Los Angeles Times
April 18, 1988
Hitchcock Creates Internal Vibrations
by Steve Hochman

Robyn Hitchcock knitted his heavy eyebrows, peered out at the 1,000 or so people at the chilly John Anson Ford Theatre, and explained: "If you want to dance, it's better to just vibrate internally, because this isn't Dance music." But the tall, lean Englishman's outdoor concert Friday showed that his melodic, intelligent Pop and often bizarre, twisted imagery call for as much a physical response as a cerebral one.

Hitchcock himself was much more animated than in past shows, interacting with bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor and even good-naturedly mocking the Pete Townshend-like moves of guest guitarist Peter Buck of R.E.M. --or maybe he was just reacting to the cold.

Whether singing the praises of flesh and fish or, in his convoluted-but-coherent between-song remarks, denouncing the "forces of darkness" embodied in his wristwatch and a faulty foot-pedal, Hitchcock showed he has the wit and Pop-sense to merit the Sgt. Pepper-ish cap he sported. While many on hand seemed to appreciate the earthy and cosmic humor of the tunes and tales, many others sat stone-faced, as if hanging on every word of a prophet. Or maybe that was just because of the cold, too.


LA Weekly
Dated April 28, 1988
Robyn Hitchcock: Good for a dose.
Arion Berger

Our minds are relatively malleable organs, gullible, easily confused and disoriented by the smallest contradictions. Under the stars and in the twilight, pop-surreal icon Robyn Hitchcock played his skewy, bouncy music not demented beyond recognition but not, like, total ear candy and almost fooled the inalert into believing it was just another good pop show by another English asshole with a good line of patter (a great line of patter, topics including hex-removal, transvestitism, Parliament-member perverts and the nature of an audience). But he does some strange things with six strings, stranger than what those House of Lords guys are up to, and you can see it in the other band members, literally hunched over their instruments, trying to wrench and twist out the bizarro noises as no other ostensibly pop group does. You can hear it in the lyrics (arty audiences are very good listeners), springing as they do from pretty, crypto-psychedelic noun-verb-adj.-adj. combos with spaced-out Britishisms like "custard" and "knickers" and "gardens" and "tea" and all that lot. Its pop. Its totally out there. He's a charmer with some very sick dialogue. I dig it deeply in smaller doses.