I can only provide a setlist up to the first encore as I had to sprint for the last train to Bath:

_Solo_
Ghost Ship - very good, hadn't heard it before. Drowned sailors abounding.
I got the hots
Arms of love
I'm only you
Chinese bones

_Enter Tim_
Queen Elvis

_Enter Chris Cox_
I saw Nick Drake

_Enter Kimberley Rew_
I feel beautiful

_Enter Deni Bonet, John Paul Jones, Peter Blegvad, Morris Windsor_
De Chirico Street
Open the Door Richard

_Interval_

_Enter Robyn, Peter Blegvad, John Paul Jones_
Fly by night (Blegvad)
Ice fishing (John Paul Jones + Peter Blegvad)

_Enter Kim_
Sally was a legend

_Exit Blegvad and Jones_
IODOT (highlight of the evening, needless to say)

_Enter miscellaneous people (I lost track here)
She doesn't exist any more
Dark Princess (highlight of the evening among songs I'm less keen on)
America (with anti-Bushies intro)
Madonna of the Wasps
Balloon Man
Jewels for Sophia

_End of set_

Alan Rickman reads an extract from Robyn (from the novella, perchance?)

_Encores_
She said she said (Morris, Peter Blegvad and Robyn on harmonies)
A man's got to know his limitations, Briggs

They were obviously gearing up for more encores but I had to split (it's an old-fashioned way to say goodbye).

Tim played acoustic guitar and percussion, JPJ played mandolin, piano and bass guitar, Peter Blegvad played guitar, Chris Cox played double bass and mandolin, others played their normal instruments. More later.

- - Xipe the Flayed God
(Actually it's me, Mike G., o d'd on too much pulque and aztecobilia...)


I hope someone got a recording. Alan made a couple of amusing remarks about how he was unable to handle a reading from Captain Beefheart which Robyn had suggested, and then he read quite a long Hitchcock piece about life flowing through things and then running dry, but (a) I was near the back and (b) my hearing aid was playing up, so I missed most of the nuances.

To tell the truth I found the show a wee bit desolate. Robyn was in full-scale death trip mode and I had spent the afternoon studying Aztec methods of human sacrifice ["... select obsidian knife K decorated with face and teeth, slice flesh along A-B, connect to incision at Z, and extract heart whilst still beating. Deposit heart on chacmool M, then flay
skin along dotted line X-Y. If flayed skin smells too bad, make sure that the Skin Depository Jar D is fully locked by twisting flange C. IMPORTANT: the sacrifice must still be alive at this stage, or the sun will refuse to rise tomorrow..."].

Anyway, what I'm driving at is that I could have coped with a bit more light relief, and the show wasn't exactly a laugh a minute. I can't really
grumble about the omission of any specific number when I don't know what all the encores were, but my impression was that he was actively avoiding
Soft Boys material. Maybe he played Kingdom of Love or Only the Stones Remain or Insanely Jealous at the end?

- - Huitzilipochtli


from Charlotte:

As has already been reported, the 50th Birthday Celebration was very enjoyable. Robyn seemed in good spirits, despite all the talk of death... 'Chinese Bones', 'Queen Elvis' and 'I Often Dream Of Trains' were sublime. To top it all off, I had the pleasure of meeting him afterwards. He was so friendly, very willing to engage in conversation. What a great guy!


from Christopher:

I noticed Matthew Seligman in the foyer of the RFH prior to the gig and was surprised that he wasn't part of the performance.

I guess he was in the audience though?

I enjoyed the gig a lot, although the band seemed a little unrehearsed at times, and they transformed a simple, beautiful (devoid of baggage) Blegvad song into a menagerie of sound. At times, John Paul Jones didn't seem too sure what instrument he was supposed to be playing for the next song...

These were minor quibbles though. For me the atmosphere was great, with many a spine-tingling moment. Very nice to see him in a sizeable venue too. A stark contrast with the 12 bar club. Hammill at the Lowry in Manchester and Hitchcock in the QEH within three weeks! One of the best months of music in recent years....

Definitely worth the four hour there, four hour back bus trip (and an hour and a half walk) from Stoke-on-Trent, even considering the lesson I had to teach at 9:00 this morning.....

My first impression of the Luxor CD is that they're sketches of songs, some of which, I would expect, may end up on forthcoming albums.


from David P.:

