Here’s wishing a spider-filled 56th birthday to one Robyn Hitchcock.*

This song, “Oceanside”, is what started it all for me.** I was a freshman in college, nosing around the used CD bins at the Record Exchange, probably debating whether to buy something by Barenaked Ladies or that wretched “How Bizarre”*** band before my lucky Oldsmobile equipped friends were ready to haul my car-less self back to campus.

I was handing one of their interchangeable surly employees a Mighty Mighty Bosstones disc to trade when this song came soaring out of the speakers.  It wasn’t an entire verse in before I’d decided that it was the greatest thing I’d heard since leaving home, immediately asking who was singing and whether it was alphabetized somewhere in the store.

That CD, Perspex Island—released several years earlier—had just been orphaned by someone else and I asked if they’d sell it to me. The guy extracted it from their stereo, I applied my $3 Bosstones credit toward the price, and walked out of the store wondering whether I should drop an extraneous “Y” into my own first name.

I later discovered that a lot of Hitchcock purists aren’t a big fan of that album because the major label production was seen as too “American” for a decidedly British musician, but it’s always held a special place for me.

You always remember your first.

* More on this as the day progresses.  Probably an immense, off-putting amount more.
** He played this very song at the Union Chapel show I went to last month, which essentially overloaded my central nervous system. It’s quite possible that I died.
*** OMC. Huh.

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