Robyn Hitchcock plays “Clear Spot” at the Relentless Garage

On Friday we went to Highbury to see Robyn Hitchcock and pals play through Captain Beefheart’s Clear Spot album in tribute to Don Van Vliet, who died in December.  As I’ve probably made clear by now, I’m an enthusiastic Hitchcock fan, but Beefheart is still very much the BF’s territory.  Nevertheless, I did my homework with a CD and got myself up to speed with telling my Sun Zoom Sparks from my Long Neck Bottles.

The night began very promisingly with a support solo set from Terry Edwards, who was promoting his latest CD Clichés, a tribute album in memory of Alex Chilton, who himself put out an album called Clichés in tribute to Chet Baker — as Edwards put it, it’s a Moebius strip of a tribute album.  There were a couple of real stand-outs, particularly a very touching “The Very Thought of You” and a positively outrageous (in a good way) version of James Brown’s “I Love You Too Much”, in which Edwards wore not only a guitar but also a sax.  Also before the main set, we were treated to an impromptu interlude from Hitchcock with Jenny Adejayan on cello and two girl backing singers (Lucy and Jen?) playing a song (“Old Man Weather”) off his most recent Norway-released CD.

The main set itself was glorious.  The BF was surprised at how faithful the renditions were, having been to previous Hitchcock-plays-classic-albums gigs which were decidedly not faithful — I’ve heard the bootleg of his Sgt Pepper gig, and it is clear that everyone onstage thought, “Ah we all know these, let’s just busk it,” to predictably poor effect.  This was extremely tight musically, with everyone giving the impression of both great concentration and good fun — particularly Terry Edwards on lead guitar, who maintained his cool through some hairy sections.

If anyone was giving off an aura of effort, it was poor Stephen Irving on the drums, who had clearly learnt the set drum pattern and gave Hitchcock a savage stink eye every time Hitchcock threatened (as he occasionally did) to wander off the song as Irving had learnt it.  Jenny Adejayan had as much to do, making her cello step in for both guitar and horn parts on the recorded version, as well as doing justice to the cowbell.

Paul Noble (bass) just looked like he was having a whale of a time, while Hitchcock clearly had great fun doing his Beefheart impression, though he wandered in and out of this “Beefheart” voice where appropriate – in this and other respects the gig was not just a slavish and pointless attempt to recreate the record, but a very different experience indeed.

I thought “Sun Zoom Spark” a triumph, but then I was deliriously excited by the presence of the cowbell on stage; I’d say the BF was equally delighted by a ridiculously shambolic “Golden Birdies”, where Terry Edwards needed the roadie to hold up his sheet music.  We later went for a drink with some friends of the BF’s, some of whom had seen the original band doing the same songs, who pooh-poohed that night’s showing.  I say, for those of us who will never get a chance to see Beefheart really doing it, that this was a bloody good second-best.

See comments for setlist.