Wey Wey Hep a Hole Ding Dong: Robyn Hitchcock the song by song, album by album thread

Dark Green Energy : If this were on Perspex Island instead of languishing on a b-side, it would easily be in the top three or four songs on it. As Lance says above, Stipe's presence is somehow less distracting when it's consistent throughout the song.

I still prefer the demo though, where Robyn provides profundo basso accompaniment to himself.

3.8/5

 

Dark Green Energy

This is a really beautiful song, a perfect mesh of Out of Time-era R.E.M. with classic Robyn. The duet works really nicely - Stipe's unmistakeable voice really needs to be up front, rather than as distracting backing vocals. I've not heard the Robyn-only demo to compare.

Lyrically, really nice variations on a theme of "we are part of nature, and nature is part of us".

The production is light and not overpowering too. Better by miles than a lot of Perspex Island songs.

5/5

 

A terrific song which is utterly wasted on a B-side. I can only assume it was left off the album as they may have felt that including two tracks featuring Michael Stipe would have been over-egging the pudding. But it's way, way better than at least two thirds of the album itself. Like She Doesn't Exits, it benefits from more sympathetic production that much of what's on PI. I think either of the two songs would have made a potential breakthrough single.

It's a lovely duet between two very different voices that nonetheless work well in tangent while the lyrics seem to sit well with the human/planet relationship concept which, I must confess, hadn't occurred to me until this discussion. Luckily I bought the SYTYIL single, otherwise this gem might have passed me by which would have been a great shame.

Dark Green Energy 4.3/5.

 

This is a really good one, 4/5

 

Dark Green Energy - 4/5 - Astonished at the time that this was a b-side, and still am.

 

DGE -- solid 4/5 track and certainly better than most of Perspex.

 

OK I listened to this a bunch more times and I'm changing to 4.8/5

 

Solid 4.0 not sure how this didn’t make it on the album.

 

Our votes for "Dark Green Energy"

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Average: 4.3625

 

Today's song is "Watch Your Intelligence", written by Robyn Hitchcock and produced by Paul Fox.

Robyn Hitchcock – Watch Your Intelligence Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

This was released as a B-side of "So You Think You're In Love."

 

The main guitar riff here vaguely recalls "Hear My Brain" from 1977....And there's bits of this that sound like "Ultra Unbelievable Love", though the overall sound couldn't be more different: this is very lean and the band gets the chance to show off it's fleet mastery, while that was straitjacketed and tightly controlled, in a bad way. More of the rather stripped down approach of this osng and yesterday' is exactly what Perspex Island needed to give it variety and a sense of lightness.

I just connected what Perspex Island reminds me off: Lucky Town by Bruce Springsteen, released in 1992. That may not sound right, but it has that same overbearing sound and absolutely stiff, never-varying and loud drumming.

Anyway, I love the lyric here which is unusually clear and straightforward, too.

I much prefer this to "Ultra Unbelievable Love"' 4.2/5

 

Never heard this one before!
Seems like a classic example of a hidden gem b-side.
Nice to have a touch of the angular Soft Boys-style guitar, which was generally absent from Perspex Island. Lyrically it strikes me as a more sardonic forerunner to Television from Spooked, but I think I prefer the later lyric. This is still really good though.

4/5

 

Watch Your Intelligence : This slice of Real Robyn should have been on the album instead of [insert your choice here].

3.7/9

Bear in mind that even 'Birds In Perspex', far and away the best track on PI, only got a 3.8 or 3.9/5 from me (and in more generous hindsight ithat one should really break a 4).

 

Good call about Hear My Brane etc - maybe this reminds me of Anglepoise or Psychedelic Love, before the gloom of the Asking Tree set in.
'I live here, Donald'. Indeed. 4/5

 

Intelligence -- 4/5. This is what Perspex needed -- some more uptempo stuff.

 

I agree with the Soft Boys comp. Yes, I like this one quite a bit, though maybe not as much as the folks above: 3.5/5

 

This is fabulous; possibly my favourite song of the entire PI sessions but, like DGE, cruelly consigned to a B-side when it should have been a cornerstone of the LP. It's the only song from the period which really captures the RH situationist surrealism which makes him such a unique artist. I love the lyrics, the vocal interjections and the ad-lib section over the fade and prefer it to the more po-faced Television from Spooked which deals with similar themes.

The angular Soft Boys era riff is a welcome departure from much of the overproduced, AOR sludge on the album. I can't imagine why it was left off as it would have provided some much needed light relief to the whole proceedings. Alas, song selection and sequencing. as we've noted, are not always Robyn's forte.

Watch Your Intelligence 4.6/5.

 

Meh not much in the way of melody except for the chorus sorry to go against the grain but this one's a 2.5 for me.

