You may think you know all there is to know about Robyn Hitchcock, but Victoria Segal uncovered 10 little-known facts about the iconic singer-songwriter.

He is available for weddings.

“I’m a minister of the Universal Life Church of Arizona: I can marry people in the States, although I’m not sure I can do it in Britain. I married Colin Meloy of The Decemberists and his wife [artist] Carson Ellis five years ago. I haven’t done a marriage recently, though.”

He likes a birthday party.

“There’s nothing more significant in your life than your birth. I’ve signed on for the long haul, like John Lee Hooker or Bob Dylan or Martin Carthy. You no longer have to knock off when you hit 30. As far as I’m concerned, the songs aren’t necessarily better now, any more than they were at 40 or 50, they’re just expressing different things and reacting to different things as your metabolism changes. But I’m really happy to put flags in the map of my life and anyone who is interested can come along and celebrate with me.”
　
He was born with trousers on.

This is a line from my song ‘Birds In Perspex’ (1991). It’s a very British angle. You are born already embarrassed, concealed, shamed by emotions and your physical existence. I came from a very squeamish kind of middle-class background — we were all born with trousers on. But I don’t necessarily think the Brits have a monopoly on it — I think it can be universal.”

He played at Yoko Ono’s 80th birthday show.

“It was a complete accident. I was in Berlin, visiting my daughter. I knew Michael Stipe was also there, and we were going to meet up. We attempted to get tickets to Yoko Ono’s show, but it didn’t happen so we went to get coffee and then Michael rang up and said, ‘You’ve got tickets.’ So we bolted down some prawns, hopped on the U-Bahn, then Michael texted and said, ‘You’ve got front-row seats.’ We squeezed past everyone and sat down. And then Yoko and Sean appeared. I’d never seen either of them before. Legend central, really. They did an amazing show. Sean’s a great bandleader, I’ve never seen a mother-son thing like it — I tried to imagine my mother and me doing a similar thing and I couldn’t at all.

Then Michael tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘We’re on in the encores.’ I didn’t even have a shirt on — I was wearing a V-necked sweater, and was basically dressed for coffee on a chilly Berlin night. Thank God I was wearing trousers! So these encores came and we were duly hauled up to sing ‘Give Peace A Chance.’ Then they gave us some birthday cake.”
　
He’s not prone to Soft Boys nostalgia.

“The Soft Boys didn’t have any fun. I hadn’t really learned how to write songs — I’d bring in all these lines and the other guys would play them back like a very mild version of Captain Beefheart. Then we’d try to play in bars but often I’d have drunk too much to be able to play — I hadn’t worked out the alcohol-to-performance ratio at that point. What we left behind was better than how it was at the time. I like to meet up with Morris [Windsor, drums] and Kimberley [Rew, guitar] and talk about who’s alive and who’s dead , but it’s not something I pine for at all.”

The Soft Boys played at The Mudd Club and Danceteria, bringing neurotic British rock to the epicentre of NYC grooviness.

“We were very excited to be in America. Lenny Kaye always says how he saw us at the Mudd Club. It had a garage door — you’d stand on stage and this garage door would just roll up and reveal you. I don’t know if anyone ever went on stage naked to play with that. It wouldn’t have happened with us — we all had our trousers on.”

Arthur Lee wanted to kill him.

“I’d written this song, ‘The Wreck Of The Arthur Lee’ [on 1993's Respect]. Arthur hadn’t taken this very well and had issued various threats to kill me in interviews after which he was put away for waving a gun in a supermarket. I was then invited to be a guest on stage when they did Forever Changes [at London's Royal Festival Hall, 2003]. It was very odd. Arthur invited me up on stage a song early so I had to play something I’d never played before, introduced me as ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ and mimed shooting me with a gun. After that, he was very friendly.”

He suspects cats may one day rule the Earth.

“The dinosaurs ruled for something like 100 million years and we’ve been here 30,000 years. I don’t know if we’re going to outdo the run of the dinosaurs. Will a feline dynasty in 5 million years be looking back at us, the super-cyber cats who survived the next apocalypse? Have you seen those Bengal cats with silver skins? I can imagine them walking around museums that have our iPhones in, looking in wonder.”
　　
He doesn’t like “schlepping electric guitars around.”

