REVIEW: Robyn Hitchcock, Storefront Hitchcock (Warner)
- Joe Silva
For those with only a passing familiarity of Robyn Hitchcock's work, he may seem to chalk up to not much more than an semi-obscure 80s pop quantity that never quite made the grade like - oh, let's say the Cure did. By while many of his post-punk contemporaries eventually were forced to return to their day jobs or simply ran out of new fashions to aspire to, Hitchcock has continued to hold together a modest core audience of listeners for close to twenty years. And more importantly, one of those listeners was filmmaker Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense, Silence of The Lambs, Beloved). When the two met backstage at one of Robyn's gig in a club not too far from Demme's home, the seed for another notch in Demme's filmography was planted.
The resulting piece of celluloid should be making the rounds at the same sorts of theatres that periodically hold midnight showings of Clockwork Orange any time now. Presenting Hitchcock in front of a small and audience of friends and fans while behind him the macrocosm of a busy New York City street rushes past him on the other side of a shop window, Demme has captured one of Robyn's most valuable assets - his ability to improvise and entertain with not much more than an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a traffic cone or two.
Moving through a mixed bag of his tunes new and old, Robyn rants, regales and generally puts forth a savagely good show. Interspersed with his well known semi-nonsensical tales, Hitchcock gives up great renderings of old faves like "Glass Hotel," as well as new songs like "1974." Beyond being a prime example of how well-crafted his material is when it's stripped down as it is here, Robyn shows how versatile he can be with a six-string beneath his fingers (something he's not all that well known for). The CD release and the film differ slightly in which tracks are used, but as it may be sometime before the video version is released, this soundtrack is a super illustration of a multi-dimensional artist in a sometimes overwhelmingly flat musical horizon.
