Robyn Hitchcock explains the songs on Respect. Each track starts with a spoken part (his side of a conversation with J.D. Considine) talking about the song that's about to play.

Also contains alternate versions of two songs. Just as the word "Spectre" has two different letters at the end, so too does this album have two different songs at the end.

Here is a link to the audio on YouTube and a transcript of the spoken parts done by Aaron Lowe, a member of the fegmaniax email listserv back in 1993.
Listen on YouTube

ROBYN HITCHCOCK & THE EGYPTIANS
SPECTRE: Robyn Hitchcock explains the songs on RESPECT

Interview portion produced by Scott Carter & Mark Davis
engineered by Mark Davis,
interview by J.D. Considine

Album Producer and Engineer - John Leckie
All songs written by Robyn Hitchcock, published by Two Crabs Music (BMI)

For Promotional Use Only - Not For Sale

Just as the album Respect was recorded in Robyn Hitchcock's kitchen, so too
was this possible interpretation of Respect. What started out as a
conversation over tea between Robyn Hitchcock and critic J.D. Considine
transformed into a soul-searching session where each of the album's ten
songs was dissected and here are the results.

1. THE YIP SONG

"Yeah, we did have a small dog, many years ago. My girlfriend
at the time had a small dog. And in fact, her mother had another small
dog, a bit later. And I used to say "yip" to the dog a lot -- the
dog used to yip when it wanted to go in or out, and we had another
one that used to yip when it wanted to go up or down, you know; it
would come up three flights of stairs and then it would yip at the
top of the stairs because it wanted to get back down again. It was
called Yipper. That's pretty much what that song came from ... was
actually small dogs, but it's not about small dogs. It's about,
actually, people consenting to a useless operation designed to prolong
someone's life for an extra few weeks, while they in their delirium
imagine this woman Vera Lynn, who is the force's sweetheart. She was
like the Axl Rose of her day, you know? And he sort of tried to call
out to this image, in his pain, as he's passing away, being destroyed
by something. And all these voices are kind of saying "Yeah, surgery
would be a good idea. Yip, yip, yip, yip, yip." But, you know,
originally the song was nothing to do with that at all; it was "Vera
Lynn, Vera Lynn / She played punk rock with her fin" and I imagined
Vera Lynn as having this enormous great black, kind of shark's fin on
her back. That she used it to strum some sort of Les Paul guitar
as if she was cleaning her back with a guitar in the bathtub, just
stroking this guitar back and forth across her fin, and somehow all
these sort of punky chords would be coming out."

2. ARMS OF LOVE

"'Arms of Love' ... it was originally called 'Arms of God.' I had it
in mind for Roger McGuinn, in fact. R.E.M. have done a sort of country
version of it, but they've changed the chords slightly. And that had
wine glasses on it -- it has Andy playing wine glasses. We actually
had a bunch of wine glasses on the BBC Mobile, 'coz we recorded it on
the BBC Mobile, and the BBC came in and put the mikes on the kitchen
table, like we have here. And Andy just put his moistened finger around
the circles of each wine glass top. That's what that sound is, anyway,
at the beginning. The best thing about it is that as I was writing it,
I suddenly realized that I didn't have to spend as long getting from
one chord to another as I thought. It would been a really slow, sort of
waltz thing, but in fact I've managed to skip from one chord to another
quite fast, so it's quite a concise tune. I mean, I like the tune. And
the good thing about it is it hasn't good very many words, and I keep
forgetting them, and I always change them each time I sing it. I changed
it from the 'Arms of God' because that was too much like being about to
be dead. But the idea is that the two people in the song are separated,
and soon they will be in the arms of love. But will it be in each
other's arms? 'Don't worry, honey. You'll soon be ... back with me?
back with somebody else? what?' You don't know, so it could be
ultimate reassurance, and it could be your worst fears being confirmed.
Either way it'll be quite exciting and probably rather sad. Well, it
wouldn't be sad if you got back together again."

3. THE MOON INSIDE

"I think it's about the power inside a woman. It's lunar. It's tidal.
It's just as the menstrual cycle is linked, amazingly enough, to the
passage of the moon, as are, I think, the activities of crabs. And I've
never understood why a full moon is powerful, because life on earth has
evolved with the moon. There is now a moon inside of us. If a woman
went off to Alpha Centauri or something like that she would still
menstruate in twenty-eight day cycles, at least to begin with. And
probably if you took a bunch of crabs and put them on Pluto or
something in a huge salt-water tank, they would initially act in
synch with the way the moon affected crabs on earth. So we've got that
lunar element inside of us, and I specifically link it with ... this
particular song has to do with passion, if you like -- the way quite
unexpected feelings can come up in people, just as the sea has all kind
of moods. The sea can caress you; the sea can break your neck. The
sea can be treacherous; the sea can buoy you up and keep there; the sea
can pull you down and finish you forever. The sea is your mother; the
sea is potentially your assassin. We supposedly come out of the sea.
Maybe if the word ever, sort of, chokes on its own vomit, the sea will
be the last place to be terminally polluted. There must be huge great
things down there, the size of cathedrals, kind of, buried feelings,
right at the bottom where we can't see. I think this is all just
related to the moon inside, as the hidden, the unexplained, the
uncontrollable forces of the sea, which again are controlled by the
moon."