“I prefer playing acoustic. Electricity is a barrier. Jonathan Richman said the fewer plugs and wires between you and the audience the closer you can be. I’m not really drawn to widescreen gestures — I don’t make widescreen records either which may be the limit of my appeal. I’m not like a hoarding or a poster, I’m more like something in an antique shop next to the stuffed owl.”

He isn’t giving in to despair.

“My elegiac records were when I was much younger. Things like I Often Dream Of Trains, I wrote that sort of stuff in my 30s. Love From London is celebration — we may be having a party on the Titanic but it’s still a party. Time is finite for all of us, whether one of us goes or everybody goes, each of us only dies once. Look on the label, it never said we were going to last too long.”

Treating their music like a toybox rather than a workstation

They might be steeped in admiration for Pavement, Sebadoh and Guided By Voices, but Manchester’s Mazes take their cues from ’90s lo-fi’s murky sense of fun rather than its slacker angst. Swerving past the sadness of Lou Barlow and compadres, the trio head instead for its gleeful sense of experimentation, a willingness to gobble up ideas like a packet of Skittles. With the follow-up to 2011′s A Thousand Heys, Mazes treat their music like a toybox rather than a workstation, picking up brightly colored noises and chunky plastic melodies to chew and rattle until they hit the right combination. Sometimes, this results in fingerpaint smudges of sound, like the charming clockwork instrumental “Significant Bullet” or the silver-nitrate piano of “Leominster”; other times, they take the thread of a pop song and let it wind itself up into a strung-out guitar exploration. The title track, with its literate lyrics and laconic attitude, tips a hat to the elegance of Malkmus before spiraling into a disheveled Soft Boys panic attack, while the rustling prog drums of “Sucker Punched” and the pressing groove of “Skulking” provide enough rough surfaces to snag attention. Not afraid to wander or wonder, Mazes make sure there’s intrigue around every corner.

Harpist creates a sense of mystery in an age of instant information

Creating a sense of mystery in an age of instant information is difficult, but Serafina Steer manages it beautifully with her third album, The Moths Are Real. There’s nothing particularly enigmatic about her CV — classically trained London harpist who has worked with Bat For Lashes, Patrick Wolf and John Foxx — but left to her own devices, Steer enters a world of her own, drawing you in by her side. Produced by Jarvis Cocker, The Moths Are Real flickers between the physical realities of love, sadness and urban life — the naked romance of “Skinny Dipping,” the wintery alienation of “Ballad Of Brick Lane” — and a frosted mythological wonderland that lurks the other side of the looking glass. It’s a record that trembles on the threshold between worlds, not just in its merging of folk, psychedelia, prog and electronica, but in the way the lyrics are sweetly conversational one second (“Of course, my scanty life philosophy, as you suspected all along, is actually based on lines from songs,” shrugs “Disco Compilation”) and as stylized and strange as a temple oracle the next (“Island Odyssey,” “Lady Fortune”). The reference points might seem to be in place — Joanna Newsom, Shirley Collins, Alice Coltrane, Robert Wyatt — but Steer sends the compass needle spinning, charting the places where magic and mystery poke through threadbare normality.

File under: Psychedelic harp, bardic pop, cosmic folk

For fans of: Cate Le Bon, Robert Wyatt, Young Marble Giants, The Incredible String Band

From: Peckham, South London

“Seeing the word ‘kooky’ in relation to my stuff is sickening,” shudders Serafina Steer, all too aware of the pre- and misconceptions that come swarming the minute a harp enters the picture. Her horror is utterly justified: the classically-trained Steer’s third album, The Moths Are Real, is a transfixing collection of songs that trip between the lyrical and the conversational, the physical and the ethereal. Robust folklore rubs up against Greek mythology; oracular meditations on fate and fortune are spiked by wistfully sensuous love songs and some thoroughly modern one-liners. Musically, too, it trembles between high and low, old and new, with synth-pop, prog and psychedelia snapping at the harp’s lovely heels.

In keeping with her musical shape shifting, Steer has worked with diverse roster of artists, including Bat For Lashes, Chrome Hoof, Patrick Wolf and John Foxx. Three years after her debut Cheap Demo Bad Science, her second album, Change Is Good Change Is Good, was picked by Jarvis Cocker as one of his favorite albums of 2010. It obviously wasn’t just end-of-year punditry: He produced The Moths Are Real, joining Steer on the eerie Scott Walker glow of “The Removal Man.” Even in starry company, though, Steer burns brightly all by herself.

