The Eighties was a dark time for Sixties-fixated musicians hovering on the outside of the mainstream, according to Robyn Hitchcock.

"It was a time of Linn drums and synths, and drummers who just wanted to take cocaine and be drum machines.

"All the guitars were chorused and happening miles away on a distant plain. There were a lot of different kinds of powder sprinkled over the music."

Robyn had been dragged into it all with 1982's disastrous Groovy Decay album, his second solo effort since his post-punk Cambridge band The Soft Boys had disbanded.

"Well-meaning people tried to make me sound early Eighties with big drums and distant guitars," he says.

After the terrible experience of recording that album, Robyn took a self-imposed break.

The result was his classic 1984 album I Often Dream Of Trains, which is being recreated in a short acoustic tour of the UK taking in Brighton at the end of its run.

"I was always definitely a Sixties guy, even when punk came along," says Robyn. "This record was very much detached from the sounds of the time. There were no drums, no synthesisers, no reverb, nothing there to say where the record was from."

Some of his inspiration came from visiting friends in Alfriston.

"I wrote lyrics for Captain Sensible who was living in Brighton," he says.

"I would go down on the train and write lyrics. There was a definite South Coast element in there."

The album romanticises locations like Reading and Basingstoke, as well as tackling dysfunctional families, child discipline and Victorian transport systems through acoustic and even occasionally acapella arrangements.

The I Often Dream Of Trains tour also includes songs written around the same time, discovered by Robyn as he added bonus tracks to his latest CD reissue of the album.

"The albums were all out of print," he says. "If you are an author you make sure your stuff is still in stock. People were buying them expensively on eBay.

"The way the business is going, this could be the last chance to physically release this stuff.

"Every ten years I get my tapes out of the cupboard and look for more extra tracks. Some of the songs I had completely forgotten about. It is a chance to revise your history, and who better to do that than yourself?"

Despite releasing a box set of Eighties solo work, with another box set of albums recorded with his band The Egyptians on the way, Robyn hasn't been dwelling totally in the past.

His last tour saw him head out on the road with REM's Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey and drummer Bill Rieflin, known collectively as The Venus Three.

The band released one album, Ole Tarantula, after the tour, and according to Robyn there are another two albums-worth of Venus Three material in the can.

"When I Often Dream Of Trains was released, the musical landscape had shifted," says Robyn. "REM had arrived, jangly guitar rock was becoming acceptable again.

"Now if you're starting out you are able to listen to stuff from 30 years ago. There is none of the Maoist ideas of punk where nothing happened apart from Iggy Pop, The Velvet Underground and The MC5.

"You can do whatever you want, which is great. You can say I'm a country-prog-speedmetal band', and you will have an audience. It's so much better for somebody like me."

Support from Tim Keegan.

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