ROBYN HITCHCOCK: And people think I make stuff like that up. But more often than not, I'm just transplanting it from one area and moving it into another. It's like saying, well, is a horse weird? Well, a horse is weird if it's in an aeroplane, especially if it's in business class. A horse is not weird in the field. An onion makes perfect sense surrounded by other onions and shallots and stuff. But it looks more out of place if you find it working for the Ministry of Defense. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMEET DOSHI: You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the original research library rock and roll radio show. I am Ameet. My absent co-host is Charlie. SPEAKER 2: Hello? Hello? AMEET DOSHI: And we both work at the Georgia Tech Library. Josh, Josh, Josh is on the board. JOSH: Yes that is I, Josh, thank you. AMEET DOSHI: Fred and Wendy are in the studio with us. And for the next hour, we've got music and library talk for you. And whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. FRED RASCOE: You know how at the top of every show we say that this is the original research library rock and roll radio show? And usually, we have a research librarian or archivist as guest. Today, today's show is one of those episodes where we can put a little extra emphasis on the rock and roll part of that. Today's interview guest is ROBYN Hitchcock. AMEET DOSHI: Nice. We're calling this episode Our Information Will Replace Us. I feel like this is going to drift into apocalyptic sci-fi territory, Fred. FRED RASCOE: Well, it will be a conversation about self-archiving and preservation. WENDY HAGENMEIER: I like it already. FRED RASCOE: With an emphasis on speculating what will happen to our information after the inevitable extinction of human beings, which spoiler alert, is happening soon. WENDY HAGENMEIER: Yikes. FRED RASCOE: Happy Friday, everyone. WENDY HAGENMEIER: If you, our listeners, want to join the conversation. The hashtag for this show is #LITS324, L-I-T-S 324 for Lost in the Stacks episode 324. And feel free to tweet your thoughts, reactions, and reviews of your peers with that hashtag. AMEET DOSHI: Our songs are about failed experiments, having no future, and leaving only the merest trace of your existence behind after we're gone. WENDY HAGENMEIER: Sounds pretty bleak. But I have to admit that as a digital archivist, I'm intrigued to hear Robyn's ideas about electronic information outlasting our species. AMEET DOSHI: So let's start with a song that puts thousands of years of human cultural memory into a much broader perspective. This is "Only The Stones Remain" by Robyn Hitchcock's first band, The Soft Boys right here on Lost in the Stacks. [THE SOFT BOYS, "ONLY THE STONES REMAIN"] CHARLIE BENNETT: This is Lost in the Stacks. And joining us by phone is Robyn Hitchcock, musician and artist known for his solo recordings and also for leading bands like The Soft Boys, The Egyptians, the Venus 3. And lately, he's been collaborating with and touring with Emma Swift. And they'll be at Atlanta's City Winery on November the 10th. And he and Emma Swift also have a new 7-inch record released in October called Love is a Drag. ROBYN, welcome to the show. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Hi there, Fred. How are you? FRED RASCOE: I'm doing very well. How are you doing? ROBYN HITCHCOCK: I'm hiking away. Thank you. I'm just digesting my quinoa. FRED RASCOE: Oh, that sounds very healthy, though. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: It sounds healthy. Yeah, it's great to sound healthy. FRED RASCOE: That's what we've been told anyway, that it's healthy. Have you moved on to kale yet? ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Oh yeah, we had some kale last night with some tofu. FRED RASCOE: Well, let me tell you I feel extremely lucky to be talking with you not just because personally I'm a fan. But we billed this show as the original research library rock and roll radio show. And so usually, our guests tend to be on the more library side of things, rather than the rock and roll side of things. So I'm interested in hearing your opinions on a lot of things that we talk about on this show. And I think if I could start, do you have any thoughts or memories, good or bad, impressions, of libraries as you were like forming your artistic development? ROBYN HITCHCOCK: You mean actual real libraries? FRED RASCOE: Well, yeah, whatever you think. If it's conceptually or an actual physical library that you remember. However you think of when you think of libraries. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Used to get library books out of the library when I was a kid. I remember cycling into Woking and getting HG Wells's War of the Worlds out, which was actually set in that part of Britain, was sort of about 25 miles from London. And I'm just going in on my bike and getting a library book. It seems like an incredibly innocent pursuit now. I mean, now I'd probably be getting an Uber. And I mean, I wouldn't even be traveling really, everything would just be delivered. And the libraries are being closed, unfortunately, a lot in Britain because we have a Philistine government and Philistine culture. And also printed matter is being made redundant because everything appears online. So we still collect vinyl and we still buy books. But if you want something fast, you just look it up for free on a screen, which is appalling, but convenient. FRED RASCOE: So where do you fall in