Robyn Hitchcock

"The Man Upstairs"

Release date: 25 August 2014

8/10

08 September 2014, 11:30 | Written by Alex Wisgard

(Albums)

(Robyn Hitchcock)

Ever since Johnny Cash’s first American Recordings album, Rick Rubin has had a lot to answer for. As older artists get more venerable, it seems Rubin has entitled them to sound more vulnerable. Now every rapidly-ageing musician of any genre seems to feel compelled to make their “Rick Rubin record.” Robyn Hitchcock has never been one for vulnerability. With a work rate as quick as his wit and encyclopedic as his mind, he’s consistently been, as one magazine once put it, England’s greatest living Syd Barrett. But The Man Upstairs is the first sign that he’s willing to slow down, even by a little. His eleventh solo album, The Man Upstairs, sees Hitchcock recording with Joe Boyd for the first time. Boyd has produced Pink Floyd, The Incredible String Band and Nick Drake - formative Hitchcock influences, all, and ones he’s never been shy of paying tribute to. So it’s fitting, then, that half of The Man Upstairs’ ten songs are covers; and as such, it’s one of the most quirk-free records in the man’s career.

The covers themselves are a fascinating mix of influences and co-conspirators and, while they’re faithfully performed, they all sound unfailingly Hitchcock-esque. The opening rendition of The Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” may seem like an oddball choice - their early albums have always been hip to drop as influences, but one look at Richard Butler’s drunk-uncle-gone-shamanic dancing in the video for the original makes you question its merit. Yet, by ditching the drums and switching out the synths for Jenny Adejayan’s elegiac cello, it becomes a masterclass in Drake-ian chamber pop. Likewise, his take Roxy Music’s “To Turn You On”, taken from Robyn’s beloved Avalon, is utterly bewitching. He even manages to turn “The Crystal Ship”, a so-called classic by a band who I find so utterly loathesome I refuse to type their name here, into a dark and subtle folk ballad that almost makes me want to give the original a shot.

As for the originals, they’re of a similarly earthly nature to last year’s Love from London, but shorn of that album’s ProTooled gloss. Hitchcock takes a well-worn sentiment like “I can’t take my eyes off you,” and gently twists it into a theme for a great city on “San Francisco Patrol”, sweetly calling out “Fillmore and Haight and Fell” as other songwriters might rhapsodise over their baby’s hair. The charming Franglais jangle of “Comme Toujours” (a lyric Hitchcock has had lying around for nearly 35 years) may at first glance seem a little too arch for comfort, but as the harmonies of I Was A King’s Anne Lise Frøkedal slowly unfold over Robyn’s lead, the song is simply putting it all out there for once. When he sings “I’m not trying to be clever” near the end of the track, you have no choice but to believe him.

The Man Upstairs is certainly a grab-bag and, on paper, there’s little to suggest that it would all hang together. But as Robyn Hitchcock continues to mellow out and age gracefully, he’s also mulching back into his own influences. For an album where half its songs are covers, it’s one of the most personal-sounding albums he’s ever made. Sure, the eccentricities of other solo efforts like Eye or I Often Dream of Trains are missing, but to complain about that would be asking for a lack of honesty that The Man Upstairs simply refuses to provide. It seems patronising to applaud a sixty-one year old for making a mature album…but, having once described himself as “an elder statesman since I was 23,” it’s comforting to know that actual elder-statesmanhood suits him pretty well too.