Black Snake Diamond Role

Just a few months after the Soft Boys called it a day, Robyn Hitchcock released his debut solo album Black Snake Dîamond Röle (not sure what the deal is with the caret and umalut in the title). In many ways, the album is almost like a third Soft Boys album, since Robyn's former bandmates (Kimberley Rew, Morris Windsor, and Matthew Seligman) all back him up on various tracks, but on the whole, it sounds more like a Syd Barrett solo record than a Pink Floyd record, if you know what I mean.

I bought Black Snake the same day that I bought Underwater Moonlight, on the same March 1987 visit to B-Side Records in Madison. All of Robyn's post-Soft Boys/pre-Egyptians albums had just been reissued by Relativity at "mid-line" prices in the U.S., so they became cheaper and easier to find, which was instrumental in my RH fandom moving from the shallow end to the deep end.

When I bought BSDR, I knew a couple of songs from the Egyptians' live album Gotta Let This Hen Out! ("Acid Bird" and "Brenda's Iron Sledge"), and "Brenda" was probably my favorite Robyn Hitchcock song, so I was eager to hear a studio version. At first, I thought the album sounded kind of cheap and lo-fi, but after hearing the next album, I decided that lo-fi was probably better than sounding au courant circa-81. Thank heaven for small recording budgets!

Listening to the album nowadays, there are a bunch of hidden gems (especially on side two: "I Watch The Cars", "Out Of The Picture", and "Love") and only a couple of songs that I'm inclined to skip, "Do Policemen Sing?" and "The Lizard". It seems like many of my least favorite Robyn songs are ones with "The (Noun)" as titles ("The Lizard", "The Pigworker", "The Fly", "The Rain", etc..)

When Rhino reissued Black Snake Dîamond Röle on CD in the mid-90s, they replaced the original mixes of "The Man Who Invented Himself" and "Brenda's Iron Sledge" with different ones, because apparently the original mixes were "lost". I still vastly prefer the original saxophone version of "The Man Who Invented Himself" to the sax-free version on the Rhino and Yep Roc reissues, and suspect that Robyn "lost" the original in a bout of Let It Be..Naked! revisionism. The saxes on the song are neither ghastly nor mellow, and their excision smacks of saxophobia, if not downright saxism. Robyn Hitchcock is an anti-saxite!

Each CD reissue of Black Snake has slightly different bonus tracks, but the current Yep Roc issue omits one that should be there "Dancing On God's Thumb" (the b-side to "The Man Who Invented Himself" single). This ADS post by 2f's attempts to outline the differences between the bonus tracks on Rhino and Yep Roc, but I'm trying to keep them out of the discussion and centering on the original albums as they were originally issued. We didn't have any "bonus tracks" in the olden days -- our LPs had ten songs, with five songs on each side, and we liked it!

We also didn't have youtube in the olden days, but this performance of "Brenda's Iron Sledge" by Robyn & the Egyptians is pretty sweet.



Quite possibly the greatest couplet in the entire history of the pop lyric that wasn't penned by Ray Davies.