that spectrum? Do you like reading on your device? Or do you still like getting-- ROBYN HITCHCOCK: No, I spend too much time on the device anyway. I'm talking to you on it. I mean, my dentist has got a device that even tells jokes. The iPod-- the iPhone 8 will be able to give you therapy and things like that. And by the time the iPhone 11 comes on, it will be rendering all human decision-making processes redundant because the phone will just tell you what to do. And if we last much longer, we'll just be a race of infantilized blobs being birthed, nurtured, and deathed by the machine. But I mean, in another way, it's a miracle. What we're doing is replacing ourselves. And as we replace ourselves, we will also replace our knowledge. So you think about the Roman library, the library-- sorry, the library in Alexandria that was burned by the Romans, 55 BC, which was allegedly enormous volumes of knowledge. The knowledge of the world was kind of burned by these Roman thugs. And so much information was lost. And then the myth of the Tower of Babel, and how that, again, there's a fear that the cumulative wisdom of humanity will be flipped aside and destroyed probably by humans. But what we seem to be also doing is actually, even as we prepare to destroy ourselves, we're actually storing it all in our phones. That human nature hasn't developed, but technology has. And it's going to overtake us. I mean, the good news, I suppose, is that-- is that each of these things will be a library presumably. It'll have-- it'll all be stashed somewhere. We're the last generation to have things that are-- I've just moved all my stuff over here from Britain, my notebooks, and my photographs, and all that stuff. If I was 20 years younger, that would all just be on a series of hard drives. That's the way it's going. FRED RASCOE: I want to ask you about those things, those kinds of things that you just mentioned, the notebooks, and photos you-- because you live in Nashville now. Is that correct? ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Yeah, yeah. FRED RASCOE: So you've moved these kind of things. And I wanted to ask you about the kind of things that you keep like that. I mean, it's fair to say, at this point in your career, you have a very long history of artistic accomplishment. And there are some artifacts that naturally will have come from that. So what do you like to self-archive? Is it just your notes and ramblings, art, is it master tapes, things like that? What is it that you keep? ROBYN HITCHCOCK: The notebooks and the drawings are here with me. And they don't really take up that much space, a couple of shelves. I actually destroyed most of my-- I destroyed my-- I burned all my notebooks in 1984. And then my ex-wife but one ran amok and tore up all my other notebooks in 1988. So I don't have anything much from before 1988. I think I've got one file of lyrics. But I've got a lot of-- there's still-- gosh, that's 28 years ago. So I've got a fair bit of that. And I've got some paintings. Master tapes is a much more of a problem. I have something like 26 boxes of master tapes stored in a warehouse somewhere in East London, which I pay a phenomenal amount of money for to-- and I'll never go back and do anything with them. They're just sitting there. But I can't quite bring myself to let them be destroyed. FRED RASCOE: But it's all climate controlled and-- ROBYN HITCHCOCK: They're climate controlled. But most of the stuff that's on it has already come out. So it would only be of interest to a sort of collector who wanted to remix my old albums from the '80s or something. It's not like there's a-- I don't think there's any lost gems. But I have also here got-- I've got hundreds of cassettes and compact disks from radio sessions, and rough mixes, and gigs. And I don't know how the hell I'm going to archive-- I'm never going to sit there and listen to it all. I can't even face opening it. There's so many CDs full of old sessions from the last 15 years. I don't know what's on them. And the cassettes, God. There just isn't enough time. AMEET DOSHI: We'll be back with more of our interview with Robyn Hitchcock about the preservation of the physical and the digital after this music set. [MUSIC PLAYING] JOSH: File this set under GN281.P5 [THE DIRTBOMBS, "EXECUTIONER OF LOVE"] [LYS GUILLORN AND THE MERCY CHOIR, "I WANNA DESTROY YOU"] AMEET DOSHI: "I Wanna To Destroy You" by Lys Guillorn and the Mercy Choir. Before that, The Dirtbombs with "Executioner of Love," songs about failed experiments. And they are also songs written by Robyn Hitchcock as performed by other artists. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. We're talking to musician Robyn Hitchcock about the information we keep and the information we leave behind. In the last segment, we were discussing what artifacts Robyn self-archives. And I asked him what he thought about the challenges of physical versus digital preservation. