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Rating: Thank heavens in our career as listeners we have not missed encounters with moody and irregular musicians, people capable of bringing out the best in themselves while walking the fine red line between the recording studio and the psychiatric ward. Like Mad Hatters who stumbled into a Hieronymus Bosch painting, amongst strange half-human, half-animal figures, to show the trailing visitors their wonders enclosed in a piece of black vinyl. Thus, the best works of Skip Spence, Syd Barrett, Roy Harper, were born when it was thought that their authors were no longer useful to the cause of rock music. Connecting Robyn Hitchcock, who held the charming electric pop of the Soft Boys in the early eighties, with these hooded lepers, is a very virtuous operation. He never went crazy, never attempted to hammer the rest of the band or ride a bus naked, but has always defended his creative freedom since he bid farewell to the (for him) mediocre Soft Boys and the pimple-ridden listeners of the usual pub.
Hitch, who had always been electric, in 1984 gathered his personal ghosts (Lennon, Barrett, McGuinn, Dylan, Ray Davies) and scattered them acoustically in the half-dozen different personalities that inhabited his mind depressed by the failure of his first two solo albums. The isolation in a cottage in Sussex leads to hearing insects buzzing in his head and wanting to capture them first with nets made of Chopin-like piano nocturnes ("Nocturne", "Flavour of Night"), then with cotton candy sprinkled over acid barrettian ballads ("Cathedral", "Winter Love", "Trams of London") or with bizarre a cappella vocal traps ("Uncorrected Personality Traits", "Furry Green Atom Blown"). The patience tested with a relentless hunt with hammering low guitar string hits (the shamelessly raydaviesian "Sounds Great When You're Dead" and the off-kilter country a la Skip Spence of "The Bones in The Ground") until trying more vigorous methods with adrenaline discharges of "Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl" and the robust piano chords of "This Could Be The Day".
Since it's all useless and the insects are still buzzing there, before collapsing into a hell of nerves it's better to try to catch them by weaving webs in the recesses of the mind with ballads suspended between the purest light of "I Used to Say I Love You" and the mantra-like twilight of "Autumn is Your Last Chance". You know this was Syd Barrett's preferred method, but he never came back among us. Robyn Hitchcock did, however, and with the Egyptians in the following years, he would step out of Bosch's painting, expanding his colors with electric brushstrokes of absolute value.
But this remains a loony and ramshackle record that seeks to establish a complicity more than a simple listening: a lone man and a few instruments to wallpaper our hearts with yellowed leaves.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
03 Cathedral (03:40)
Do you wonder like I do
What goes on inside of you
In the cathedral of the mind
All the worshippers are blind
Like a toilet from outside
A cathedral from inside
There behind your open face
Lies an awful lot of space
And if I ever look into
your open eyes again
I'll remind myself to stare
until I'm looking through
your eyes
When I'm hurt you feel the pain
You've been in my head again
You're projecting onto me
What you'd like yourself to see
Now the clock is beating fast
Every moment wanders past
And fades away
Then comes back another day
Do I go or do I stay
Inside your mind
04 Uncorrected Personality Traits (01:43)
Uncorrected personality traits
That seem whimsical in a child
May prove to be ugly
In a fully grown adult
Lack of involvement with the father
Or overinvolvement with the mother
Can result in lack of ability
To relate to sexual peers
And in homosexual leanings
Narcissism, transexuality
Girls from the waist up
Men from the waist down
Attempts to be your own love object
Reconcile your parents to you
By becoming both at once
Even Marilyn Monroe was a man
But this tends to get overlooked
By a mother-fixated
Overweight sexist media
So uncorrected personality traits
That seem whimsical in a child
May prove to be ugly
In a fully grown adult
If you give in to them
Everytime they cry
They will become little tyrants
But they won't remember why
Then when they are thwarted
By people in later life
They will become psychotic
And they won't make an ideal
Husband or wife
The spoiled baby grows into
The escapist teenager who's
The adult alcoholic who's
The middle-aged suicide
Oy! So
Uncorrected personality traits
That seem whimsical in a child
May prove to be ugly
In a fully grown adult
09 Trams of Old London (03:27)
Trams of old London
Taking my baby into the past in it
Trams of old London blow my mind
Ludgate, Fenchurch, Highgate Hill
Rolling slowly up there still, uh-huh
Waterloo and Clerkenwell
Out to Aldgate East as well, uh-huh
On a clear night you can see
Where the rails used to be
Oh it seems like ancient myth
They once ran to Hammersmith
Trams of old London
Taking my baby into the past in it
Trams of old London blow my mind
Through Electric Avenue
Brixton down in southwest too, uh-huh
Teddington and Kennington
Twickenham and Paddington, uh-huh
In the blitz they never closed
Though they blew up half the roads
Oh it hurts me just to see 'em
Going dead in a museum
Ah...