On playing the harp:

The harp comes with a lot of baggage, physically and literally. On The Moths Are Real, I tried to use the harp more as other people might expect to hear it. I wasn’t trying to be willfully oblivious to the fact that it is quite swoony — I wanted to use the glissando and the cosmic potential of it, all the effects to make a whole world. I think before I thought it was more subversive to ignore that and just treat it as a guitar.

On working with Jarvis Cocker:

I often work with people in a semi-producer-like way, but I’d always end up slightly overruling them. Feeling a bit more confident about the songs this time, I did feel that I’d be ready to work with someone and let them have that role. I sent Jarvis a couple of emails — we’d met a couple of times — and he said he wasn’t a producer but to send some tracks anyway. Then we did two days in Shoreditch Church (in East London), where he suggested working on two of the demos I sent him, “The Removal Man” and “Skinny Dipping,” to see whether we could collaborate together and whether he liked being a producer. I think what was good — apart from that he’s terribly nice — is that I don’t know him so well, so it was good to have that respect. It wasn’t like I was going to start having…well, I might have had one tantrum!

On sea shanties:

The song “Night Before Mutiny” is a response to a traditional sea shanty about a whore called Serafina — it’s not too bawdy, but it’s not very nice about her. Everything rhymes with Serafina — the sea shanty even calls her a “dirty she-hyena.” I suppose because it’s an unusual name, I felt a kind of a kinship with the character. There’s this funny lack of concern for her in the song. I guess as a feminist, those whore or tart-with-a-heart archetypes, they get to me.

On lyrical labyrinths:

I think the record is a bit of a labyrinth, but I don’t want to sound like a twat, or have anyone examine it as a concept album and therefore find it lacking. In the imagery of the lyrics, there are quite a lot of cracks or lights, leading to, or in between, cosmic changes of forms — drowning, lying, sex, sleeping and waking. So to me, it’s sort of labyrinthine in a multi-dimensional, Borges-inspired sense.

On prog-rock:

What interests me about prog, and the children of prog, is that the music offers an artist the freedom to explore form and rhythm and esoteric lyrical ideas as part of a complex tradition that seems to have grown organically. And it comes without the leaden dogma or lineage of being an aspiring contemporary classical composer. Though it’s probably as riven with prejudice and dogma as anything. I was talking to a friend about whether I could honestly claim a prog influence, and they spoke about prog’s lack of attitude and preoccupation with a kind of perfect musicianship, as opposed to other influences like Mark E. Smith or Young Marble Giants. I thought, “Oh God, that’s me.”

Showing off the skeleton of his back catalogue

Not one to be satisfied with a cake and some candles, Patrick Wolf has marked the 10th anniversary of his debut album Lycanthropy by re-recording 16 tracks from his back catalogue to create an acoustic double album. He calls it a “make-under,” designed to show off the skeleton of the music, but there’s still plenty of greasepaint smeared over the impressively sharp cheekbones of these songs. Divided into two halves – Sundark is melancholia, bitterness and introspection, Riverlight is love and euphoria – the collection polishes Wolf’s romanticism to a burnished glow, exposing the rich grain of cabaret and folk beneath the glittery pop opulence. The more serious songs are most efficiently served by this treatment – “The Libertine,” from 2005′s Wind In The Wires, flaunts new levels of Klezmer-tinged drama, while “Paris,” from Lycanthropy, is stripped of its electronic static, all the better to revel in its tears (“The bath was spilling over/ My self-pity spilling with it”). The happier moments also flourish, however, with both “House” and “The Magic Position” given a freshly painted backdrop of emotional veracity. Where Wolf goes from here is anyone’s guess, but if this is spring cleaning, then the summer of his career looks set to shine.