Well here it is the most anticipated show of the century, well by us anyway. Was it worth the wait? Dammed right it was.
I arrived early to get a parking space on Waterloo Bridge and spent an hour hanging round Festival Pier and the Royal Festival Hall. At about 6 o'clock as it was getting dark and I found myself walking towards "Matthew Seligman", either it was him or he has an exact double. Anyway as I approached him he ran off towards The Royal Festival Hall, which is just a short distance from the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and disappeared inside. Only to reappear after about a minute and then hot foot it back inside again, strange!
When I got to the concert hall at about 6.50 there was no-one there, the show was about to start at 8.00, was I in the right place, right day, right year?
O.K. so about 7.15 the place was buzzing but still not a radish in sight, Rik where were you?
The show itself started promptly at about 8.00 with Robyn coming on by himself and singing a few acoustic numbers, including "I Got The Hots For You" (see the cake picture), and "Chinese Bones".
Robyn then introduced "tonight's first victim" and Tim Keegan came on to play "Queen Elvis". After which the other guests came on one song at a time. Chris Cox playing double bass , Kimberley Rew playing the fool, Morris Windsor playing drums of course, John Paul Jones playing mandolin/electric bass/grand piano, and Deni Bonet playing violin.
They played until 9.00, including a fantastic version of "De Chirico Street", then took a 20-minute interval.
During the break someone spotted Tim Keegan talking to members of the audience behind us. This was the chance I had been waiting for, so I approached him and asked if he would be kind enough to pass the card to Robyn. He said no problem but would I rather give it to him myself after the show, he would be back out after the show and would try to
get us to Robyn.
Second set ran for 50 minutes or so then Robyn said goodbye. Everyone left the stage, and then a single figure appeared and walked up to the microphone. It was none other than Alan Rickman who is now very well known for his role as Professor Snape in the Harry Potter movies. He announced that Robyn had promised to play some more songs
if he read one of Robyn's poems, so he did. (Sorry I don't know the name of the poem.)
Robyn came back on by himself and said "that's as it sounds in Harry Potter", the audience broke into a rendition of "Happy Birthday", Robyn played this down but did seem touched by the sentiment. He then played a solo electric version of "She Doesn't Exist Anymore".
The second encore included "She Said" by the Beatles, "Sally Was A Legend", a brilliant version of "Balloon Man", and the final song was one of the The Soft Boys first "We Like Bananas". They finished when they were forced to stop at about 10.45, with Robyn announging "we have to stop now, the gates are closed". They left the stage to a standing ovation, which lasted several minutes.
After the show Tim Keegan was as good as his word and Robyn came out to accept the card, saying, "who's the signature guy then?" He noticed the `stamp' on the envelope had not been franked and asked if it has been sent from abroad. He didn't open it there but would save it for his birthday tomorrow.
We had to be let out of the artist's entrance by a security guard as by this time the main doors were locked.
Wow what a night, all this and a new Robyn Hitchcock album to listen to on the way home, can life get any better?


From The Guardian, 4 March 2003:

Robyn Hitchcock, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

(Four stars out of a possible five)

There is nothing more tedious than watching other people do drugs. Watching the fruits of other people's drug-taking, however, is generally much more entertaining. To be fair, I have absolutely no idea whether Robyn Hitchcock, wonky idealogue of the Soft Boys, friend to the stars and the very definition of a cult, indulges but negotiating the lysergic logic of his lyrics, you feel that the doors of perception have been not so much cleansed as painted in garish colours and left permanently ajar.

A birthday concert to celebrate, as Hitchcock explains after bounding on stage in the first of three overwhelmingly colourful shirts, 50 glorious years of me, brings out a similarly colourful gaggle of friends. As well as Soft Boys Morris Windsor and Kimberley Rew (a deft but largely unshowy guitarist), there is Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, expat ambassador of oddball Americana Peter Blegvad, Alan Rickman reading a poem (of course) and, hello, Peter Blake exiting the gents.

Hitchcock's is a particularly English brand of psychedelia, defiantly an acquired taste. (My companion, a Hitchcock virgin, displays amusingly visible discomfort through much of the show.) In between songs he empties the contents of his mind like a madwoman's handbag, offering thoughts on asking Mozart for the soap in the shower; how, in the genetically modified future, we will all be either Elvis or Marilyn; and his hopes that Bush, Blair et al will open their third eyes. My companion rolls his.

The songs themselves: the proud children of Dylan, Syd Barrett and the Beatles work better when Hitchcock performs solo, or with a trio, than when there are as many as eight people on stage. The influence on REM of the Soft Boys marvellous 1980 debut Underwater Moonlight is obvious; sometimes, though, you wonder if it really takes this many people to sound like the Levellers. But Queen Elvis is beautiful and brave, the ancient English folk melody of The Speed Of Things deeply affecting, the ambivalent kiss-off of She Doesn't Exist strange and haunting. Like all surrealists, Hitchcock makes you look at familiar things askance and anew. If his songs sometimes become tangled in self-consciously wide-eyed imagery, a childlike playfulness carries him through. Then again, the poem read by Rickman, a kind of bleakly psychedelic Larkin, finds him at his most serious. "I'm a mirror cracked from side to side," he sings at one point, which pretty much sums it up.


During the concert Alan Rickman read a poem written by Robyn. Here is the text:

If death is not the end, I'd like to know what is.

For all eternity we don't exist,
except for now.
In my gumshoe mac, I shuffled to the clifftop,
Stood well back,
and struck a match to light my life;
And as it flared it fell in darkness
Lighting nothing but itself.

I saw my life fall and thought:
Well, kiss my physics!
Time is over, or it's not,
But this I know:
Life passes through us like the blade
Of bamboo growing through the prisoner pegged down in the glade
It pierces your blood, you screaming head -
Life is what happened to the dead.

Forever we do not exist
Except for now.
Life passes through us like a beam
Of charcoal green - a golden gleam,
The opposite of how it seems:
It's not you that goes through life
- life is the knife that cuts your dream
Around the seam
And leaves you turned on in the stream, laughing with your mouth
open,
Until the stream is gone,
Leaving you cracked mud,
Not even there to be absent,
From the heartbeat of a dying fish.

In bed, upstairs, I feel your pulse run with the clock
And reach your hand
And lock us with our fingers
As if we were bumping above the Pole.
Yet I know by dawn
Your hand will be dry bone
I'll have slept through your goodbye,no matter how long I wake.

Life winds on,
Through Cheri and Karl who can no longer smell chocolate,
Or see with wonder wind inflate the sail,
Or answer mail

Life flies on
Through Katy who was Catherine but is bound for Kate
Who looks over her shoulder at the demon Azmodeus,
And sees the Daily Mail

(I clutch my purse. I had it just now.)

Life slices through
The frozen butter in the Alpine wreck.

(I found your photo upside down
I never kissed a girl so long,
So long, so lovely or so wrong)

Life is what kills you in the end
And I can cry
But you won't be there to be sorry
You were made of life

For ever we did not exist
We woke and for a second kissed.