According to our records, Robyn has played this song 7 times, most recently at The Chapel
on May 22, 2025.
He first performed it at IOTA
on October 16, 2000, 24 years and 7 months earlier.
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From Robyn on Patreon in 2025 This song is where John Lennon intersects with my two other great musical heroes, Bob Dylan and Syd Barrett. I can imagine either of those two singing it, at their curly-haired zeniths. There’s something in the chanted vocal line that echoes Dylan’s visionary ranting phase (which in 1967 was barely over), and the weird chord lurches are definitely Barrett-esque. The images themselves seem to spring from the same fountains of the brain common to all three of them - which is probably why I love them so much. I’ve always felt like their kid brother, hatched out into the world long after each of them had left home and vanished into his own psychic infinity.
The Walrus landed in late 1967. The odd thing is that, at the time, there was nothing surprising about it, to me, anyway: of course, the Beatles were capable of churning this kind of music out - bring it on! At that stage my school friends and I didn’t differentiate much between one Beatle and another: they were still the Fab Four to us. In those days it generally snowed in Southern England before Christmas, and I still hear the song through a curtain of fat snowflakes. Back in December 1967 I customized a pair of empty spectacle frames by gluing cellophane confectionary wrappers over them - one green and one purple - to give the snow a home-made psychedelic tinge.
I’m no stranger to the Walrus: it settled into my neural pathways along with other visionary anthems, making a sublime trifecta with Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” and Barrett’s “Wolfpack”. It would be hard to define what all three songs are about, but they each give off intense emotional energy via a surreal barrage of words. Before Christmas in 2019 the band Wilco was kind enough to invite me up on stage to sing it with them in Chicago. All that was missing was the multicoloured snow.
Here you can see two clips. One is of Kurt Bloch, Luther Russell and self running through the song in a kitchen in San Francisco, before our soundcheck rehearsal with the whole band at the Chapel. The other is an audience video shot that night at the Chapel gig itself, May 22nd. Note how Kelley Stoltz has sampled the strings from the middle section of the Beatles’ version. My recitation is from Shakespeare’s “King Lear” Act IV, Scene 4, which appears on the original “Walrus” recording from a BBC Radio broadcast as the music fades out. When it ends with “Oh, untimely death!”, Kelley triggers a sample of the noises from the end of “Bike” on the first Pink Floyd album. All roads lead back to Abbey Road…