Robyn Hitchcock - Groovy Decay / Gravy Deco - Acoustic Versions (1982-1983)

A couple of days ago, I started posting my Robyn Hitchcock stray track material, in chronological order. For nearly every album he has officially released, I have two albums. One is of as many of the songs from the album I can find performed in an acoustic style. The other is of studio stray tracks from around the same time as the album. This is another example of the first type.

"Groovy Decay / Gravy Deco" is easily the most problematic of all Hitchcock solo albums. The fact that it has two different names (plus "Groovy Decoy" for another version) is an indication of the trouble. Basically, Hitchcock's first solo album "Black Snake Diamond Role" in 1981 sold very poorly. So for his next album in 1982, the record company pushed a producer on him who would try to make the album ape the most popular trends of the time. Hitchcock went along with that, but regretted it almost immediately. He put out a different version based on demo recordings in 1986, but  the demos were full band versions that didn't sound that different.

As a result of all this, the album has been like the sole "black sheep" of all of his solo albums. He didn't tour at all to support it, and he's very rarely played any songs from it. Thus, when it comes to finding acoustic versions of these songs, I had a hard time. I was only able to find four songs done in that style, which is by far the fewest I could find of any of his solo albums. But, on the plus songs, the acoustic versions are a revelation, since they completely cure the songs of the trendy production problems the originals and even the demo versions suffered.

Four songs would be way too few for an album. Luckily, I was able to find three more acoustic versions of songs that were done around the same time. (The other studio recorded songs from that era will be the subject of my next Hitchcock post.)

But even three more songs wasn't very much. So I added three more songs from the next phase of his career, the all-acoustic "I Often Dream of Trains." He's released a live album recorded in 2008 of nearly all the songs from that album, plus some outtakes, called "I Often Dream of Trains in New York." Since the original album is acoustic and the live album is acoustic, I figured it would be redundant to have yet another acoustic version of those songs. But I found three more songs from that era that were not on the live album but instead were performed acoustically in concert at other points in his career.

Yet even after adding those songs too, this album still is only 30 minutes long. I wish there was more of this time period done acoustically. But, like I said, this is the one album Hitchcock regrets and has generally ignored, so we're lucky to get different versions of even some of the songs.

By the way, the sound of "St. Petersburg" is a bit dodgy compared to the rest, but it's the best I could find.

01 Young People Scream (Robyn Hitchcock)
02 52 Stations (Robyn Hitchcock)
03 America (Robyn Hitchcock)
04 St. Petersburg (Robyn Hitchcock)
05 Listening to the Higsons (Robyn Hitchcock)
06 Messages of Dark (Robyn Hitchcock)
07 Trash (Robyn Hitchcock)
08 Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl (Robyn Hitchcock)
09 Bones in the Ground (Robyn Hitchcock)
10 Surgery (Robyn Hitchcock)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15271812/RobynH_1982_GroovyGravyAcousticVersions_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used the cover to Hitchcock's 1982 single "Night Ride to Trinidad." I removed the song title from the top of the picture and added additional text below Hitchcock's name at the bottom. And no, I don't know what that is in front of his face.