Robyn Hitchcock - The Coach House, San Juan Capistrano, California, September 18, 1994
Enough about Robyn Hitchcock, let’s talk about me! Sometime in the late summer of 1993, my older brother brought home a stack of compact discs he had borrowed from Thom Moore (an excellent songwriter himself). If I remember right, those CDs included Surfer Rosa, I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, Daydream Nation … and Underwater Moonlight and I Often Dream Of Trains, our indoctrination into the Hitchcock universe. Suffice it to say, I was hooked for life.
It’d be about a year before Robyn swung through our neck of the woods, but we caught him at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in September of 1994 — the same weekend as this Coach House show, in fact, which we can listen to via a nice soundboard. I wasn’t there, but I did see John Cale at the same venue a few weeks later. The setlist here is pretty close to what I saw up in Santa Monica: a bunch of new material, some of which was destined for Moss Elixir, plus some very nice reworks from the catalog.
Robyn had disbanded the Egyptians at this point and set out on his own, but it’s great to hear the singular power of his guitar playing in this solo setting; I’ve always loved “Heliotrope,” one of his most purely gorgeous numbers. For the encore, Hitchcock plugs in for some solo electric performances, highlighted by a mystical “Autumn Is Your Last Chance,” the perfect song then and now for when the leaves begin to fall …
Robyn Says: At the age of 40 I was ready to climb down from the amps and tour buses, forsake the clamour of Alternative Rock, and reincarnate as a solo troubadour, folksinger style.
This is simply superb and fantastic quality . . . . . . .
just such a fine fine singer songwriter and along with folk like Roddy Frame and Stephen Fretwell,
Alexi Murdoch, Emily MacGuire are in need of paying close attention to and our worship (no really!) National treasures all and should make up the charts on every given week!
No comments:
Post a Comment