From Robyn on Patreon in 2024
I have a memory - which can’t be true - of being an artist in 19th Century France. I was living in a white tower in the middle of a field; but the room I was in had no door - just one big window by which there was light enough to paint. Often, at dusk, I would lean out of this window - my long orange beard (à la Van Gogh or Viv Stanshall) tapering down the curved brickwork towards the ground below. Nasturtiums grew from the cracks in flagstones, their orange flowers luminescent in the gloaming. Figures would pass in the distance, padding silently through the mists - for it was autumn. Crows and bats silhouetted themselves on the twilight sky.

One evening I was looking up at them, when suddenly I felt a great weight on my beard tugging me down: I almost dropped my paintbrush. A couple of yards below me (for my beard was very long) a woman with auburn hair and green eyes was scrambling up towards me. A second later, she was gazing into my face, suspended before me by a pair of shimmering translucent wings that grew from her back and beat ceaselessly, like a hummingbird’s. I glanced down, and was somewhat disturbed to see that below the waist she had the black and yellow abdomen of a wasp - much as a mermaid becomes a fish, below the belt.

As I tried to process this unearthly apparition, I noticed one more thing: she had a golden halo above her head, as if it had been painted against the evening sky. She grabbed the paintbrush from me and snapped it in two. Then she smiled at me, her full lips and broad cheekbones illuminated with diabolical glee. The faint clicks from below were the two halves of my paintbrush reaching the ground.

The apparition’s lips parted slightly, but instead of speaking she began to whistle an old folk tune. Even as I tried to identify this haunting melody, the wasp lady grabbed me by both ears and gave me the most passionate, snake-like kiss. Her tongue found mine in a way that it had never been found before. But even as that sensation flooded my veins and accelerated my heart-beat, she let go my ears and ripped open my white, paint-spattered smock. And before I could feel the shock of this, she gave me a greater shock by curling up her giant abdomen and stinging me just above my navel. I fell back onto the floorboards in agony, which thankfully turned to numbness and then into oblivion.

When I woke, I was standing outside the tower. I could see its door, open, behind me. Inside were a rusty bicycle and a column of flowerpots. It was early morning, and the dew had turned to frost; the nasturtiums had died overnight. The sun was mercifully mute behind a veil of mist. A hundred meters or so away from me, the Madonna of the Wasps lay like a crashed aircraft. Her work was done…

That’s the story behind this song. It’s my favourite from my radio days on A&M records - there was even a cassette single of it once, I think. Time is a strange currency, but it’s the only way you can buy life. Or is it the other way around? Davey Lane and I have been playing this one on and off for a few years now - here we are performing it in Melbourne. Filmed by Jeremy Dylan (thanks JD!) and enhanced as ever by Charlie Francis in his lair in Cardiff.

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Robyn also described his idea of the song in an interview with the New York Times in early 1992. From the review of the Februiary 6th show that year:

On another note, today's New York Times has an article by Karen
Schoemer in anticipation of tonight's show at the Ritz. The most
interesting thing I noted was Robyn's explanation of 'Madonna of the
Wasps': "It's a woman who's turned into a wasp from the waist down,
like a mermaid," he [Robyn] said. "I pictured her hovering outside the
room, occasionally jutting her abdomen through the window and jabbing
at this bearded emaciated artist in a small white room in northern
France. He didn't know whether she'd put her head in the window and
give him a kiss or put her stinger in the window and gouge his abdomen
with her poison. But he was compelled to open the window every time
until she came and hovered outside. One day, he was able to get out
of his room. It was winter and the frosts were coming, and he saw the
madonna dead by the side of the road. She was like a wrecked plane.
She was hollowed out. He could see her fuselage. She wasn't even half
human any more, it was like a figurehead with the paint knocked off.
And he suddenly sees that this thing that has been enthralling him or
terrifying him no longer has any power over him, and in death is
nothing more than a battered figurehead."