Robyn wrote the following on his Substack in March 2026.
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It’s September 1988, and I’m breaking up with two people at once. My partner of 14 years is based in London. I’m living in a house in Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, off the coast of Southern England. My new girlfriend lives in San Francisco, 5,000 miles away. I’m due to visit her before embarking on a short West Coast tour.

After a brief, restless sleep, I rise one day before dawn and trundle down to the harbour with my guitar and suitcase to catch the ferry to Lymington on the English mainland. There’s nobody around on the chilly autumn pavements. From one of them, I pick up a handful of newly fallen chestnut leaves to present to my girlfriend as a souvenir of Britain. At first light, I slip onto the ferry, a spectral figure in the sea mist and make my way upstairs, where the cafe is already open, an orange glow in the pale blue dawn. I buy a cup of Wightlink coffee (Wightlink being the Isle of Wight ferry company) from a blank face at the counter and slump down at a table. My stomach feels queasy from lack of sleep. Yuck! Nonetheless, I pull out my notebook and a pen to see if I can write anything.

Sure enough, as the Wightlink Coffee percolates to my early morning brain, gradually but firmly out of it emerges a new song. I’ve trained myself to compose so that songs are constantly forming in my head, whether I notice them or not. Looking out the window at the waves as the night drains away, I’m tuning in to what exactly is crystallising in my mind. It’s a composition entitled “Wax Doll”. What’s that, I wonder? Yes, two words: “Wax” as in candle, and “Doll” as in figurine, little talisman. OK, better write that down for the chorus…

Oftentimes, song lyrics are messages to another person:

“I love you”

“I don’t love you anymore”

“You don’t love me anymore - WAH!”

And, even perhaps,

“I really dislike you, and I wish you would cease to exist...”

If you’re a songwriter, maybe you write songs like that yourself, or express them as prayers, internally, in the Great Manifesting Room in the psyche?

Personally speaking, songs are often just messages from me to myself. They’re a kind of Greek Chorus in my head that summarises my situation.

“Wax Doll” is one of those: it’s telling me where I’m at, like a Tarot reading. Does the doll melting in the flames represent me? Hmm… if so, I don’t think I’m melting there alone. Songs are tricky like that: you start out singing to one particular person and end up serenading a hybrid.

So I’m looking across the table at myself as I sit on this ferry on a still, calm morning in the bloodless dawn. Some kind of negative voodoo is at work in me. I’m seeing reflections of myself, at odds with how I might appear as a live performer. They aren’t flattering. Lately, I’ve been having acupuncture, hence the needle in my back in the lyrics. My heart is a place of many arrows, some inherited, some fired by myself.

The coffee kicks in as my words scrawl themselves across the page. My handwriting looks messy, and I hate writing clumsily. At this point, an old British vaudeville performer steps onto the small red velvet stage in my mind: Alan Breeze. My grandma and I used to see him sing on BBC television back in the mid-1960s. He sang inane music hall songs to middle Englanders, most notably “I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts”. A dapper figure in his tuxedo and bow tie, he embodied a very different kind of showbiz from the one I am part of.

The mind is a great transformer. No sooner has Alan Breeze entered my thoughts (sadly minus his charming co-star Kathy Kay) than he morphs into a guru. His message is to liberate yourself from your self, to step out of the ego and swim in the lake of Pure Being. Try immersing yourself, counsels the transfigured Mr Breeze, in the pit of souls where your lonesome individual self will joyously merge with a horde of other discarnate spirits.

But this is a tall order, especially at 7am after a couple of hours of bad sleep. In the end, only a few random characters manage to transcend themselves in “Wax Doll”: a phantom highwayman with a three-cornered hat named Jacob Lurch; Mr Moose (a stuffed animal from the TV series Fawlty Towers); and Dandy, whosoever that may be.

Like a house on the waves, the ferry glides onward across the Solent, the narrow stretch of ocean that separates the Island from the English mainland. The Island has long been a refuge for me, though I tend to wind up trapped alone with myself there, which isn’t always so nice. You can leave other people, but it’s impossible to leave yourself, I’ve discovered - at least, while you’re alive.

The ferry docks at Lymington Pier while I’m midway through writing verse three of the song. I leave one chestnut leaf along with my empty cup on the table and shuffle down the narrow gantry to the exit. Soon I’m on a train, then a bus, and then a jet plane. After a while, I’m up in the clouds, looking down at the ocean from 35,000 feet - and next moment I’m in outer space, mentally, a colonist from Earth poised to corrupt and exploit other fresh, round planets up there, light years away from the Isle of Wight ferry.

(Is there any mercy? Or just the drip, drip, drip of the dissolving ego as it cooks in its own flames? Hard to say at the best of times. It’s never been the best of times, as far back as I can recall, in the caves of memory where my earlier self squats among the bones of half-chewed experiences. How has it been for you, dear reader?)

I carry on writing “Wax Doll” all the way over the Atlantic, and continue when I finally get to my girlfriend’s pad in San Francisco, although none of these verses are keepers in the end. She goes to bed alone, and I keep writing until I fall asleep in my chair. She and I are already on the way out. After just a couple of months our relationship is dying. I am roaming the earth in vain, it seems. But perhaps I got what I really wanted out of that long voyage: another song. Whenever I sing it, I’m back on that ferry in the dismal dawn. For worse or for better, that little slice of my life is bottled forever.

“Wax Doll” was originally released on the Queen Elvis album in 1989. You can listen to it here.

A live acoustic version of it recorded in Nashville last year.


And here’s Alan Breeze singing “Let’s Face The Music And Dance”


P.S . The “whatcha say, whatcha say” bit at the end is a nod to John Lennon’s bottoming-out song “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down And Out”. It seemed appropriate…