Stormy weather all the way

Most records that are called “cinematic” generally follow the moody smoke-trails of Barry Adamson, DJ Shadow or Portishead. But while Archipelago, the second album from Edinburgh-based quartet Hidden Orchestra and the follow up to 2010′s Night Walks, evokes neon lights reflected in dirty puddles and dangerous nocturnal journeys through seedy side-streets, it reaches a little further than the usual urban darkness. The jazz inflections of “Seven Hunters” bear the scent of Soft Machine-style experimentation, while “Fourth Wall,” with its booming bass and brass, does the whole car-chase-while-smoking-Gitanes thing with enough vigor to swerve the cliché slip-road. The delicate strings of “Disquiet” give way to an alarming crack of thunder, and “Reminder” breaks down in a rush of cloudburst percussion – it’s stormy weather all the way. Densely layered and dynamically structured, this music is as much about the head as that mythical underbelly, and Hidden Orchestra have the skill to ensure these imaginary motion pictures genuinely move.

Victorial Segal spoke with Gonzales about self-expression, self-improvement and who he’s playing to these days.

You recorded the album in a studio in Paris. As someone who seems to enjoy collaborating with other artists — Feist, Peaches and Drake, for a start — was it a lonely experience?

The title really says it all, you know? The solitude is baked into the cake. It’s conceptually tight so you realize that you’re hearing a photograph, an audio photograph, of what happened during those two-and-a-half minutes. There’s something very pure about that. There’s no Frankenstein element. If I’ve got it and I like it then it tends to be on the album. If I don’t have it, I have to start from scratch, to go back to find a coherent version that works from beginning to end. It’s man versus himself. When I was learning what makes literature interesting when I was teenager, it was man versus nature, man versus society or man versus himself. This is clearly man versus himself.

Do you enjoy that particular battle?

I think people who know me know I’m a pretty competitive musician. I’ve done a couple of piano battles and I’ve even broken a world record [for longest solo concert in 2009, when he played for 27 hours, three minutes and 44 seconds] — so I thought that kind of pressure would bring out the best in me. They used to give medals for music in the Olympics until the ’40s. If you read biographies of great composers you often find they’re extremely competitive: There were rivalries between Liszt and Wagner, Brahms and other composers. You had Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney engaging in a lot of competition. What inspires me these days is rap and that’s really competitive and more of a meritocracy, where who sells the most is the generally the best. Indie rock is very polite. But classical music moved extremely fast because they were always trying to outdo each other. Rap today moves extremely fast.

So while people might think a man at a piano is a genteel prospect, you’re actually saying it’s red in tooth and claw?

If you’re into hardcore self-improvement — and I am — then, yes, you have to take it very seriously. A lot of musicians, I call it the “Oops I’m good” syndrome — they want to make it seem like an accident they even ended up there. If you’re a dentist you go to school to learn how to be a dentist and hopefully be the best dentist you can be.

You’ve worked in several musical genres. Do you have several distinctive audiences?

I do have two or three different groups. I was held aloft by the underground when I first started. I was a piano player by training, but I wanted to be a man of my time. I didn’t want to stay in my ivory tower. I thought, Okay, well first I have to connect with “real people,” as I call them, and I did that mostly through my sense of humor, and that’s what really makes me a man of my time. And then slowly, I brought in the musical element. With that first solo piano album in 2004, suddenly there were some fans from that classical and jazz world which was very encouraging because I thought that was the ivory tower, the museum world of music. The underground people know a lot more about me, so they’re less shocked when I can veer towards the vulgar on stage. Some people who only got into me through the piano music, they’ll come to see my show and all of sudden be a bit shocked when I go to that surreal, Andy Kaufman-type performance. A few people walk out but mostly people are along for the ride. I wouldn’t do any of the clowning around if there wasn’t the piano there. I’d just be a guy with a silly name wearing a bathrobe. Luckily I’m not. Luckily, I’m also there as a musical genius.

Do you feel you’re blurring the lines between high and low culture? Are you fighting against musical snobbery?

I think snobbery is a good thing. When I hear music badly played, I will dismiss it. I think what you’re referring to isn’t actually snobbery, it’s fear. It’s that people who go to the ballet and the symphony and the art gallery are often actually scared they’re not going to understand pop culture. Likewise, people who are into pop culture and have a more disposable attitude to music have a fear that were they ever to delve into more substantial forms, they wouldn’t understand it. In a way, I’m there to assuage their fear. Barriers are there for a reason: stylistic barriers are great. I think it’s great dance music is based on “boom boom boom boom” 4/4 drum beat, I think it’s great hip-hop is based on certain codes in the lyrics. I’m not trying to erase the borders, I’m trying to get people over their fear. When people go to see classical concerts these days, often the artist is scared the audience will reject them and doesn’t make an effort, so the audience feel left out sitting in a cold symphony hall thinking “Wow, I paid 80 bucks for this. I guess this is high culture.” Everybody’s scared, nobody’s enjoying themselves, it’s a disaster.

