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Singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock (previously of The Soft Boys, The Egyptians, and The Venus 3, which continues to grace live venues today) is one of the many surprises in Jonathan Demme's surprising and provocative new feature Rachel Getting Married. In his turn as a musical guest at the film’s (slightly tense) wedding, Hitchcock charms and beguiles the camera and audience, and even temporarily takes the focus from Anne Hathaway's powerhouse performance as the
tortured sister of the bride.

Through a career that has spanned punk, new wave and an indie
rebellion against synth-driven New Romantics, Hitchcock has been, and remains, a defining influence on popular music. If you have not heard of him, type his name into YouTube and see what happens. Today Hitchcock is happy to talk about Demme's biggest commercial hit since audience-shocker Silence of the Lambs (though Rachel Getting Married is probably more troubling), oh, and a little bit about sometime radio host Bob Dylan.

So what do you think of the film?
It's quite disturbing, not an easy watch I’d say. I'm really pleased it's done so well, as it's the kind of film that Jonathan couldn't have made with a big studio, which would have demanded a happy ending and the kind of easy resolution that the movies always seem to need. Rachel Getting Married is more like American real life, and shows how hard it can be for people to really love one another. Some of its very funny, and some of it's very upsetting, and I think Kym [Anne Hathaway] is a particularly difficult person to watch, though the great thing about the movie is that by the end of it you really do care about her.

How did the collaboration come about with Jonathan Demme?
We've known each other for a long time. He had filmed me in concert in an abandoned shop window in New York, back in the mid-90s, for Storefront Hitchcock, and then got me to play a sort of secondary English villain in his remake of The Manchurian Candidate. On Rachel Getting Married he wanted to have the music performed in real time, so they decided that Bill Irwin, who plays Rachel's father, would be a music business lawyer and have a big house in Connecticut where the wedding would take place with lots of musicians wandering around and who play with me when I perform my song America and the song I wrote for the movie, Up To our Nex In Love. All that music you hear in the film happens in real time, nothing is dropped in; it is much more like real life - with musicians.

How do you go about writing a song for a film?
Jonathan gave me the script, I read it, and my take on the movie was basically Up To Our Nex In Love. I picked up the guitar and that's what came out. I find that if you do that right after you have read the script, it will turn into a song; it is quite a quick process in that way, if you let it happen. I was just thinking of being a voice in Kym's head.

And what made you choose America?
Jonathan chose that one. He wanted me to sing America by the pool right after they got married. America was from Groovy Decay.You weren't very keen on that album - No, I wasn't. It was a long time ago, and a project I didn't feel very in control of. One of the problems with it was that a lot of the songs had been demoed quite effectively, but then we did the thing that people did in those days, which was you make some perfectly fine demos and then spend more money re-recording them, when actually the demos were fine. America was a song that I had not written when we did the demos. In fact the very first recording of America is the one on the album. Of all the stuff on Groovy Decay, America is probably the best, though it also suffers from trying to be state of the art; everything on that album has that early 80s patina of unreality that was deemed a good idea at the time. It was a kind of loss of confidence really on everybody's part. I probably had a perfectly good sound going on though it seemed a little retro.What we didn't realise was that retro was about to come back. So in the end I did what I very seldom do and tried to make a contemporary record, which is probably why it sounds so dated now.

Your career goes back 30 years. What's your favourite period?
As time went by I got more tolerant. When I started there were lots of movements which I wasn't really a part of; punk, new wave, rough trade type experimental rock, the new romantics, the stuff that was on the cover of The Face. I was pretty out of place through all of that, and then indie came in; The Smiths and REM in 83/84, which began to fit much more with what I had always done, which was based around two guitars, a bass drum and three harmonies, like the 60s beat groups. Some of the American groups around then were listening to our records, the stuff I had done with The Soft Boys and on my own, at which point we started to be called influential. It just seemed that they were talking our language, or we were talking theirs. The other thing is, rock n roll is really an old man's game. I'm about to be 56 and I'm playing with a variety of people who are younger than me, but nobody cares that I'm still wielding an electric guitar, because Keith Richard and Dylan are also wielding theirs. I'm constantly surprised that young people are still coming into rock n rock; it would be a bit like people coming in and playing big band jazz when I was younger, people seem to still want to play it, and it'll certainly see me out.

What would you have done if music had not taken you off touring and recording?
You sound like a voice in my head...more

words: Allen Therisa

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