Trams of old London
Taking my baby into the past in it
Trams of old London blow my mind
Trams of old London
Taking my baby into the past in it
Trams of old London blow my mind
10 Furry Green Atom Bowl (03:15)
Furry green eye
In a furry green hole
It's a furry green atom bowl
Furry green eye
In a furry green bowl
It's a furry green atom bowl
Spread-dud-dust, spread-dud-dust
Spread-dud-dust in a reaching way
As the dead bug flares, dead bug flares
Dead bug flares in a swollen glow
Furry green mole
In a furry green hole
It's a furry green atom bowl
Um...
Um...
Verdigris, verdigris
Verdigris, verdigris
Verdigris, verdigris
Um...
Um...
Um...
Um...
The lid comes off like a casserole
(The lid comes off like a casserole)
The steam comes up the devil's nose
He knows, he knows, he always knows
He sits there in a silver cone
Drumming his fingers on a golden throne
He loves that smell
He loves that smell
Um...
Um...
That swollen bowl it blew up whole
(That swollen bowl it blew up whole)
And the black was hungry when it came down
So it et the world for miles around
Sticky black meat (sticky black meat)
Will flood your street (will flood your street)
Sticky black oil
Will boil your soil
Furry green eye
In a furry green hole
It's a furry green atom bowl
Furry green eggs
On furry green legs
Big ones, small ones, out they roll
Gonna shake my pie, gonna bake my soul
It's a crusty old pie (it's a crusty old pie)
But it's a crusty old world (it's a crusty old world)
And underneath (underneath)
There's roots and bulbs (roots and bulbs)
Gonna mix 'em all up (gonna mix 'em all up)
In the atom bowl
Big ones, small ones, out they roll
Big ones, small ones, out they roll
Big ones, small ones, out they roll
In a new formation
In a new formation
In a new formation
Spell a brand new world with the same old letters
Um...
Um...
Um...
Um...
There's roots in the earth and kidneys in the body
Roots in the earth and kidneys in the body
Roots in the earth and kidneys in the body
And that's the way to stay
There's roots in the earth and kidneys in the body
There's roots in the earth and kidneys in the body
There's roots in the earth and kidneys in the body
And that's the way to stay
There's roots in the earth and kidneys in the body
There's roots in the earth and kidneys in the body
There's roots in the earth and kidneys in the body
And that's the way to stay
13 I Often Dream of Trains (02:25)
I often dream of trains when I'm alone
I ride on them into another zone
I dream of them constantly
Heading for paradise
Or Basingstoke
Or Reading
I often dream of trains when I'm awake
They ride along beside a frozen lake
And there in the buffet car
I wait for eternity
Or Basingstoke
Or Reading
I often dream of trains till it gets light
The summer turns to winter overnight
The leaves fall so suddenly
The sun sets at four o'clock
Exactly what
I'm dreading
I often dream of trains when I'm with you
I wonder if you dream about them too
Maybe we'll meet one night
Out in the corridor
I'm waiting for
You baby
Baby
Baby
Baby
Baby
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By GIANLUIGI67
Simply, in this work, he touched the strings of harmony.
Believe me, this is pure Hitchcock, visionary, innocent, inconclusive.
