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Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians Play “The Yip! Song”

Listen to this track by former Soft Boys turned neo-psychedelic trio Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians. It’s “The Yip! Song”, a cut taken from their 1993 record Respect. The album is the tenth record with Hitchcock’s name on the cover and the sixth with his stalwart backing band The Egyptians consisting of drummer Morris Windsor and bassist-keyboardist Andy Metcalfe. By the time of this record, they were at the end of their contract with A&M and it was the last time to date that the “The Egyptians” name would be formalized on an album sleeve along with Hitchcock’s.

Working with producer John Leckie (XTC, The Stone Roses) they approached making the record in the style of late Sixties and early Seventies British folk bands. To wit: they gathered at one house, Hitchcock’s on the Isle of Wight, and then rehearsed and recorded the songs with their families in tow. They laid down the vocals in the kitchen, and the instruments in the living room.

Despite the down-home setting, Robyn Hitchcock was not in the best place in his life at the time. Along with the pressure of being a singular and decidedly non-traditional artist on a major label with lots of expectations placed upon him, he’d lost his father to cancer; the writer and cartoonist Raymond Hitchcock. Some of his grief over that loss came out in the songs. This one is the most vivid example.

One of the reasons “The Yip! Song” is so compelling is because it doesn’t sound like a song about loss or mourning at all, at least not on first listen. For one thing, the tone of it isn’t exactly elegiac as you might otherwise expect. Instead, it’s downright confrontational and very much in-your-face as a kind of amped up psychobilly-folk assault. Only the dreamy and psychedelic bridge brings it into the realm of Hitchock’s usual Syd Barrett-esque psych-pop homebase.

Some things in “The Yip! Song” are very much expected – at least as much as anyone can say that about Robyn Hitchcock’s work. As in a lot of his songs, the barrage of juxtaposed imagery is lurid in places and decidedly absurdist. This is after the initial yip! yip! yip! lyrical opening that takes us by surprise and also instantly captures our attention as listeners. Otherwise, “The Yip! Song” namechecks British wartime singer Vera Lynn (Lynn Lynn Lynn Lynn …), which is also pretty far off of the usual lyrical map. Hitchcock sets that reference alongside images of hospital trolleys and surgery. So, what gives with all that? And why might this song be called “The Yip! Song”, anyway?

Raymond Hitchcock, Robyn’s father, isn’t strictly at the center of this song in any overt way and certainly not by name. But elements of his life and experience certainly are, including the lines about Vera Lynn (Lynn Lynn Lynn, etc.). He was a part of Britain’s wartime generation and when Lynn’s voice heard over the airwaves soothed the troops during a harrowing period of history. She was a symbol of an era now passed.

But these are peripheral details to what’s really at the center of this song made up of a collage of imagery rather than a straight narrative. That’s nothing new in a Robyn Hitchcock song, either. Neither is the theme of perception, in this case how an old man dying in his hospital bed fifty years after World War II ended might be externally interpreted by the songwriter and understood by his audience. This question of perception and meaning as death looms is a pretty big one, not to mention what becomes of a person’s experiences in a world they once knew that is now gone.

What listeners can pick up here almost right away is the song’s raw emotional undercurrents that go beyond just an expression of sadness at a loss. There’s anger here, too – quite a lot of it, in fact. There’s even fear at the thought that as one lays dying with the totality of their lives behind them, they might be reduced to a jumble of fragmented memories that don’t add up to a meaningful conclusion. This is all while doctors and nurses yip yip yip around as they do their jobs, with the significance of those memories and impressions of a life going entirely unacknowledged.

Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip …

There isn’t any other available language to express these troubling feelings in any definitive or comforting way. With implications this big and overwhelming, the response might just as well be a series of yips. These are in the forms of the tasks in which we engage in times like these to keep us busy and distracted. They could be in the thoughts we have about what we’ve lost. It could be in the context of pondering the meaning of our own lives, if any, and what it will mean to others once we’re gone.

In pulling out shards of images that connected Hitchcock to the memory and identity of his father, this confrontational song about death suggests those things he’s confronting in himself; his fears, his confusion, his doubts about what mortality and the state of being alive really mean. It rests on thoughts about what he’s expected to do to even begin to address all that as the life of someone important to him ends.

Yet at the same time, the song holds a saving grace, too. “The Yip! Song” makes it OK for him not to have any answers to anything. Because of how overwhelming it is to him, and to anyone, yipping his way through it is just as valid a response as any. Therefore, it’s an anthem for us as listeners to embrace in the very same way.

This, among many other reasons, is why Robyn Hitchcock is such a singular songwriter. With splashes of colour and chaos, “The Yip! Song” illustrates the mystery of human consciousness, existence, loss, and grief. It’s one of his most powerful artistic statements, far from a sombre or maudlin treatise on death and mourning as it is possible to be. As such it is all the more provocative, even if the background of the song isn’t immediately apparent on first listen.

“The Yip! Song” seems to originate from the dark recesses of the songwriter’s heart. This is not in any kind of self-regarding way. Instead, it suggests that sometimes feelings around big events cannot be understood or expressed by conventional means. Sometimes, absurdity is best met with absurdity. Reminders of this provide a unique and valuable comfort of their own.

Robyn Hitchcock is an active singer, songwriter, touring musician, memoirist, and record label owner today.

For more background on the Respect album and where Hitchcock’s head was at the time, watch this 4-minute interview filmed around the time the record came out.

Last year, Robyn Hitchcock wrote an autobiography of his experiences as a teenage music fan in the year 1967. You can check out reader reviews and impressions of Hitchcock’s story set during a formative year in his life right here.

You can catch up with his recent activities, merch, and Patreon links at robynhitchcock.com.

Enjoy!

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