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

Uncorrected - 5. "The spoiled baby..." to "oy" really shows what a creative high he was on as songwriter. A gloriously weird, insightful, melodic and short section not be heard from again. Blink and you missed it.

This is an album about expression and not product. There's no eye on the charts, ears on current productions and thoughts from record label management in this record.

 

Uncorrected....was fun the first time, but I usually skip it. 2/5

 

A few days off:

Cathedral -- the first *great* song on the album -- 5/5

UPT -- as a novelty song *after* the greatness of Cathedral, it does get a bit tiresome. 3/5. Live with a band, it's usually fun, though.

Why Cathedral was bracketed by two "funny" songs -- I never understood.

 

Pretty much agree with the two previous posts. 3.5/5

 

“Uncorrected” — 3.25/5

This is a well-done comic a cappella number, but to me it doesn’t bear repeated listenings and I usually feel like skipping it. It’s a great parody of midcentury pseudopsychology, and fits with the album thematically if not stylistically, but I wouldn’t want to hear it over and over again.

 

Our votes for "Uncorrected Personality Traits"

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Average: 3.9208

 

Today's song is "Sounds Great When You're Dead", written and produced by Robyn Hitchcock.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/3OPQcu0mC5L1rvvawccuSz?si=VMpuV80lSPClFRIaGVincw

A live version of this song was released on I Often Dream of Trains in New York in 2008.

 

Sounds Great When You’re Dead - I love the ominous guitar and piano in the verses here, but this song never really takes off for me. The lyrics don’t seem particularly interesting to me, and none of the lines capture my imagination. I like this well enough, but I don’t think it’s in the same class as any of the previous songs on the album.

3/5

 

I'm not a huge fan of this one either. It all seems a bit ham-fisted both musically and lyrically. Compared to the subtle playing elsewhere in the album, the piano here sounds invasive and strident while the guitar riff is a little ponderous.

Lyrically he's not at his best on this one either. The words sound as if they were cobbled together without a great amount of thought and there are some horribly mangles lines eg "Baby, you're incredible, I think that you're the most/I've searched around for everything like you from coast to coast". That said, the first verse is an interesting pick up on the theme from Uncorrected Personality Traits and, even in the weaker songs, there's usually a gem. In this case it's "We're at our most together when we're at our most apart".

 

I think it's a great song, and again, perfectly sequenced between "UPT" and "Flavour of Night"-- another shouty mad song; I can agree that perhaps he's just stuck some words and musical ideas together, but for me it makes up an overall mosaic: there's this theme theme of lost love and frustration at a relationship that didn't work and this theme of anger (the shouty vocal) and perhaps implicit threat in the chorus, leavened by the idea that maybe he's just being whimsical and silly again. It's a necessary part of this album; in fact this is the last of bit of this raging madman that we'll see here.

3.8/5

 

I will add, since my 30 minutes of editing time are mysteriously up, that there's something winningly nihilistic and utterly catchy about the line "It may sound dodgy now but it sounds great when you're dead", I just think it's a brilliant line.

 

Don't want to overanalyse the songs here too much for fear of detracting from the flow of the album. This is typical RH, could have been on Groovy D done differently, but as LdS says fits here. The Egyptian theme of the afterlife (or beforelife on Respect) crops up a few times.
The jagged and sinister piano definitely reminds me of the soundtrack to the great film 'Chinatown'. 1974 may have been a dodgy year for Robyn, but a great one for American movies.
4/5

 

Yeah I like this one...I don't have much to say about it, 3.8/5

 

Yeah, this is a bit of a step down from the other songs so far, and a bit more clunky in its construction (the chorus just seems bolted onto the verse haphazardly). However, it has a great jagged sound, a sense of creepiness about it and I love the chorus lyric too. 3.5/5

 

Sounds Great - 4. The little touches like piano fill, backwards guitar and extended ending chorus elevate the tune. As a song its far from the best on the album but still has loads of charm.

 

"It Sounds Great" - 5/5 - yes, it does.

 

Sounds Great.......I love the vocals on this one, musically pretty good also. Solid track. 4/5

 

The chorus elevates this one for me. 4/5

 

"Your mother is a journalist, your father is a creep" (but which is worse?).

Not the best track on the album in a compositional sense maybe, but I still love its attitude of general disdain. It also made a great opener for Egyptians gigs in place of 'Pretty Girl' circa 1986/7 (I never thought PG worked that well live 'rocked up' without that manic piano).

In fact, I like this one a lot more just in general than I like Pretty Girl.

4.2/5

 

“Sounds Great When You’re Dead” - 4.5/5

I like this one, demo-ish sounding even moreso than much of this album. As noted before, it’s interesting how the first lines of this song echo the Freudian concerns of the previous “Uncorrected”. Not the most elegant of the songs on IODT but I still think it sounds great...

 

Our votes for "Sounds Great When You're Dead"

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Average: 3.9818

 

Today's song is "Flavour of Night", written and produced by Robyn Hitchcock.

Spotify: Flavour of Light
Lyric.

A live version of this song, recorded in November 2008, was released on I Often Dream of Trains in New York in 2009.

The song features James Fletcher on saxophone.

 

Drive-by trivia before we properly get into examining 'Flavour Of Night':

Jools Holland was on BBC Breakfast News just now, plugging the latest series of his live (in the studio) music performance TV show 'Later', which has been going for twentysomething years and five hundredandsomething editions. I was reminded by this that Robyn has appeared on the show just the once (circa 2012-ish), on his own and spotlit, playing a single song: 'It Sounds Great When You're Dead.' Why he chose it then and what exactly he was promoting, I can't remember.

Unhappily it wasn't a great performance and he seemed quite uncomfortable.

 

Yes, I saw this and remember being surprised by the song choice but disappointed by the performance. I think it may have been around the time he was doing the whole of IODOT live?

 

Ah yes. That would put it a bit earlier than I thought then, at around 2008/9, but you're most likely right.

I remember that I was surprised that he was even on the show, and then only playing one number. But weirdly I was also equally surprised that he hadn't already been on it much earlier, given that he's a contemporary of Holland's and had been kind enough to lend Andy M to Squeeze in 1987/8.

Still odd, though. Even Scott Walker played two songs on Later.