the most beautiful song in the English language’ into a vaguely nationalistic commemorative tea-towel of a tune by overfamiliarity and canonisation, rock’s answer to The Hay Wain.
But Hitchcock lets us hear ‘Waterloo Sunset’ as if for the first time. He knows that the song is a hymn not to London but to finding dewy-eyed contentment in your own company, to watching the distant Terry and Julie meeting every night and wishing them as much happiness together as you have alone. Gorgeous.
Indeed, Hitchcock’s neurology has never been very conducive to social interaction, which may explain why his outlook is sometimes misunderstood. Absurdism is no escapist flight from reality. It fearlessly acknowledges life’s lack of meaning, and there are few singers able to communicate existential angst and Southern English anomie like him.
His haunting rendition of Traffic’s ‘No Face, No Name, No Number’ feels like a transmission from a lone astronaut, watching 1967’s flower-power optimism collapsing from far above the stratosphere. Anyone would seize onto surrealism after witnessing that. As the summer of love sours into the autumn of disaffection, join us next time on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue…
But the deepest, saddest, wisest thing on the whole album is its sole original offering, title track ‘Vacations in the Past’. Hitchcock’s dreamy-direct voice floats like a dandelion seed over Celtic mandolin: ‘I fumble for tomorrow like an octopus on speed / Tentacles akimbo, my insatiable need / For you, my love’.
The lyrics’ bizarre bathos-turned-pathos is witty, but it also gives clear and affecting voice to the tight kaleidoscope of his worldview. He’s no longer frolicking in his memories but berating his inability to reach past his gilded nostalgia-cage and connect with others. After such a light-hearted romp through the psychedelic songbook, the poignancy lands with meteoric force – a glimpse, for the uninitiated, of the astounding writer he is.
We make it to the end with a song that few people would dream to approach. Yes, that’s right; the boy’s only gone and done ‘A Day in the Life’. It helps that his vocal resemblance to John Lennon – that citric drawl wedged sharply between tenor and baritone – is almost uncanny, but more than that, it’s proof that the Beatles’ power lies not in their studio wizardry but their unbeatable (unBeatleble?) popcraft.
As detailed in his memoir, Hitchcock spent his 1967 at boarding school in Winchester, the very same city where, 51 years later, I met him in the pub after a hometown gig. I had brought along my mum, my dad, my aunt, and my uncle. Glancing between all four older guests, Hitchcock asked drily, ‘are these your parents?’
This shouldn’t be surprising. He comes from 1967, where you can be the child of whomever and whatever you want. Onward he journeys, the Winchester lineman with the voice as plaintive as a cathedral’s change-ringing sequence, dauntless and solitary and, in his own words, ‘yearning for that time’ ever since. But why? Well, just listen to 1967: Vacations in the Past. It tells you exactly why.
1967: Vacations in the Past is out now via Tiny Ghost Records – listen and download via their official website
1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left is available to buy from Little Brown Books
Robyn Hitchcock’s UK tour closes on 14 September with a full band show at London’s EartH Theatre alongside special guest Stewart Lee – book via alt. tickets
Robyn Hitchcock socials: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | X | YouTube
Review by Poppy Bristow
Photography by Emma Swift
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Very good