 

Our votes for "Watch Your Intelligence"

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Average: 3.8125

 

Today's song is "Lovely Golden Villains" written and recorded by Robyn Hitchcock.


Recorded in 1990, this was released in 2007 on While Thatcher Mauled Britain, part of a larger box set I Wanna Go Backwards.

In the purple shadows
Many colours swim
Get me out of England fast
Father, I have sinned
I need a place to vanish
I need a place to hide
My clothes are strewn upon a beach
I'm bobbing on the tide
I've made my pile
I wish to escape
Once it's peeled you cannot glue
the skin back on the grape

Lovely golden villians
Lovely golden villains
Lovely golden villians
Gonna make a lovely villain out of you

Out in (?) county
Out in Bendalore(?)
Lovely golden villains
Curl up safe and warm
Look out Margarita
Look out Uncle Bob
Lovely golden villains
Are always on the job
have a little debbie
Have a little wine
I don't speak your language
So why don't you speak mine, eh?

Lovely golden villians
Lovely golden villains
Lovely golden villians
Gonna make a lovely villain out of you

Blimey, Mrs Withers
Cheer up Uncle Claude
They won't interfere
With Mr Snelling on the ball
Curled up like a lizard
By the telephone
Mr Snelling called to ask
if I was on my own
"Ah, ah, ah Mr Snelling
Course I am", I told him
Then I looked around
Uncle Claude was leering
From the dodgy looking mound
Lovely Margarita
Had a shooter too
Sometimes I wish I was
Selling flowers at Waterloo. Cheers!

Lovely golden villians
Lovely golden villains
Lovely golden villians
Gonna make a lovely villain out of you

Lovely golden villians
Gonna make a better villain out of you
Lovely golden villians
Gonna make a better villain out of you

 

"Lovely Golden Villains" has a fairly strong Bob Dylan influence in it's odd little surreal comic narrative, but manages to not be pastiche but pure Robyn, I think --the amusing mass of harmonies and lyrical figures are interesting, to me this is a song about Robyn's flirtation with American success with A&M, but it quickly just devolves into a silly tale of druggy debauchery, I guess. I don't know why, but I wouldn't have minded hearing this on Perspex Island, just for a change from the plodding jangle-thump.

It's one of those goofy Robyn songs, and not everyone likes those...and I don't like every one of them either...but I like it more than the Bob Dylan's songs it's influenced by.

3.9/5

 

Gor blimey guvnor. This is the life, strike a light etc. Actually it's nothing to do with the USA or drugs (really) is it Brits?Costa Phoaar! Pass the sangria. Sort of follow-up to Man in the Air with a bit of Dury added. 3.5/5

PS It's 'out in Alicante, out in Benidorm' in verse 2.

 

Lovely Golden Villains is about British criminals fleeing abroad to escape justice, as was very prevalent in the 1960s and 70s. In your transcript above, the words you're looking for at the top of verse two are are Alicante and Benidorm, which are both holiday resorts in a part of Spain known as the "Costa del Crime" due to the number of fleeing criminals and ex-cons who used to hide out there. I suspect golden in this context means suntanned. In the same verse it's "have a little bevvy" ie have a beer.

The line about selling flowers at Waterloo refers directly to Buster Edwards who was one of the infamous Great Train Robbers who hi-jacked a mail train and stole a fortune in used banknotes in 1963. He later had a flower stall at the London railway station and was portrayed in a film about his life by Phil Collins.

It's all wonderfully silly and the fake voice in verse three is distinctly Pythonesque; you can imagine Graham Chapman playing a dim policeman. I doubt this song was ever seriously considered as an album track but it's a lovely little outtake.

Lovely Golden Villains 3.8/5

 

Thanks for the heads-up about Buster. Diamond geezer.

 

Lovely Golden Villains : Yeah, you can't get more 'English' (as opposed to 'British') than this one.

I can see it's mostly about Yer Cockerney Costa Del Crime mob, but I think there's also a bit of a reference to John Stonehouse in the first verse (an English MP in the 1970s who attempted to fake his own suicide by drowning to avoid imprisonment, fleeing the country and leaving his usual clothes and possessions lying on a south coast beach - itself parodied soon after in the BBC comedy The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin).

We've no proper recording date for this track, but I like to imagine that Robyn was writing and playing this kind of stuff in his spare time as some kind of respite from churning out the 'product' that A&M were expecting (possibly even demanding) from him by this point. At least on these demos (including the ones for Perspex Island itself) it sounds like he's having a lot more fun than he is when working at the day job.

Under normal circumstances I'd consider this great fun but a bit throwaway, but following Perspex Island as it does in this thread, it's a real refreshing breath of non-sterile air.

3.8/5