Music Arcades: Robyn Hitchcock: Eye

Another CD picked up on a whim when I saw it, second-hand, in Jack's on Division Street, Sheffield. I saw Robyn and the Egyptians a couple of years earlier on the Globe of Frogs tour, in the old Take 2 club on Staniforth Road, but I'd never heard of Eye before the day I bought it. It remains the yardstick by which I measure all his other albums… and find them wanting.

It was 1990; CDs had just displaced vinyl as the default format, and albums were edging up to, and beyond, the hour mark. Almost all albums that long need punctuation and paragraph marks even more than the one that had previously been enforced at the end of Side 1. Without such prompts for catching your breath, they're shapeless and indigestible, like 1990's otherwise wonderful Ragged Glory. Eye is the exception, its 64 minutes best experienced as a continuous stream — Earwickers wandering in and out of its daisy-chain of songs, possibly at random, or perhaps subject to some grander, indiscernible design. The only punctuation it needs is the reprise of Queen Elvis to round things off and let the cycle begin again.

Some creative work sounds like it's been hand-hewn at the bottom of a collapsing mine shaft and dragged up into daylight by sheer force of will. Some sounds like it makes its way into the world by exactly the opposite means: a relaxing of the muscle, not a clenching. The best Robyn Hitchcock songs are all examples of the latter.

Eye is one of two albums that always takes me back to a drive across the Peak District, between Sheffield and Middlewich, that I made several times around this time of year in 1991. Turning over, around the outskirts of Macclesfield, to the live broadcast of Norman Lamont's Budget speech, where he announced fiscal measures to deal with "that other scourge of the modern world… the mobile 'phone."