Thanks for popping round.
As it happens, the new Rotifer album "Coach Number 12 of 11" has just come out in Austria, Germany (what about Switzerland?) and the Benelux countries (with the UK and US to follow in the spring, if everything goes to plan... ). It's the most straight-forward, danceable, hummable thing I've done so far, the kind of record I would have wanted to make before I knew how to.
Darren Hayman wrote the liner notes:
"Robert Rotifer claims to be Austrian, but he’s lying through his teeth. Robert Rotifer is English, as English as Lacoste, as English as Rickenbacker guitars, as English as Chicken Tikka Masala. Robert writes in his second language better than I think in my first.
I’m 37, and I don’t really know how to make friends anymore. You can’t say ‘Do you want to come round my house to play?’. I guess I’ve met Robert maybe ten times in ten years. The last time was in his kitchen and his wife, Judith, made Leek and Fennel soup. So I guess we might be friends now. Robert lives in a very old English house, in a very old English town. What’s he trying to prove?
It’s all about travel with Robert. He commutes from Canterbury to London, and sometimes from London to Vienna. He seems to find travelling difficult too. He worries if he’s on the right train carriage, especially when the announcement tells him he’s on coach twelve of eleven.
I spent a whole evening watching Battlestar Galactica while Robert kept texting me from a three-hour traffic jam in Bexleyheath. I spent four hours in congestion with him on the M11. The man’s a jinx. The planes and motorways do get him home eventually. Robert writes songs about home and travel. He writes about things close to him and the things that drag him away.
There is a real need for unknown songwriters, its Robert’s tough luck that he isn’t more popular, but it’s our good fortune. We need the undiscovered to write songs about trains and kitchen designers for us. Successful artists don’t tend to do that as much.
Robert is good too, very good. I might even say he’s one of the best Kent based Austrian songwriters in the business and I know a few."
Let's just say I prefer Perrys, Fenders and Korma, but apart from that he's spot on.
dbl7", 1996
