Robyn Sings

If I post about one of Robyn's self-released Editions PAF! albums, I guess I probably need to post about all of them! Robyn Sings was his second self-released album (sold direct at shows and at his website) consisting of two discs of Bob Dylan covers, mostly performed live. The discs are designated as "stripes" and "dots".

The "stripes" disc contains songs from throughout Dylan's career that Robyn performs solo, usually with a guitar and harmonica, like Bob would do them. It includes two performances of "Visions of Johanna" (which a really long song), "Tangled Up In Blue", "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", and newer songs like "Dignity" (from the Oh Mercy era) and "Not Dark Yet" (from Time Out Of Mind). Here's Robyn performing that one with John Paul Jones (yes, the Led Zep dude!) at a 2005 Dylan tribute show.



While the first disc is kind of like Dylan's solo set from the 1966 "Royal Albert Hall" concert, the second ("spots") disc is an exact re-enactment of Dylan's electric portion of that 1966 concert, as performed by Robyn Hitchcock & Friends (mostly the band Homer) at a 30th anniversary show at the Borderline in London (25 May 1996). The same eight songs ("Tell Me Momma"-sic through "Like A Rolling Stone") performed in the exact same order right down to the audience banter ("Judas!", "You're a liar"). It also uses modern digital sound to reproduce the lo-fi audience recording of the original concert. I think it's the keeper of the bunch.

Robyn's done a few other "special" shows where he recreates classic albums and concerts (The White Album, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Jimi Hendrix's 1970 Isle of Wight concert), but this is the best of the bunch, mainly because of its amazing attention to detail. Robyn Sings is probably just a minor footnote in the context of Robyn Hitchcock's career, and only worth searching out for die hard Dylan and/or Hitchcock fans, but there are certainly worse ways to use up your emusic downloads.

I think I'll blog Bob Dylan next month. Forty plus albums in thirty days in April! Unfortunately I only own about ten of them, but I could just make up stuff on albums like Knocked Out Loaded ("a forgotten gem!") because it's not like anyone actually knows enough about those albums to call me on it!