One of the sights from this show I will not forget is an expression of utter bewilderment on the face of a young girl sitting at one of the front tables. At that point, Robyn Hitchcock was playing "My Wife and My Dead Wife", an oddly irresistible story of a man who lives in the company of two wives, one dead and one alive.
Those lyrics are as clever and disturbing as they were 40 years ago, and it must have been a treat to hear them for the first time. But then again, it was a real treat for me, too, and I have heard them a hundred times. Robyn Hitchcock does not play it every night (his setlists are remarkably diverse), but the 1985 song remains an enduring classic in a vast catalogue of amazing consistency and whimsical brilliance.
Along with Robert Forster, Luke Haines and a few others, Robyn Hitchcock is one of my all-time favourite songwriters. The first time I heard his song (I believe it was "Executioner" from Eye), I genuinely could not believe I had never heard this music before. It was confident, charismatic, idiosyncratic and oddly appealing. I have since heard everything else in his discography, and this feeling has only become stronger: how could this be so obscure? After all, The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight is one of the greatest albums of all time, and so are Fegmania!, Eye and I Often Dream Of Trains. The answer, inevitably, is what Stephen Pastel once said: "In the end, you become as big as you are meant to be". Or, alternatively, Robyn Hitchcock has never truly desired fame.
In Brighton, at the Komedia club, he does a long set divided into two parts. We start with the wistful "September Cones" (originally on You & Oblivion, a great compilation of demos and outtakes) and end with a brief encore featuring "See Emily Play" and "Waterloo Sunset" (both taken from his new album of 1967 classics that once inspired him). In between, it is what you have come to expect: sex, cheese, insects and death (well, he scales back on sex a little). Plus, the man is genuinely, effortlessly funny with his onstage ramblings and droll English humour. The best joke of the night was perhaps to do with two ways of looking at things. There are two groups of people in the world, optimists and pessimists. Some think The Beatles are half-alive and some that they are half-dead.
Again, with a catalogue so big, there were bound to be some omissions (I would have wanted "My Favourite Buildings" and "The Man Who Invented Himself"), but you can't fault his choices, either. He did The Soft Boys stuff ("Queen of Eyes", "Tonight"), he did the Egyptians stuff ("My Wife and My Dead Wife", "Madonna of the Wasps"), he did things classic ("Queen Elvis", "Cynthia Mask") and new ("Raymond and the Wires", "The Shuffle Man"). For me, one of the highlights was "Autumn Sunglasses" (from the eponymous 2017 album) whose melodicism came through in style in the intimate live setting. He was eccentric and charming without trying too hard. And he was humble, too, and introduced Syd Barrett's "See Emily Play" as a song written by 'the original Robyn Hitchcock'.
Interestingly, there were two glasses of water on the small table beside him, and, inevitably, the amount of water was decreasing all the time. I knew he timed it, in the sense that he would finish it off before or after his last song. And yet there was a part of me that hoped against hope that the water would never disappear and he would be playing there for us until the end of times. It would have been amazing, too, and with songs so timeless, such a Robyn Hitchcock thing to do.