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: In the old days, everything was stored on paper. And as long as the paper didn't moulder, it was all right. But you could pick it out and read it. So you can still look at manuscripts from the 12th century, probably. But now, everything is kind of technologically stored. It also becomes obsolete. So there's no saying that in 20 years time, there'll be a way of playing compact disks. And I mean, cassettes, you can sort of-- I don't know, I don't know how long any of this will last. That's why I like having things on vinyl because in theory, someone from 10,000 years in the future, or from 10,000 light years away could arrive and find an LP. And if they're smart enough to figure out interplanetary travel, they're probably smart enough to figure out how to decode it. So they just put it on a kind of wheel and spin it around and put a needle in the groove. And they'd hear the music. They might play it backwards, of course. FRED RASCOE: Well, that's what we did in the '70s when we sent the Voyager spacecrafts out in their interplanetary interstellar missions. They all carried a record. It wasn't vinyl. But it was a record with grooves with instructions on how to play it. So I guess the idea is that as a mechanical concept 10,000 years from now, you can decode that more than you can decode a piece of magnetized something with zeros and ones on it. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: I would think so, yeah. So but you said they weren't on vinyl. What were they on? FRED RASCOE: It was actually a gold record. Like it was literally-- I think maybe gold plated aluminum. I'm not exactly sure. But it was included. And it was greetings from many of the world's languages, like hundreds of the world's languages. And some-- Chuck Berry, actually. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Chuck Berry song? FRED RASCOE: Yeah, along with-- ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Which one? FRED RASCOE: "Johnny B. Goode" ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Not "No Other Place To Go"? FRED RASCOE: They didn't think that far ahead. They weren't thinking ironically. There was also a Louis Armstrong and lots of folk music from around the world on it. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Oh gosh. Yes, I'd heard that. I'd heard that. But well, that's it, isn't it really? But I just think that vinyl is probably as good a way to store music as any. So all mye-- I've got all my rereleases are done on vinyl. And my new stuff comes out on vinyl. And Emma's-- the record I've done with Emma is a vinyl 7-inch. It's also a download. It's not coming out on CD. So yeah, I think that's-- that's what I mean. So you could digitize all your photographs. But it doesn't mean that in 20 years time that those-- that won't be obsolete. But probably whatever is around in 20 years time will be smart enough to just keep upgrading the technology. So if and when the I of things take over, the devices, artificial intelligence, which is supposed to achieve consciousness in 2040, which is about the time that we run out of fossil fuels and climate change really severely kicks in, if we haven't already been blown up by Donald Trump, this, I mean, seriously, if anyone thinks that we're going to be-- any of this is going to be here by the end of the century, I think they're just deluded. Things are about to transform so radically. Everything we've been working up to since the Renaissance, since-- and then the Industrial Revolution is going to peak in some ghastly way in the next 50 years. So let's hope there's a way of storing stuff for whatever comes next. Or maybe there'll just be Voyager out there with a gold-plated Chuck Berry record as a sort of little legacy of our aborted civilization. FRED RASCOE: That may be all that we have left in the end. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Yeah, well, we've been thinking along those lines. I mean, the nature of the apocalypse has shifted. 30 years ago, it was nuclear between America and Russia. Now, it's again possibly nuclear if Trump comes in. But whether that gets us-- if that doesn't get us the environment, which is disintegrating anyway, nothing's being done about it fast enough to change. So it's so big that people don't even really bother thinking about it. We just carry on flying around the-- or I just carry on flying around the world because that's how I make a living. But I mean, there is genuinely no future, as the Sex Pistols said. And so this is a really interesting question for libraries. Where-- how do you store stuff when there may be nowhere to store it? Or there may be nobody there to store it for because at the same time, it is very-- our instinct is to find ways of preserving somehow what we've done, of making a record. The best thing about humanity has been its consciousness. And the worst thing has been what we've done with our consciousness. And even before our light is extinguished or transformed, we need to find some way of saying, oh look, folks from the future, intergalactic space pigs, whatever you are, people from the 17th dimension, the next occupants of planet Earth, this is our story. This is what we did. FRED RASCOE: And that's-- you've hit on something that librarians do struggle with is there is kind of a tension between access and preservation. Because right now in the moment, access means digital because that's how people want to consume information. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Well, that's why it's good to try and keep the originals, the books, the photos, the paintings, the records, and all of those. But you can't guarantee that they can be stored safely anywhere. Digital because it doesn't take up any space can sort of go anywhere. It can go into a cloud. FRED RASCOE: And it sort of instantly replicated. You can instantly have 9,000 copies of it. