Globe Of Frogs

Globe of Frogs was Robyn Hitchcock's major label debut with the Egyptians. All eyes were on the band after they signed with A&M, so the album's inner sleeve had the following manifesto.

MANIFESTO
SOMEWHERE inside a glowing kernel of peace is an irritant- an inflamed seed that messes up the organism. We are best seen as conductors, through which solids, air, and liquids flow constantly, matched by a whorl of loosely related thoughts. If am a prophet of chaos, then this is truly my age; but perhaps I am a prophet of order, recoiling in disgust from the uncontrollable force of life. inside and out. This album does not deal with the conventional problems of so-called "real" life: relationships, injustice, politics, and central heating systems, about which it's notoriously hard to talk because orthodox lines of cliche have been devised for and against everything. In the short span of a song- let alone a newspaper- it is easy to descend to slogans and dogma: Thatcher is bad, vegetables are good, show business is indifferent. Everybody who wants to know that knows it already. The dinosaurs graze in the last warm valley, avoiding the icy winds. To go into "issues" at the length they merit requires the depth- and double-talk- of a politician. I'm concentrating instead on the organic. All of us exist in a swarming, pulsating world, driven mostly by an unconscious that we ignore and misunderstand. Within the framework of "civilization" we remain as savage as possible. Against the dense traffic of midern life, we fortify our animal selves with video violence, imaginary sex, and music: screw you, mate- here I go! One side, mother____er! give it to me, baby, as often and as beautifully as possible- eat lead, infidel scum. mostly we contain ouselves. sexual crimes, and private murders are still news (legalized murders, though, such as executions, wars and the systematic deprivation of the helpless, seldom make the headlines). But our inflamed and disoriented psyches smolder on beneath the wet leaves of habit. insanity is big business. and vice versa. religion isn't dead either. The antichrist will have access to computers, television, radio, and compact disk. If he walks among us already, the chances are that he has a walkman. I just hope it's not christ himself, disillusioned after two thousand years in a cosmic sitting room full of magazines and cheeseplants, turned malignant and rotting in despair at the way his message has been perverted. My contention is, however- and it's a bloody obvious one- that beneath our civilized glazing, we are all deviants, all alone, and all peculiar. This flies in the face of mass marketing, but I'm sticking with it. So loosen your spine, bury your television, and welcome to a Globe of Frogs...

Robyn Hitchcock
November 1987

Globe Of Frogs came out before I had a CD player, so I purchased it on cassette. I initially didn't like it, for reasons that are hard to explain now. It just seemed a bit to glossy in places. Anyway, I never picked up the album on CD, and probably hadn't heard the entire album in the last 15 years before today.

I know the four songs on the A&M Greatest Hits album ("Balloon Man", "Flesh #1", "Vibrating", "Chinese Bones") and the ones that he's played live over the years like "Sleeping With Your Devil Mask", but there were two or three songs that I flat out didn't remember when I played the album last night. Like the first song on side two ("Unsettled"). What a great tune! And I didn't remember it at all.

Globe Of Frogs (and the other A&M albums) show no signs of being reissued in the near future, and I couldn't even find any GoF-era videos on youtube. The closest thing I found was a cover of "Chinese Bones" by Suzanne Vega & the Grateful Dead at a rain forest benefit in September 1988.

Anyone who wonders how Suzanne Vega & the Grateful Dead would sound covering a Robyn Hitchcock song doesn't have to wonder anymore!