Robyn Hitchcock And The Venus Three

Robyn Hitchcock is at home in England, having just returned from playing in Norway - a country he believes, "Is an increasingly wonderful place to be, it makes a nice change from Britain anyway."

Hitchcock's askew and seemingly constant philosophical scrutiny on life and its inhabitants is one that has been publicly expressed many times over since 1976, when he first fronted the seminal folk-punk pop rockers, The Soft Boys. Even when commenting on our newly updated trams, those that are much more streamline than he rode the last time he visited Adelaide some 14 years ago, he asks, "What's the point of a tram if it doesn't rattle?" a question that can easily be adapted when helping to describe his music.

"Well, they don't often make literal sense because they're not literal songs," he allows. "They're not like listening to the news or Bruce Springsteen. Having said that, I don't always know how much sense the news makes because there's all these things happening and people don't necessarily know why. You're given a lot of information but you're not really shown how to decode it, so people make uninformed choices. But fortunately, nobody votes on the basis of my songs, I just put them out and they find people who like them."

Awkwardly, I proffer that I often refer to his material as well-crafted pop songs that are full of mixed metaphors, often threaded together with deliberately bad rhyming; a description Hitchcock takes slight umbrage at.

"I don't know if they have metaphors in them," he retorts, "people have often said that. And I do try to rhyme on purpose," he adds, with some sarcasm. "Sometimes you can have a rhyme that stings a bit or hums even, but I think Bob Dylan got there first on that one. My music is very easy - you take 'The Basement Tapes' by Dylan, 'The White Album' by The Beatles and throw in a dash of Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart And The Incredible String Band and there you've got it. But if you just had to pick two things, it would be 'The Basement Tapes' and 'The White Album', though sometimes I veer towards 'Revolver', and 'OlŽ Tarantula' [Hitchcock's latest album] is at the 'Revolver' end."

The Authority Box is a perfect example of that influence, I propose, being quite possibly the missing link between The Beatles and Oasis...

"Well, funnily enough, I was trying to sound like The Psychedelic Furs on that song," he laughs, "but Underground Son was trying to sound like Oasis. In fact, I was trying to sound like The Soft Boys and REM 'cause I was in The Soft Boys and Peter [Buck, who plays along with Scott McCaughey and Bill Rieflin in Hitchcock's current band, Venus 3] is in REM [who incidentally cite The Soft Boys as one of their biggest influences], but then Underground Son resolved itself into Oasis, though it doesn't really sound like Oasis either," he further muddles matters. "But if you wanted to describe it in one sentence it would be, 'classic, late 20th century rock music'. You might have trouble fitting it in now, but in 50, 60 years time it will just blend in perfectly between 1965 and 2000. I think that it's really just a harmonic of what's been going on. It may reflect my feelings but in terms of style and attitude, I was a huge music fan in the late '60s and I grew up producing that kind of stuff, but it doesn't sound specifically '60s to me, that's just where its soul is. So yeah, late 20th century classic rock, but hold the Phil Collins."

On that, my immediate opinion was that 'OlŽ Tarantula' is possibly a bit more 'rock' than much of his previous works. But then came Belltown Ramble:

"Yeah, that's the song where they all swapped instruments," he enthuses. "Peter played bass, Scott played piano and I'm playing acoustic guitar, so it feels different to the others but it's also like a good antidote to have one song that was a bit different. It's completely live and there's no overdubs or editing, except for the fading out at the end because I got the chords all back to front."

Steve Jones

Robyn Hitchcock And The Venus Three play at the Governor Hindmarsh on Sat 14 October. 'Ole! Tarantula' is out now through Belmore Records.