His friends were...
John Paul Jones
Rob Ellis
Paul Noble
Jenny Adejayan

Photos from Whisky Fun blog - link below

Online review by Stewart Lee
Islington’s Union Chapel is a foreboding venue for rock musicians. Its vaulted Victorian interior amplifies and supports the unplugged guitar or the naked human voice, but electrify the proceedings and indecipherable white noise bounces round the buttresses. Sometimes the holy formality of the space adds a magical, crispy frosting to an event, but sometimes it smothers an audience’s response in reverential torpor, as their laughter and applause disappear unheard up into the arches. And tonight it’s snowing outside. The bar isn’t busy, but the kiosk selling hot drinks by the doors is doing well. Robyn Hitchcock’s been in the business over thirty years now, from the psychedelic punk trash of his ‘70s Cambridge band the Soft Boys, to his current incarnation as a surrealist troubadour and national treasure in waiting. His fans are, understandably, aging. Some of them may not survive the cold.

If anyone can defeat The Union Chapel, it’s Robyn Hitchcock. Opening for R.E.M last year, at the similarly sonically unpredictable Royal Albert Hall, the silver-fringed dandy arrived onstage, accompanied only by Led Zepellin’s John Paul Jones on mandolin, and let the architecture do the work, playing the spaces between the notes with a subtlety and quiet confidence the headliners could have learned from. Tonight, Hitchcock’s on tour trailing his new album, Goodnight Oslo (Proper), a noisy reminiscence of an amphetamine fuelled night in Norway in 1982, recorded with three fifths of R.E.M, and the stage is set up for a full band. Hitchcock is accompanied by PJ Harvey’s drummer Rob Ellis, a bass player sensibly clad in a fur hat, and a cello player in a sleeveless dress she must already be regretting. He holds a steaming cup of tea and a black and white polka dot guitar that matches his black and white polka dot shirt, making it look as if he has a fret-board growing out of his stomach.

While Ellis adjusts his kit, Hitchcock fearlessly free-associates his way through an inspired between song ramble, that’s as funny as a wedge of vintage Eddie Izzard, and draws down the Union Chapel’s cavernous ceiling into an intimate canvas canopy. Ellis’ percussion is minimal and sharp, the bass parts clean and functional, and the cello hums supportively. Hitchcock’s nasal folksy voice and precise phrasing cleave the damp air. And there’s room in NASA Clapping and the closing I’m Only You for Hitchcock to fill the band’s bent jug-band grooves with freak-beat guitar breaks that echo the synaptic and studiously untutored cascades of his childhood hero, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett.

Barrett’s influence on Hitchcock is also lyrical. He’s been criticised for his reliance on a peculiarly English sense of whimsy, and it must be said that Hitchcock lyrics sport more than their fair share of amphibians and insects. But his songs can also capture those tiny moments when nothing seems right, when time contracts and expands and we’re momentarily uncertain of whom me are. The Union Chapel was built to offer worshippers dead certainties. Tonight, Goodnight Oslo’s spindly title track uncoils to fill it, incrementally, inch by inch, with a bleakly comic existential dread. Hitchcock one, Union Chapel nil.


Online review and photos by Whisky Fun
It’s almost Spring, or so it seems. From snow to sunshine. Shining daffodils on the kitchen table. And outside my window at night the persistent twittering of insomniac birds. What are they saying? Are they discussing the meaning of life or simply swapping self-absorbed semaphore at a volume that others can’t escape? I can’t really say and frankly don’t care. I’m contemplating, full of remorse. Well, that might be a slight overstatement, but not for the first time I have to admit that here’s an artist who has passed me by for many years, simply a name on a shelf-divider or a listings page. On the basis of this performance, I can confirm that this is something I deeply regret.

We saw Robyn Hitchcock deliver an uncertain and unremarkable contribution to last year’s Rogues Gallery show, but something sparked my curiosity. Was it the garish shirt, the almost-Nick Lowe haircut, or the easy-hanging Stratocaster? I’m not sure which, but either way we jumped at these tickets, even if it did mean yet another trek across snowbound London and another visit (two within a week) to the you-know-where for a plateful of you-know-what, and a nice cup of tea. The lovely yet chilly Union Chapel is maybe only about two-thirds full, but yet again it’s clear that we’ve come to a church that’s full of believers, with high expectations of some sort of spiritual enlightenment.

It began with Hitchcock’s shirt, black and white spots that almost exactly matched the design on his Buddy Guy Stratocaster.

The slight sense of disorientation that this caused as the guitar moved was nothing compared with the effect of Hitchcock’s spoken contributions, delivered in the theatrical style of an Edwardian actor-manager. Occasionally cleverly-constructed song introductions, sometimes simply surreal observation. Some of it just twitter. It polarised the audience. Some looked bewildered, if not a tad embarrassed. Others – the majority, I’m glad to say - laughed. Frantically. At one point, during a particularly lengthy and obtuse introduction to the wonderful ‘NASA clapping’ the Photographer was in tears, something normally only achieved by comedian Ken Dodd at his bizarre best. It demanded huge powers of concentration just to keep up with Hitchcock’s musings, let alone the fifteen or so songs, all pretty strong material, including a few from his new album Goodnight Oslo, recorded with his sometime band the Venus 3 (featuring, it is mandatory to note, REM guitarist Peter Buck). If you don’t know, Hitchcock has been recording since 1976, first with The Soft Boys, then, in between solo work, with the Egyptians and more latterly the Venus 3. He’s recorded more albums and accumulated more re-releases and retrospective box sets as he’s moved record company, than most of us have eaten, well, plates of fish and chips. So it’s hard to know where to start, although Goodnight Oslo certainly won’t disappoint.

Tonight’s band features long-time collaborator Paul Noble on bass, Rob Ellis on drums and Jenny Adejayan on cello. Hitchcock divided his time between acoustic and electric guitars. On the latter he achieves, with the aid of an array of pedals and a quite unusual technique, a distinctive droning tone that fits marvellously with the cello to produce a sound that sits somewhere in time and texture between the Beatles’ Revolver and Sergeant Pepper.

It’s slightly psychedelic, and infused with a very attuned late sixties pop sensibility. At its most extreme, it falls into the infectious pop-pastiche of ‘Saturday Groovers’ from the new album. But the material is so diverse in tone and content that the sound never becomes repetitive or overbearing. As a writer Hitchcock falls into that school often dubbed, and almost dismissed, as ‘English eccentric’, a phrase that tends to devalue. He’s a great fan of Syd Barrett (they even share a discussion group, and he recently recorded a tribute gig to Barrett in a London pub) but if you listen carefully you can see that he draws his influences far more widely than from one person. And specific song titles speak for themselves and for the tone of the evening: ‘I’ve got the hots’, ‘Sinister but she was happy’, ‘You and oblivion’, ‘The museum of sex,’ ‘Sounds great when you’re dead’. Hitchcock ended with the title track from the new album, derived from a few days that he and Maurice Windsor (drummer with the Soft Boys) spent in Oslo twenty years ago under the influence of Norwegian amphetamines, an experience from which, he tells us, he has yet to fully emerge. Now that might explain something.

It’s a fantastic and enlightening show, in every sense, evidenced by the excited chatter of the audience as they leave. I can only urge you to go and see Mr Hitchcock if you get the chance – he’ll be touring the States with the Venus 3 in April - and maybe dip your toes into his extensive discography, which is what I’ve been doing. And as we left the Union Chapel it’s snowing again, putting Spring on hold for few more weeks, but I know that somewhere in the distance those birds will still be twittering. - Nick Morgan (concert photographs by Kate)