4. RAILWAY SHOES

"Well, 'Railway Shoes' isn't on, actually ... it's not a term. You know,
it's not like ... we don't say 'Gol-blimey, mate, put yer railway shoes
on, guv,' back in the Old Country or anything. It's ... 'Railway Shoes'
is ... I was just sitting in the shed in the garden, playing the guitar
and out came the expression 'Railway Shoes.' I like a title. If you've
got a title it's much easier to work from: 'The Moon Inside,' 'Railway
Shoes,' they all existed as titles and tunes before they became fleshed
into anything definite. I was trying to sound like Richard Butler from
the Furs, really. [He chuckles.] It's made to sound like Richard Butler
trying to be Van Morrison, which is an unholy combination, I think. But
my skills as a mimic are obviously waning. [Laughs.] No, I was gonna
ask ... we didn't have time to ask people to come and play on the
record, but I was thinking of asking Richard to come and sing on
'Railway Shoes.' I can just hear him on the chorus: '[in a raspy,
Richard Butler-esque voice] Railway shoes!' You know, that kind of
thing."

5. WHEN I WAS DEAD

"There are different versions of 'When I Was Dead' floating around.
There's a dubbed version which has got a lot more space in it. Morris
is shaking a bag full of rats' feet -- rats' toenails, I think --
and that's what the percussion is, it's all these things going 'shhhk-
a-shhhk-a-shhhk.' It's not a wide-open space, this song. Death could
equally well be the wide-open spaces -- I mean we've made it sound very
claustrophobic. You know, when the Devil asks him to supper, and then
God says he's got all his records, this is obviously happening in a small
room, in a cave, by candelight. The corpse is still in a small room lit
by candles. They've put some perfume on the corpse to stop its smelling.
The mourners are standing around, and they can't communicate with the
dead person, and the dead person can't communicate with the mourners.
All the dead person can see is God and the Devil who've turned up instead
while Aunt Edith and Cousin Aileen are standing there, weeping pitiously
by the corpse and strewing the ground with lilies. So, again there's a
communication gap between the living and the dead. Given the existence
of a universe, all the molecules in it, nuclear fission apart, and black
holes, have been here for ... for billenia or something. They just
keep juggling around so, you know, you've got three of Shakespeare's
molecules and you've got two of Himmler's or whatever it is. Part of
your fingernail was part of St. Joseph of Arimathea's frontal lobe or
something. And large parts of you were once a daffodil in ... Novia
Scotia or something. And [chuckling] your feet used to be Winston
Churchill or whatever it is. The same things keep getting recycled.
It could be that when we pass away, our psyches dissolve into lots of
sort of strips of feeling. All the things that comprise us that are
held together by our bodies dissolve hence 'I wasn't me to speak of /
Just a thousand ancient feelings,' feelings that have been around
since the beginning of human time."

6. THE WRECK OF THE ARTHUR LEE

"I was listening to a lot of stuff by Love, which was Arthur Lee's group,
back in the sixties, when I was in L.A., making a previous album. I
thought, God, I must try writing more songs where, they keep jumping
-- all these different movements, like they used to do in the sixties a
lot -- sort of, having three-minute songs with loads of different
movements in them. I must write some more jumpy stuff with lots of
chords in, like a lot of Arthur Lee's songs were. And I came back,
got drunk ... I had jetlag so I woke up about three or four hours with
a hangover and there was nothing to eat in the house but I was wide
awake, and the sun was streaming through the windows and it was July,
and I was suddenly back in England. And I picked up the guitar and
made up 'The Wreck of the Arthur Lee.' As you said, it prob'ly doesn't
need explaining [laughs]."

7. DRIVING ALOUD (RADIO STORM)

"'Driving Aloud' is a very ... impacted song. It's the most like the
songs I used to write, on the record, in terms of being impenetrable,
or obstruse or something. Not many songs by anyone refer to Harrison
Ford, I mean, Harrison is not generally a much sung-about person. It was
originally called 'Driving to Portland.' I wrote it in the back of
the bus, as I was sitting with a cup of tea and a guitar, trying to
sing in a key that was high enough for me to hear myself over the engine
of the bus, and I was playing this riff that I had made up in the shed
at the same time I'd made up 'Railway Shoes.' And I wrote the words,
I mean I wrote six or seven verses and I kept verses one, two, and five,
or something. And then, later, after we'd recorded it, I rushed back
and wrote a whole lot of extra verses which we had pressed up and then
demolished again, so there's a completely different version of the
song lying around somewhere, with a load of yet more verses, on a
completely unrelated topic. But ... the idea was basically momentum.
If you were talking out the window of a bus, of a slow-moving vehicle
to somebody, and somebody asked you a question, and you reply. But
you're replying not to the person who asked you that question but to
another person, who then asks you another question, to which you reply,
but that doesn't reach the questioner. It's a series of completely
dislocated conversations held together by extreme anxiety, indecision,
and a feeling of something ominous about to happen up the road."

