Raymond and the Wires Releases Gigs Lyrics Comments

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Author
Robyn Hitchcock
According to our records, Robyn has played this song 100 times, most recently at Robyn & Emma's house on December 03, 2025. He first performed it at Old Town School of Folk Music on November 22, 2014, 11 years earlier.

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Notes from Robyn on Patreon in 2021
Charlie and I also recorded a demo of “Raymond And The Wires” a song I’d recently written in a kitchen in Sydney. It refers back to the time when I was 11 and went to ride on a soon-to-be-extinct electric bus with my father Raymond. He had recently given me a book about buses and I had become particularly obsessed by electric-powered vehicles (trolleybuses & trams) that were on the way out. I loved the way they drew voltage from the thick black wires that hung above them like a kind of handwriting in the sky. A few years later I felt the much same way about electric Bob Dylan...

Raymond was an ex-soldier with a stiff left leg that still ached from a war wound in 1944, 20 years previously. He wore thick glasses and often looked lost, walking with a distinctive lurch. Because he’d been that way all my young life it didn’t occur to me how much he must have constantly suffered from his disability: as a teenager he had been a sprinter. He and I didn’t have a very direct relationship, but every so often he would focus on doing something with me. Whenever I was with him I absorbed him at point-blank range, and he fuelled me with the creative drive that compels me to this day.

So it felt special that he indulged my electric-traction fetish and took me to Reading, just outside London which still had the overhead wiring and silent, hissing trolleybuses: a town famous for manufacturing biscuits/cookies, and where Oscar Wilde was criminally jailed. But to me Reading will always be where my father and I attempted to bond, sitting downstairs on a now long-demolished trolleybus.

Lyrics

My eyes have seen the trolley bus
On her pneumatic tyres
Vamping down the highroad
Drinking from the wires

My eyes have seen the trolley bus
Her rivets and her wheels
Sinking electricity
I wonder how that feels
I wonder

My eyes have seen the trolley bus
In 1964
I caught one with my father
We climbed through the back door
We couldn't sit upstairs because
My father's leg was bad
He spoke to me behind the glass
He was a lonesome dad

My eyes have seen the trolley bus
The silent way she moves
You miss the love you never had
The needle skips the grooves
I never knew my father close
Although I took him in
He travels round beside me now
He goes everywhere I've been
I wonder
I wonder

My eyes have seen the trolley bus