Gig review: Robyn Hitchcock at The Crescent, York

Time works strangely around Robyn Hitchcock – his personal musical universe seems to exist outside of its usual rules.

His blend of very English art-school lyrical surrealism and melodic, freewheeling songcraft has remained largely unchanged from his earliest days with the Soft Boys (the blueprint for many a jangly alternative rock band of the early 80s and beyond) through decades of solo output.

You can jump on board at any point, and so tonight’s setlist wanders freely (much like one of Hitchcock’s stream-of-consciousness song intros) during a very civilised all-seated Sunday night show at The Crescent.

Backing himself with dextrous fingerpicked guitar, and switching to keys in the second half, Hitchcock’s voice and delivery of course brings Syd Barrett, Lennon and Dylan to mind, but also suggests a whole alternative timeline of art rock where intellect was worn lightly and no one could quite take themselves too seriously.

We kick off with some musings on the unstable nature of the self and the colours of traffic cones in the evening light – setting the scene for opener September Cones. Hitchcock introduces I Sometimes Dream Of Trains as celebrating its 40th anniversary – refreshingly in this age of veteran musos flogging nostalgia for cash, he’s only just realised – and goes off on a riff about ageing, involving a skateboarding undead Queen Victoria.

Madonna Of The Wasps from 1989 is an early highlight, while sound engineer Stu gets roped in as a double act as Hitchcock throws increasingly random requests at him (“like Lou Reed with a British accent eating chocolate biscuits ) and he obligingly drenches first half closer The Lizard in psychedelic guitar delays.

The second half includes a good showing for pandemic-era album Shufflemania with the Raymond Chandler homage The Man Who Loves The Rain along with The Sir Tommy Shovell - Hitchcock’s ode to the much-missed English pub from his current Nashville abode, (which, importantly, notes that “I will not be drinking in the Racist Loser/It’s not my kind of boozer.”) - as well as revisiting The Man Who Invented Himself from 1981 and the Soft Boys’ Queen Of Eyes.

Though Hitchcock has just completed a book and an album looking back at the music that first set him on this path as a teenager in the psychedelic pop dawn of 1967, we only arrive there right at the end, when he illustrates his influences by putting his own stamp on The Kinks’ lovely Waterloo Sunset and a remarkable solo version of The Beatles’ A Day In The Life. Let’s hope his ongoing travels in time and space bring him back this way soon.