So you’re saying audiences need to relax?

“No, it’s also the artists aren’t good enough. I take full responsibility for making an audience relax, trying to get rid of that fear and take them somewhere. That’s my responsibility.”

The Central Council Of Church Bell Ringers called “Work No 1197: All The Bells In A Country Rung As Quickly And As Loudly As Possible For Three Minutes” “misconceived.” How have preparations been going since?

There was only one society of bell ringers that complained, but it was the biggest one and the director made this statement that was quite negative about the whole thing, which I thought was a bit mean, really. One of the things I feel weird about with this project is the idea that I am trying to get people to ring bells. I just think everyone should do what they want at all times. The idea is to ring all the bells in Britain, which I thought was a good idea — since I don’t know what the best ones are, I think we should try and ring them all. I think it’s a good idea but the practice is fraught with problems. I am not coercing people into doing it. In fact, the bell ringing society has now made a statement which is quite positive about the whole thing.

Are you worried that it might hit on some kind of Throbbing Gristle sound-weapon style frequency and cause mass vomiting across the land?

I think it would be really good to have fire bells because they are so loud and extreme — it is important that it’s not just church bells. I was thinking of school bells and fire bells. Basically bells are the loudest instruments you can get and it’s an instrument for making public music. Loud instruments are exciting, like drums.

Are you a fan of sport?

Yeah [laughs uncertainly]. I have always liked watching sports. My only experience of the Olympics is watching it on the TV every four years. For years, I have been working with dancers and then I did this work with runners ["Work No 850" at Tate Britain in 2008] and that got me into it. You know, your body is the one thing that you have to live with, so it feels very intelligent to maximize your body. What’s beautiful about sport is the movements of the body being narrowed down to a field like running — usually in life all the movements are vague. I find sport interesting. Sports people always seem quite alien when you look at them. It’s basically an exaggeration of life. We are getting on with our normal bodies while sportsmen are constantly doing a narrow range of movements and trying to perfect those. Maybe that’s what makes it watchable, like a cartoon. And there are also winners and losers.

Is there a clear division between art and music for you?

I am just in my own head and I just try to live my life, and at the moment in my life I have been trying to do a lot of work with making noise and making music. Maybe in a song you can tell a story of writing a song, whereas in a visual work what you are seeing is the bit left over at the end, after the person has gone away. If you watch someone singing a song, you are watching them do the struggling and making the thing — it’s a literal example of life happening as you are listening. That’s one of the things that’s different about music.

Do you admire any other artists who make music?

I wouldn’t call myself an artist! I was always a big fan of, for example, Talking Heads with David Byrne and Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and they were bands who were mixed up with art. When I was a teenager and was learning about the history of art and getting into bands and composers, I always thought that art and music were mixed up together, and I still think they are.

Do artists tend to have good taste in music?

No. I have been asked to do art-world gigs and I sometimes get the impression you are getting asked to do it just because you have a band and that they don’t care about the music at all. And I think the music can survive on its own. That happens in the art world; they have, like, an artist working with a symphony orchestra, as if that in itself is of interest. I hate things like that, where it’s someone working with a scientist or whatever. I think things should stand on their own and not have all sorts of explanations about them.

So you don’t think it gives you an extra credibility?

No, I don’t think so. If anything, it is the opposite, because if someone is known for one thing and then starts doing something else then it’s like: “Al right, hello, who does he think he is?” It’s the same problem of making work. You have made one work, so how do you make another? Like, if you make a song and people seem to like it then you might start to use that way of writing a song — as a formula for writing another song, and I think that’s a slippery, dangerous road. You should start every time as if you have never done anything before, and not have any formulas for doing things. I want the music work to survive on its own, otherwise it’s not good enough and I need to try harder, and I am trying harder. I am working on a new album, because I am really scared…This one was finished a while ago, and I got so nervous about this record — it has got so many things on that I have kept inside for a long time, so being so nervous about it made me want to work on something new so I am not just waiting with bated breath for this to come out.