Perspex Island

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Perspex Island

Compilation album by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians
Released	1991
Genre	Alternative rock
Label	Go! Discs

Perspex Island is the title of an album by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, released on Go! Discs in 1991.

The group's third under contract to A&M, it contains eleven Hitchcock originals which for him, are unusually uniform in style and production. It was recorded in Los Angeles in 1991, and features guest appearances by Hitchcock fans Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of REM.

The eleven songs tend to be dominated by Hitchock's own electric guitar playing, "So You Think You're In Love" selected as the main spin-off single ahead of the similarly commercial "Birds In Perspex" and "Oceanside". "So You Think You're In Love" was #1 on several Alternative charts.^[1]

In all, the set is one of Hitchcock's least challenging, his complex lyrical quirks held at bay by a production ethic which boosts the instrumentation. Nonetheless there are interesting themes in some of the texts, the lead track "Oceanside" revisiting ground previously trodden in "Airscape" from Element Of Light.

Pitched at the US student circuit, the album is a resonable stab at early 1990s pop, and carries a Hitchcok oil painting on its front cover, depicting the mythological figure Thoth, which The Egyptians had once used as a group logo.

Use of American phrases such as 'Toll-free number' (in "Vegetation And Dimes") plus the fact that A&M refused to release his previous album in Britain, reveal the marketing strategy for Hitchcock at the time. On other tracks, his quintessentially English perpective nonetheless reveals itself, such as in "Ride" where he speaks of sitting in a railway carriage in Swindon, a large town close to Reading, as featured in "I Often Dream Of Trains" (1984).