8. SERPENT AT THE GATES OF WISDOM

"I was talking to Julian Cope, who knows about these things. The serpent
generally a symbol of wisdom as much as a symbol of deceit. The serpent
is a symbol of knowledge, I mean, it is the serpent that gives Eve the
apple. The idea in my song is that the serpent is guarding wisdom. He's
guarding it like a kind of reverse Garden of Eden. But the serpent
can't go in, just as I don't know whether the angel that guards the
gates of Eden, and who drove Adam and Eve from the gates, is actually
allowed into Eden himself, or itself, 'cos we don't know what sex angels
are -- hopefully, both. Actually, the idea of a whole load of kind of
she-male angels is fantastic, all sort of standing there. You can
imagine Madonna would suddenly burst out of a cardboard box, lured by
the presence of such androgyny, which has nothing to do with this song.
It's the one on the record I think of as the least 'Robyn Hitchcocky.'
I wrote the song almost as a take off of The Band. I imagined Rick
Danko doing the lead, and the other two coming in. And in the absence
of The Band, we had to do it ourselves."

9. THEN YOU'RE DUST

"I just sang this song, 'Then You're Dust,' I was just singing it as I
was walking around, just literally a description of what was happening,
you know, it was like a children's picture or something. That song is
totally at face value. It is about one thing and one thing only.
I don't usually write those sort of minor key things; they're a bit
dreary, but it just seemed appropriate. And I think we did that around
the kitchen table, actually. Morris and I just sat there with acoustics
and I sang it live. It's like a lot of simple things -- it's great
because it's simple. All it is is what it appears to be."

10. WAFFLEHEAD

"The nice thing about 'Wafflehead' is that it hasn't got any instruments
on it. It's all so Captain Beefheart. Beefheart had a song called
'Hothead,' which this is a sort of distant cousin of: '[doing a
Beefheart imitation] She can burn you up in bed / Just like she said /
'Cos she's a hothead.' And ... mine is a much more leisurely song.
It's been quite a serious record. I just felt that it was good to have
something that was completely just for the hell of it at the end, that
wasn't going to close the whole thing with a sort of 'Now our hands our
folded together in prayer for those we have thought of.' Plus if you
just had 'Then You're Dust," then there's not much else to do. Either
it's the Heavenly Choirs or it's back down to earth -- thump! and the
wheel of Karma starts again. So Wafflehead is just, you know, is just
a love song couched in terms of food, which is something I've been
doing for years. It's like things I've been writing for ages. It's
a sort of parody of a Robyn Hitchcock song. But it's nice, because
Morris has a ... uh ... Morris started 'mooing.' He does this sort of
ooooooooooooohhhhhhh and we just sort of made up this cycle of harmonies
to go around it. The final mix, it doesn't come out that clearly, but
we've got a version of it with a mock French lead vocal: '[with fakish
French accent]: You're a Wafflehead / The sea of cream is what I beam /
Into her as her eyeballs gleam.' Kind of like Peter Sellers' Inspector
Clouseau. And it's got all the R's -- we just sort of developed this
sort of spiral of voices and we filled up -- Andy poured water in stereo
between two tracks in a jug. We went down to the beach to try and
sample some squelching noises. I had my gumboots on. And Morris plays
a cheese grater. And I got to sing the bass drum part; we didn't even
sample it, I just went [makes repeated popping noise with mouth] for
four minutes. And I take a gulp every eight bars, you know, so ...
we had fun. I'd really like to do more things like that."

DRIVING ALOUD (RADIO STORM) (alternate vocals)

Heading west going west heading west
Going over the sea
Where the sun always sets in the west
As a favor to me
And the plane touches down and you're dying of thirst
You're already aroused and the tires all burst
She looks so beautiful she looks so rare
You drop your coffee at the curb and vanish into thin air

And everything you say is like sugar
The sweeter it gets you know I lick it away

Radio forecast intermittent storms
Tidal waves that change their forms
Yeah!

With a knot in your heart you're afraid of the power to say
All the things that you don't wanna hear but you do anyway
And she already told you you got nothing to fear
She said it too fast and she said it too clear
It's like a Harrison Ford picture where he plays someone nice
He gets mixed up with a girl against his doctor's advice

And everything you say is like iron
It smashes me up but it's brittle inside

CHORUS

You need love baby love baby love - don't you throw it away
It's a miracle you've gotten so far without having to pay
In a sushi bar on M Street I was reaching for an egg
It took a half a second it was rolling down my leg
I've never known a word that simple have that effect
I'll say this for you, honey, you know how to connect

Oh yeah you do it very suddenly

But everything you say is a dagger
It slashes me up but it's easy to hide

CHORUS

What am I going to do with myself if I lose you?
What am I going to do with myself if you stay?

Jesus could raise the dead, Jesus could fly
Jesus could raise the dead, Jesus could fly
No sweat, no sweat at all
And everything you say is an ocean
It's keeping me up but it's pulling me down