“THAT’S ONE OF MY TENDENCIES: IF I THINK SOMETHING IS SIMILAR TO SOMETHING ELSE, I MAKE IT MORE SO”
ALTHOUGH HIS CAREER now spans six decades, and luminaries from former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck to Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme count among his admirers and collaborators, 69-year-old singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock has never had the sort of mainstream success that would allow him to stop being a very much working musician. Before the COVID lockdown, the London-born Hitchcock, who now splits his time between the British capital and Nashville, was still averaging almost 100 solo acoustic shows a year, crisscrossing the globe — often with his wife, the singer Emma Swift — to perform for the devoted fans of his often surreal and spidery brand of pop.
“When lockdown came, all the income dried up, so we had to make money somehow,” Hitchcock says. “So we started Patreons and internet broadcasts, which was great when there was nowhere else to go and nothing to do.” The performances — which often featured Swift on backing vocals, as well as appearances by the couple’s two Scottish Fold cats, Tubby and Ringo, a plush Gorilla named the Edge, and Perry the stuffed lobster — kept the couple solvent. And when he wasn’t preparing for the show, Hitchcock found his isolation to be uniquely productive. “Artistically, it was wonderful,” he says. “It gave me time to do some painting that I never would have gotten to otherwise,” he says. “And of course, it gave me time to start recording ”