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Well, you're right, exactly, the great galactic in the cosmos can print them out. FRED RASCOE: And coming back from the grander view, much more into you as a working artist, how do you how do you feel about those digital works that are so easily replicated? People access things online now streaming that give you $0.0001 per play now. And whereas before, you had to buy a tangible thing. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Well, it would be great to get more money, that's for sure. Everything is available. And nothing is worth anything. I mean, for things to have a value, they have to be scarce. So the more common or widespread something is, the less people are going to pay for it. That's the problem. You can't stop it. AMEET DOSHI: We'll be back with more from Robyn Hitchcock on the left side of the hour. [MUSIC PLAYING] ERIC CARTIER: Hi, this is Eric Cartier. I'm the digital librarian at the University of Maryland. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMEET DOSHI: Today's show is called Our Information Will Replace Us, in which we talk to ROBYN Hitchcock about the uncertain future of our information. Now, what our listeners may not know is that this is not the first time that Fred has interviewed Robyn Hitchcock. FRED RASCOE: That's right. I interviewed him a couple of times back in 1997 in Atlanta and in Knoxville. And Ameet, you were there at the Knoxville interview. AMEET DOSHI: I remember, yes. And I was just thinking how great it would be to hear those old interviews from 20 years ago. You still have them, right, Fred? FRED RASCOE: Oh yeah, I mean, I think so. There's one of them on cassette and one on minidisc. AMEET DOSHI: And you happen to have a working cassette player and a mini disk player, right? FRED RASCOE: No. Yeah. AMEET DOSHI: Well, well, as Robyn says, the universe is based on sullen entropy. So file this set under TL789.8.U6V5275 [CHUCK BERRY, "NO PARTICULAR PLACE TO GO"] Riding along in my automobile. My baby beside me at the wheel. I Stole a kiss at the turn of a mile. WENDY HAGENMEIER: "God Save The Queen" by the Sex Pistols. And before that, "No Particular Place To Go" by Chuck Berry. Songs about no direction and no future, as mentioned by Robyn Hitchcock in the previous segment. FRED RASCOE: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. And we continue our interview with Robyn Hitchcock. We're discussing his views on preservation of physical and digital information. If I can change the focus from like the things that you preserve from your career and ask you if there's-- your father was a-- Raymond Hitchcock was a well known novelist. And I wonder, going from thinking about how you preserve your own things to do you have things like papers, letters, or things that you're keeping from-- ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Of Raymond's? FRED RASCOE: Yes. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Yes, somewhere, but I don't know. But I think one of my sisters has it. There's allegedly a box with about 40 manuscripts in. He had about eight books published and two or three plays in his lifetime. But there was an awful lot that wasn't. The Raymond Hitchcock Outtake Library is quite big. And again, it would be great sometime to go through those and see what was-- if there was stuff that could be made available. But again, it's a project. Somebody-- who has the time to do it? I'm busy churning my own stuff out. And my sister-- another of my sisters, I have two. But one of them is a writer herself, writes children's books. But it's certainly there. FRED RASCOE: So I wonder if-- getting back to the issue of digital streaming, if we've talked about how libraries provide access to things. Do you-- without getting into technologically how it would be done-- do you have, in your mind, a way that libraries could provide access to your music or anyone's music? Do you-- do you see it being electronic when you think about it in the future? Or do you kind of have a desire to go back-- going back to being like a tangible thing that people go to the library to access a tangible thing? ROBYN HITCHCOCK: You mean how it will all be? FRED RASCOE: Yeah. I mean-- ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Well, I don't think there's going to be a future. I don't think humanity is going to be functioning in 50 years time. So it's academic. I think it will be stored-- you know, I think we will store as much as we can digitally. And I think-- I think that if there's anything left here, I think it'll be an i thing, with a little i. It'll be an Apple product. There will just be sort of iPhones with arms and legs that can survive like cockroaches in any environment and are sentient in their own way. And they have our knowledge, which will be a kind of mythology. Like we have myths of Atlantis or whatever, or the ancient gods. Or there'll be a-- I think what we do, what we've done will just be a myth for the next species, which I think is going to be mechanical. I mean, it's possible that it'll be feline. It's a feline dynasty will appear eventually. You'll get jaguars with reticulated thumbs that are able to invent calculators and perform operations on each other and things. I think at most-- if there's a future, I think it's-- I think it is entirely digital. FRED RASCOE: So it's worth preserving and worth figuring out how to preserve digitally, but it will be just for the benefit of whatever species comes after humans? ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, I don't think-- I don't think there's going to be-- I don't think this species is even fit to go into space. And that's the other thing. If we don't kind of abort ourselves now, we'll go out and contaminate the cosmos. We're an experiment that's failed. But it's been a very interesting failure. And we should document it. And our function will have been to have been a link in the chain of consciousness and maybe whatever comes next will do a better job. Hopefully, who knows? FRED RASCOE: Well, for my last question, I'm taking us out of a bleak territory, I think, and into something a little more frivolous. It's a debate that we've had on the show for the past couple of weeks with our various guests. Beatles or Rolling Stones? ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Oh, Beatles. FRED RASCOE: That was quick. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Although the Beatles-- the Beatles were about love. And the Stones were about sex. And it's interesting that the stones are still there. The Beatles-- the Beatles were-- three out of four Beatles were very gifted songwriters. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have written some good songs, but what they really are is a band that plays. Whereas the Beatles was really-- what they really were was a songwriting team, factory, school, if you like, that then went on to inspire ELO, and me, and all sorts of people, hundreds. They started a kind of template that is still there if you write songs and you love songs. I mean, some people just don't get the Beatles. FRED RASCOE: And I imagine-- ROBYN HITCHCOCK: I mean, The Stones have written some great songs. And they're much-- as a band, I'm sure they were much sexier and more exciting, especially in the kind of Brian-- in Brian Jones days, phenomenal, young, hormonal white guys playing Chicago blues. They were magic. But I think they were a different thing. And the Beatles, I'm sure the Beatles were a great band in a way. But what they were really about was songwriting. And as long as they could, sort of also complementing each other, harmonizing together, arranging each other's work. And then they just got too big for each other. I'm staring at a Beatles boxed set on vinyl, stereo in case you wondered, as we speak. FRED RASCOE: It'll be interesting what the cat species that follows us thinks about us based on how the Beatles and Rolling Stones lasted, relatively, what archeological assumptions they would make. ROBYN HITCHCOCK: Yes, I mean, I think if there was one thing I would hope that lasted from humanity, it would be Beatles records, certainly more than mine. If anything in future millennia was able to groove to the Beatles, that would be another wonderful legacy of humanity, one of the good things that we left behind us. FRED RASCOE: That was musician and artist Robyn Hitchcock speaking to us by phone from his home in Nashville, Tennessee. He will be playing at the Atlanta City Winery next Thursday, November 10th, if indeed, the human race lasts until then. We'll be back to wrap up Lost in the Stacks after a music set. AMEET DOSHI: File this set under BF1261.2.T78. [JOHN CALE, "HEARTBREAK HOTEL"] [PSYCHEDELIC FURS, "THE GHOST IN YOU"] The time moves and she don't fade. The ghost in you, she don't fade. "The Ghost In You" by the Psychedelic Furs, Psychedelic Furs. Before that, John Cale with "Heartbreak Hotel," songs about meeting your end and leaving behind some trace and also songs Robyn Hitchcock has covered. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Ameet, what is going on at the library next week? AMEET DOSHI: Well, Fred, learning, collaboration, a lot of scholarly research and creation. I have a feeling that 99% of it will be conducted recorded and stored on electronic devices of some kind leaving digital traces for some post-humanoid cat-like species to puzzle over thousands of years from now. We are the Georgia Tech Library. And we are at your service. [MUSIC PLAYING] JOSH: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library produced by Ameet Doshi, Charlie Bennett, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Fred Rascoe. FRED RASCOE: Josh was our engineer today. And our show was brought to you by technology that has outpaced humanity. WENDY HAGENMEIER: Legal counsel and a prototype of the self-aware iPhone 13 were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. FRED RASCOE: Special thanks to the one and only Robyn Hitchcock for being on the show. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. AMEET DOSHI: You can hear this show again or get in touch with us at werek.org/lostinthestacks. And you can find our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, and many other podcast aggregators. Let us know if we're not on your preferred platform. WENDY HAGENMEIER: Next week on Lost in the Stacks, we find out what it means to take a critical look at library services and resources. If we hold a mirror up to ourselves, what will-- will we like what we see? FRED RASCOE: It's time for our last song. And we close with a contemplation about our future as a species. What information will there be to tell whatever comes next about us? To quote Robyn Hitchcock himself, though we vanish from memory, our bones may yet be dug up and misinterpreted. That's from the just released 7-inch record. This is "Life Is Change" by Robyn Hitchcock and Emma Swift right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody. [ROBYN HITCHCOCK AND EMMA SWIFT, "LIFE IS CHANGE"] ROBYN HITCHCOCK: You don't want to see that life is change.