If you happened to be in the center of Northampton this past Tuesday night and wondered about all the elated-looking people floating around six feet off the ground, they were Robyn Hitchcock fans who’d just seen him play the Iron Horse.
The uniquely quirky singer/songwriter (whose creative DNA has bits of Bob Dylan and Syd Barrett tied together tightly) has made fairly regular appearances at the Valley venue ever since his first time there in October 1990, and during his 2016 show he joked that the Iron Horse mug from which he was drinking was the exact same mug he drank from back then.
I was at that Northampton debut, and most every other show Hitchcock has played in town, and the recent visit was one of his very best. His voice was in top form, from his lowest speaker-rumbling bass notes to a sweet falsetto, and the 14-song set (and four-song encore) included so many tunes from his beloved ’80s albums that the show felt like a special celebration.
Wearing his favorite black-and-white, polka-dot shirt, he plucked tactile arpeggios on his acoustic guitar to create swirling psychedelic pop like “Vibrating” and “I’m Only You.” For the latter, he enlisted the help of pro soundman Jim Frogameni, asking him to add a digital delay effect to his guitar for the song’s big ending, so that cascades of notes regenerated and ricocheted around the club’s speakers: “Make it sound like [the audience] has their headphones on and they’re on a waterbed.”
“Ghost Ship” was a tour de force, a Dylan-esque tumble of images (“They fall like masonry in the abyss / that opens every time we kiss” is just one couplet that sticks with me). There were especially big hoots from the audience punctuating the post-song applause, as if folks had just witnessed an impressive fireworks display.
Another haunting standout was “Luminous Rose,” a song about the breathing sea and the bodies of drowned sailors and dead airmen decomposing among the coral, as fishes nibble at their fingers.
Hitchcock’s introduction for the song found him reminiscing about the Ronald Reagan era. “Think of how profoundly doomed you felt then,” he said drily, as the crowd rocked with laughter.
His random-seeming, between-song banter was some of his most inspired in recent memory, covering such topics as the coming rule of artificial intelligence and astrological signs and their quirks. And he took a typical time for dead air at a show — tuning one’s guitar — and turned it into one of the night’s comedic highlights, colorfully narrating every ho-hum move as it happened: “A small garden of notes … piffle from the stage!”
Hitchcock has an effortless way of hitting multiple emotions at once, as he did while introducing the brand-new song “Raymond and the Wires” (scheduled to be on his next record, due out in early 2017). He picked up a little model of a trolley bus from his stool at the back of the stage and explained its name is Terrence, and how England stopped using such transportation around the time the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” came out. He explained how his father (who passed away in 1992) brought him to see the derelict trolley buses when he was a kid. “My father’s name was Raymond … probably still is,” Hitchcock said. It felt at first like a silly tossed-off aside, and we all laughed, but it reverberated with more beautiful layers as he began the song.
“1974,” which he dedicated to Iron Horse Entertainment Group marketing director (and huge longtime Hitchcock fan and supporter) Jim Neill, was another song full of memorable lyrics (“Ghastly mellow saxophones all over the floor”; “There’s a baby in a basket and it’s taken your name / And one day it’ll grow up and say ‘Who are you, eh?’ ”) and he suddenly stopped the song cold for a second to ask the audience to fill in a suitable Massachusetts replacement for the English town Grimsby. “What’s a fairly dismal place around here? Two syllables?” he quickly inquired. The winning answer was “Worcester.”
Hitchcock invited his opening act and tour mate (and fellow Nashville resident) Emma Swift back on stage to help him at the end of the set, and they sang beautiful harmonies on old gems (“Trams of Old London,” “Queen Elvis,” “Linctus House”), a great recent song called “Follow Your Money” (available on a Record Store Day single from last year) and, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dylan’s legendary “Blonde On Blonde” LP, a cover of “Just Like a Woman.”
Ken Maiuri can be reached at clublandcolumn@gmail.com.