Robyn Hitchcock – Union Chapel, London, 12th February 2009
SUNDAY TIMES

Islington’s Union Chapel is a foreboding venue for rock musicians. Its vaulted Victorian interior amplifies and supports the unplugged guitar or the naked human voice, but electrify the proceedings and indecipherable white noise bounces round the buttresses. Sometimes the holy formality of the space adds a magical, crispy frosting to an event, but sometimes it smothers an audience’s response in reverential torpor, as their laughter and applause disappear unheard up into the arches. And tonight it’s snowing outside. The bar isn’t busy, but the kiosk selling hot drinks by the doors is doing well. Robyn Hitchcock’s been in the business over thirty years now, from the psychedelic punk trash of his ‘70s Cambridge band the Soft Boys, to his current incarnation as a surrealist troubadour and national treasure in waiting. His fans are, understandably, aging. Some of them may not survive the cold.

If anyone can defeat The Union Chapel, it’s Robyn Hitchcock. Opening for R.E.M last year, at the similarly sonically unpredictable Royal Albert Hall, the silver-fringed dandy arrived onstage, accompanied only by Led Zepellin’s John Paul Jones on mandolin, and let the architecture do the work, playing the spaces between the notes with a subtlety and quiet confidence the headliners could have learned from. Tonight, Hitchcock’s on tour trailing his new album, Goodnight Oslo (Proper), a noisy reminiscence of an amphetamine fuelled night in Norway in 1982, recorded with three fifths of R.E.M, and the stage is set up for a full band. Hitchcock is accompanied by PJ Harvey’s drummer Rob Ellis, a bass player sensibly clad in a fur hat, and a cello player in a sleeveless dress she must already be regretting. He holds a steaming cup of tea and a black and white polka dot guitar that matches his black and white polka dot shirt, making it look as if he has a fret-board growing out of his stomach.

While Ellis adjusts his kit, Hitchcock fearlessly free-associates his way through an inspired between song ramble, that’s as funny as a wedge of vintage Eddie Izzard, and draws down the Union Chapel’s cavernous ceiling into an intimate canvas canopy. Ellis’ percussion is minimal and sharp, the bass parts clean and functional, and the cello hums supportively. Hitchcock's nasal folksy voice and precise phrasing cleave the damp air. And there’s room in NASA Clapping and the closing I’m Only You for Hitchcock to fill the band’s bent jug-band grooves with freak-beat guitar breaks that echo the synaptic and studiously untutored cascades of his childhood hero, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett.

Barrett’s influence on Hitchcock is also lyrical. He’s been criticised for his reliance on a peculiarly English sense of whimsy, and it must be said that Hitchcock lyrics sport more than their fair share of amphibians and insects. But his songs can also capture those tiny moments when nothing seems right, when time contracts and expands and we’re momentarily uncertain of whom me are. The Union Chapel was built to offer worshippers dead certainties. Tonight, Goodnight Oslo’s spindly title track uncoils to fill it, incrementally, inch by inch, with a bleakly comic existential dread. Hitchcock one, Union Chapel nil.

STEWART LEE