The Yodelling Hoover Releases Gigs Lyrics Comments

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Robyn Hitchcock
According to our records, Robyn has played this song 10 times, most recently at Hope & Anchor on September 29, 1984. He first performed it at The Royal Hotel on August 12, 1977, 7 years and 1 month earlier.

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From Robyn on Patreon in 2025
The Soft Boys unconsummated courtship by Radar Records in 1978 was nobody’s fault, just an example of the two parties having very different hopes of what the outcome would be. As our harp player and vocalist Jim Melton put it, “They wasted our time and we wasted their money.” Radar (which was essentially Warner Brothers in indie drag) paid for our many recording sessions with various producers and diminishing returns: one thing we all agreed on was that no attempt to record us managed to capture the feel of how we sounded live.

What did we sound like live? A kind of folk-metal-prog, if you want to try to categorise us. We were trying to synthesise something out of various ingredients, but we didn’t know what we were aiming for or how to do it. In the absence of a manifesto, we tried not to take ourselves too seriously, but to encompass anything we fancied from barbershop vocal quartets to heavy rock. Fed up with trying to figure us out, the music press dismissed us as clever jokers. Oh well…

Here are two songs from the aborted Radar album recorded in July 1978 at Rockfield Studios. You can hear some of the frustration in my vocals, peppered as they also are with obligatory New Wave rage. It was maddening that most of the songs on the album wound up up being old ones that we’d recorded before: I was always keen to get my latest compositions down on tape. Still, the band sounds feisty. Kimberley Rew had joined us only that year, which gave the music a hard rock edge and a kind of demented confidence.

A fair amount of this album has survived on cassette. Here’s the first two songs, more to follow…

Lyrics

Everything goes down, oh yeah
The jewels in the crown, oh yeah
She don't know why she does it, oh no
Maybe just because it tickles

You're very French
But your heart's a target for the east

There she goes again
Singing on a train
Sucking on a brain
Crawling through a drain
Oozing with a snake
Hope it doesn't break
Squashing on a cake
Tease me on a lake

I'm very dry
But my lips are tempted by your heart

Here come the yodelling hoover
She's gonna yodel over you
She's gonna yodel over you
Yeah

Baby, what's the use
Of being an excuse
Your dust encrusted rust
Your dessicated lust
Of other people's stuff
You never get enough
And everything you see
It goes into your mouth

She's very fat
But her heart's encrusted by the spines

Here come the yodelling hoover
She's gonna yodel over you
She's gonna yodel over you
Here come the yodelling hoover
She's gonna yodel over you
She's gonna yodel over you
She's gonna yodel over you
She's gonna yodel over you
She's gonna yodel over you