Soft boy keeps swinging

On a cold and dark evening in early January, cult English songwriter Robyn Hitchcock is ensconced in the cosy ambience of the small upstairs dressing room at Whelan’s (lit fire, low-key lighting, much in the way of complimentary beverages – including two specially delivered bottles of champagne from Bono and The Edge).

Seated around the table are Hitchcock, hotpress, and the three renowned members of the singer’s backing band, The Venus 3 – REM’s Peter Buck, ex-Young Fresh Fellows member Scott McCaughey and one-time Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin (the latter two of whom also play in REM’s touring line-up).
Having finished soundchecking downstairs, the affable, engaging Hitchcock changes into his “interview socks”, offers your correspondent a drink and declares himself ready for a chat. He begins by telling me the intriguing story of how he and Buck first crossed paths over 20 years ago.
“There was a cat protection society in Highgate in London, which was where I lived at the time,” he remembers. “Peter was involved with it in some way. I was staring through the window, in my staring-through-the-window mode, and when he came out I said 'hello' to him. Within minutes, of course, we were playing guitars.
“Joe Boyd, who’d worked with Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, was producing REM’s record at the time, Fables Of The Reconstruction. Joe came into the back room in the studio where we were playing and began telling us about working with the Incredible String Band, who I was a huge fan of. Pretty soon, Peter and I were arranging songs of mine, and things took off from there.”
“I was very familiar with Robyn’s work in The Soft Boys,” adds Buck. “In fact, we met each other not long after they broke up, in ’84. As Robyn says, we started playing together immediately. It wasn’t like ‘Oh, let’s form a band’, it’s just that we’re musicians; this is what we do. Subsequently, I’ve played on a bunch of his records and he’s toured with us. Because Scott, Bill and I are based in Seattle and we’ve played together a lot, it made sense for us to do something with Robyn.”
Presumably, the garage-rock flavoured material on Hitchcock’s current album, Ole! Tarantula, makes a refreshing change for Buck, bearing in mind that he’s had so few opportunities to kick out the jams on recent REM records.
“Yeah, it’s cool to get back to that,” he affirms. “It’s something that obviously we’d done a lot of in the past in REM, but we wanted to try out a few different ideas on the last couple of albums. So it kind of naturally followed that the songs that got picked for those records weren’t really guitar songs. But I’ll rectify that!”
Although the Venus 3 are currently firmly established as Hitchcock’s backing band, before Christmas the singer utilised a completely different line-up to perform Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates Of Dawn in its entirety, as part of a Medicine Sans Frontiers benefit show in London.
“Yeah, that was with my English combo,” says Robyn. “That’s Morris Windsor from The Soft Boys, and Kimberley Rew, who also played in The Soft Boys and subsequently in Katrina And The Waves. He wrote ‘Walking On Sunshine’ and ‘Love Shine A Light’, which won the Eurovision a few years back. The other members of the line-up are Terry Edwards, who used to play in The Higsons with Charlie Higson from The Fast Show, and Paul Noble who manages The Magic Numbers.
“The British combo has got a less widescreen sound than the Venus 3. It’s like a branch line of England; picking out all the dots, including lots of country stuff. We really enjoyed playing Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, it’s a great record. I never actually met Syd Barrett, though. I think when he stopped being Syd, and became Roger, his address book got pretty slim.”
A previous Medicine Sans Frontiers show, in the summer of 2006, also saw Hitchcock perform a full rendition of The Beatles’ White Album.
“That’s right, we had the bar staff do the ‘Revolution No. 9’ vocals!” laughs Robyn. “We transcribed as much as we could, and then we had a computer rolling with cues, so someone would say, ‘Okay, it’s six mins 15 seconds – say ‘You’ve become naked’. Or, ‘It’s 4 mins 54, say ‘Any road, you went to see a dentist instead.’ We were cueing them like that and we were doing feedback over it. And I did a rant going from 1968 all the way up to the present day, getting angrier and angrier, culminating in all this rage about Blair.
“All the Medicine Sans Frontiers stuff is organised by Michele (Robyn’s wife). We’ve done Piper and the White Album, and our goal is to do Sgt Pepper in June for the 40th anniversary. But we want to do it as a rock band, which The Beatles chickened out of! They said, ‘We can’t tour with this stuff,’ but we want to do Sgt Pepper almost in a Rubber Soul style – two guitars, bass, drums and lots of harmonies.”
One man who knows plenty about abrasive rock ‘n’ roll is Hitchcock’s drummer, Bill Rieflin. As well serving as rhythmatist for underground legends Ministry and industrial supergroup Pigface (with whom, along with Trent Reznor, he wrote the song ‘Suck’ – subsequently reworked by Reznor for Nine Inch Nails’ Broken EP), Rieflin played with notorious rockers Revolting Cocks. RevCo, as they’re often coyly abbreviated, had the distinction of recording one of the most wickedly funny songs of all time, an industrial/dance cover of Rod Stewart’s ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ (which saw vocalist Chris Connelly substitute the line “I’m sorry sugar but I’m out of milk and coffee” for “I’m sorry sugar but I’m out of KY Jelly”).
Hilariously, former British Home Secretary Douglas Hurd tried to ban Revolting Cocks from playing in Britain completely by refusing them work permits in 1990. Touring with Hitchcock must be a rather more sedate experience than travelling with the likes of RevCo and Ministry?
“(Pause) Well...there’s a really long answer to this,” replies Bill, to laughs from around the table. “The short answer is 'Yes, it’s different.' There are really pleasant aspects to touring and there are very unpleasant aspects. (Laughs) There’s a musicians’ code: you’ll only find out what went on with Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3 once we’ve all been killed!”
“He’s really on the bus because there are way more sex and drugs on a Robyn Hitchcock/Venus 3 tour than on a Ministry tour,” chuckles Scott.
Talk of the band members’ long careers in music leads Buck to reflect on his time working in an Athens, Georgia record store in the late ’70s, when he says he “was collecting every punk record on Earth – a collection, by the way, that if I sold it right now I’d never have to work again!” Then, looking over at Rieflin, he says, “Playing in a band called Revolting Cocks must be a highlight for you – that’s something to tell your family and friends about!”
“You’re talking about career highlights?” replies Rieflin. “I see. So it’s not the best handjob you ever had. (Thinks) Revolting Cocks was good. I remember Chris Connelly had the idea that we should do trombone versions of the songs and call the group Trombone Cocks.”
“Er, to be serious for a minute,” says McCaughey, “I remember we had a REM after-show party at Luttrellstown Castle a while back. I got to ask Van Morrison face-to-face why he played a really shitty show I saw in San Francisco a long time ago. He remembered it. He said, ‘Oh, I was going through a really bad time in my life.’”
“You were seriously risking a fist in the face,” observes Rieflin, probably accurately.
“I think for me,” concludes Robyn, “the thing that made me think my career really amounted to something was one Christmas morning when Robin Williamson from the Incredible String Band rang to say Happy Christmas. And playing on stage with Mavis Staples, and meeting Lou Reed, who Peter introduced me to at a showing of Storefront Hitchcock in New York... it’s that thing of meeting the people whose music really made an impact on you. I also got to be onstage with Arthur Lee a few years ago. He was really nice to me, which was good, because the previous meeting we had didn’t go too well and he threatened to kill me! So, those are the kind of experiences that I value. It’s like your record collection coming to life before your eyes!”
Ole! Tarantula is out now on Proper Records.