Robyn Hitchcock 'I Wanna Go Backwards' album

"I was writing songs and living inside myself," Robyn Hitchcock recalls in the liner notes of I Wanna Go Backwards, the new five-CD box set collecting some his best work from the 1980s. "Outside in the world, Thatcher waged the Falklands War, suppressed the Miners' Strike, abolished the Greater London Council, dismembered public utilities, sold off the school playing fields and cozied up to Reagan in a sickening foreplay to the Blair/Bush mating ritual.... My heroes were gone, seeding themselves in me, and those seeds gestated. I began to feel like a keeper of souls. Characters that I had known and loved formed embryonically again in my songs, and other creatures loomed too."

Over the past three decades, Robyn Hitchcock has built a large and distinctive body of work that's established him as one of rock's most respected and beloved iconoclasts. The prolific English singer/songwriter/guitarist's vivid surrealist songcraft has won him an uncommonly devoted international fan base, and created an ongoing demand for rare and unreleased Hitchcock material. Meanwhile, many of the artist's most popular and influential albums have fallen out of print and become difficult for fans to obtain, changing hands for hefty sums on the collectors' market.

The latter situation is addressed by Yep Roc's release of the five-CD Hitchcock box set I Wanna Go Backwards. The lavish package is the first of two projected archival Hitchcock boxes. It was during the 1980s that Hitchcock established himself as a frequent visitor to the U.S., both solo and with his esteemed backup combo the Egyptians, and built a large American audience.

I Wanna Go Backwards encompasses expanded editions of three of Hitchcock's best-loved albums, Black Snake Diamond Role, I Often Dream of Trains and Eye, along with While Thatcher Mauled Britain Part 1 & 2, a newly compiled two-disc collection of b-sides, outtakes and home demo recordings, many of them previously unreleased. All of the individual albums feature bonus tracks and enhanced liner notes, including Hitchcock's personal reminiscences on Black Snake Diamond Role and While Thatcher Mauled Britain, an extract from a novel in progress on I Often Dream of Trains, and several pieces of original poetry on Eye, along with previously unpublished photos and Hitchcock cartoons.

In addition to the exclusive CD box set packaging, Black Snake Diamond Role, I Often Dream of Trains and Eye will also be individually released in their expanded, enhanced new editions. I Wanna Go Backwards will also be released as an eight-record vinyl box set version complete with original LP artwork. Additionally, Yep Roc is making another long-out-of-print early Hitchcock album, 1982's Groovy Decay, available exclusively as a digital download.

"With music you have to follow the rise and fall of the format," says Hitchcock. "These records were LPs that became cassettes, then CDs, then CDs again, and are now LPs and CDs once more, each time with new bonus material clinging to them. Like books, records deserve to be in print. But Graham Greene didn't have to keep coming up with bonus tracks each time they reprinted Brighton Rock."

The release of I Wanna Go Backwards coincides with a recent career resurgence during which Hitchcock has released the acclaimed albums Spooked and Ole! Tarantula, and become the subject of the recent Sundance Channel documentary Sex, Food, Death…& Insects.

The three albums on I Wanna Go Backwards represent the cream of Hitchcock's solo work—i.e., the records that he cut without the Egyptians—during the '80s. 1981's Black Snake Diamond Role was Hitchcock's first solo release, recorded during the waning days of his seminal postpunk combo the Soft Boys with an assortment of players including all three Soft Boys Kimberly Rew, Matthew Seligman and Morris Windsor, Vibrators guitarist Knox, Psychedelic Furs drummer Vince Ely and soon-to-be synth-pop star Thomas Dolby.

"Black Snake Diamond Role was the first Robyn Hitchcock LP—that meant a lot if you were Robyn Hitchcock," he notes. "The first session was in June 1980, while John Lennon was alive and Jimmy Carter was president. The final one was in January 1981, when they weren’t."

Black Snake Diamond Role continued the Soft Boys' legacy of warped jangle-pop, while introducing the moody, introspective side that Hitchcock would further explore in the years to come. The album introduced such enduring Hitchcock compositions as "The Man Who Invented Himself," "Brenda's Iron Sledge" and "Acid Bird," which are joined on the new edition by eight bonus tracks, most of them outtakes from the original album sessions.

I Often Dream of Trains, originally released in 1984, was a notable departure from Hitchcock's prior work, presenting his kaleidoscopic lyrical imagery and haunting melodic sensibility in spare, mostly acoustic settings that emphasize the material's intimate focus. The album balances the haunting introspection of such ballads as "Cathedral" and "Trams of Old London" with the barbed humor of "Sometimes I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl" and "Uncorrected Personality Traits." The new edition of I Often Dream of Trains augments the album's original 18 tracks with six bonus numbers.

1990's Eye was something of a sequel to I Often Dream of Trains, with Hitchcock returning to stripped-down solo approach as a low-key respite from the major-label rock albums that he was recording at the time. "I got to record Eye at a time when a lot of people were on my case," explains Hitchcock. "It had nobody else on it and no Alternative Chart expectations. It was luxury, a wide open meadow to kvetch in."

Eye remains a fan favorite, thanks to such memorable tunes as "Glass Hotel," "Clean Steve" and "Queen Elvis." The expanded edition adds four bonus tracks to the original album's 17.

The two-CD, 39-song While Thatcher Mauled Britain Part 1 & 2, meanwhile, features a comprehensive selection of '80s-vintage solo b-sides, outtakes and home demo recordings, drawn from Hitchcock's voluminous archives. The collection yields a multitude of hitherto unheard compositions, as well as alternate and embryonic versions of familiar Hitchcock favorites.

Although the home recordings that dominate While Thatcher Mauled Britain were not initially intended for public consumption, Hitchcock relishes the opportunity to open his sonic closet for fans' inspection. "A demo is generally more relaxed than when the same performer stands in front of the red light at the official session," Hitchcock observes. "That's been the case with me; on informal recordings, I play and sing with more swing despite the odd rogue note... There is something more alive about a piece of music where all the final decisions are yet to be made.

"Songs and music can develop fast in the fertilized mind, so, as with any clutch of tadpoles, many newly-hatched songs never make it to the slippery banks of showbusiness. But they might have made fine creatures. Thanks to the miracle of magnetic recording tape, these small beings can live again, with all their potential intact."

The release of I Wanna Go Backwards, and the individual albums that comprise it, offers the definitive retrospective of Robyn Hitchcock's '80s solo output, documenting a crucial period of this one-of-a-kind creative force.

"Your younger self is always faster and less subtle," Hitchcock states. "I would sing some of the songs differently now, but on the whole they sound fine. As I've said before, 50 isn't better or worse than 30 for an artist: you're just leaning in from a different angle."

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Robyn Hitchcock - I Wanna Go Backwards