The Golden Hinde, London – Live Review

Robyn Hitchcock
The Golden Hinde, London
30th June 2025

Still one of England’s best-kept musical secrets after half a century on the road, the singular Robyn Hitchcock docks around the clock, bringing his bucolic psychedelia for a mini-residency on The Golden Hinde. Steve Morgan clambers eagerly aboard

There are gigs, and there are Robyn Hitchcock gigs. Always the same, always completely different. Tonight’s show, like the two subsequent nights on The Golden Hinde, sold out in seconds. Don’t let the tiny venue – the 70-strong throng poured into the belly of Sir Francis Drake’s globe-traversing galleon – dampen that achievement. There would have been many more takers for this unique voyage around the Hitchcock songbook: Robyn Hitchcock? On the replica of a 16^th-century galleon? If anyone still asks: ‘What’s not to love?’ in 2025, then what’s not to love?

Across two sets, armed with a solitary acoustic guitar, a wonderful bag of reverb tricks and an excellent, sympathetic mix, Hitchcock – sporting the first of two trademark eye-catching shirts – is straight into his work. No introduction, off and running through exquisite opener September Cones, a poetic musing on love, death and the passing of time. “The glider crashed into the hill, when your time stopped, my time stood still.”

It’s a lesser-known number, but a great disarmer before the jauntily upbeat, bleakly comic Saturday Groovers, a gallows-humour dissection of Sixties heads and the ageing process – ‘emphysema, heart disease and gout, nothing can move us, Saturday groovers’. Rarely has death sounded this much fun. “At least a lot of us lived long enough to see that it didn’t work and that what replaced it was far worse than what we’d originally intended, so power to us senior groovers,” he sighs. Over the next two hours Hitchcock riffs and rifles through his – and others’ – back catalogues: 21 choice and lesser-known cuts from various career guises spanning six decades.

From the Captain Beefheart, Kevin Coyne-tinged, fidgety late ’70s/early ’80s pop of The Soft Boys – alumnus Kimberley Rew is in the front row tonight – through the softer, psych-tinged melodies of the Egyptians and then, more recently in solo guise, where he happily mixes both styles, there are palette pleasers for all. One man and a guitar might be the oldest trick in the book – but in Hitchcock’s tender hands, it’s alchemy. As is his wont, the comic asides, often utterly surreal yet always embroidered with truth, precede or follow songs so often of, or about, love, unrequited or in full bloom.

There are musings on all-pervasive modern technology: “we’re replacing ourselves with the iPhone 17: when I wrote that, we were all using iPhone 8”; Donald Trump, involuntary expectorations. All part of the Hitchcock charm, an armour that makes him unique. At 72, real fame, often tantalisingly close – not least in the mid-’80s, where his cult US college radio status still bites hard – has remained just out of reach. But just as it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at, in Hitchcock’s case it’s ain’t where you ended up, but how you travelled. The intimate surroundings of the Golden Hinde make for the perfect vehicle. Like the cat that will get close to you, there’s affection, but at a remove. He doesn’t really want to sit on your lap, though in the tight confines of a remarkably well-aired venue, he’s so close he’s not far off.

It’s tough to pick standouts when the quality bar is so high. Autumn Sunglasses, a beautifully structured, Lennon-esque exercise in light and shade, is fantastically melodious; the line “and you never know your fate, ‘til she’s sitting in your car” is at once chilling and romantic.

Equally good is The Lizard, from 1981’s solo debut, Black Snake Diamond Role, which closes the opening set. It’s a cautionary nod to the grim – or Jim – demise of Doors frontman Mr Morrison, self-styled ‘Lizard King’. “You wear the lizard’s skin, no man can be a god and win at all” … “And when the clocks have stopped, you’ll find out what the lizard dropped”. Stripped back, these dark lyrics get an extra, unsettling sheen. Less weird scenes inside the gold mine, more weird scenes inside the Gold(en) Hinde. It’s also a near-perfect marriage of his vocal and guitar-playing skills, qualities that the arresting lyrics or cartoonishly surrealist touches can occasionally overshadow.

Switching between light and heavily picked nimble folk-blues guitar figures, it brings Richard Thompson to mind, while Hitchcock’s switch to a fading falsetto is no less acrobatic than his fretboard fingers. There are terrific versions of ’80s faves Chinese Bones, I Often Dream Of Trains and Queen Elvis, and time – naturally – for a traditional sea shanty in Polly On The Shore, and cracking covers of Dominoes, originally by Hitchcock’s spirit musician Syd Barrett. “Without him there would be no Robyn Hitchcock, not in the form I took, anyway,” he says. A brilliant rendition of The Beatles’ Day In The Life, a song regularly performed down the decades, remains a thing of beauty. The evening ends with a triumphant version of David Bowie’s Soul Love, where those agelessly golden tonsils are evident once more.

We bend our backs and creak up the narrow, vertiginous stairs. Thameside is now in twilight. Most of us here have a few rings around our waists, but there are always new converts. The elders keenly quiz the dazzled first timers. They, too, now know the magic Hitchcock portal, a gateway to a world recognisable as ‘pop’, but always skewed, as if experienced while waking from a dream. Weird, wonderful, woozy, wistful. It’s only Monday, but our hearts feel like Friday night.

~

You can find Robyn Hitchcock online here: Robyn Hitchcock official website
He is also on Instagram and Bandcamp

All words by Steve Morgan. Steve is also at @stevemorgan68.bsky.social‬
All photos by Leo Cicero