Robyn Hitchcock

In the early 1980s the British music press would regularly proclaim that next year would be the year of the great psychedelia revival. It proved mysteriously elusive but at least Robyn Hitchcock, who released his first records as the leader of the Soft Boys at the height of the punk wars, has always carried on as though 1967 never ended. I first stumbled across his music in the mid ‘80s. I Often Dream of Trains was the third solo album Syd Barrett never made, while Fegmania! gave a glimpse into what Pink Floyd might have sounded like had Syd remained a member. With song titles like Sandra’s Having Her Brain Out, My Wife & My Dead Wife, and The Man with the Lightbulb Head, and lyrics possessed of a surreal and subversive sensibility, Hitchcock was a one-man psychedelic revival. His entrancingly catchy and effortlessly odd songs evoked Sgt. Pepper’s, the Kinks, Dylan, Love, and Pet Sounds era Beach Boys. Not that he was derivative or a purveyor of pastiche. He sounded unmistakably like himself, but the Day-Glo spirit of psychedelia had clearly entered this man’s soul at a formative age and remained embedded there. His memoir is the story of how it happened.

In early 1967 Robyn Hitchcock was coming up for fourteen and a pupil at Winchester College. So his book is, among other things, a reminiscence of life at an elite English boarding school. Admittedly some of this is slightly overfamiliar territory: boys called Scraper, Horse and Gallows Senior, public school slang (a bicycle is a ‘bogle’ and a bathtub is a ‘swill’, all that sort of thing), time-hallowed yet absurd rituals, and dodgy masters suffering from ‘arrested development’. Still, Hitchcock writes well and even manages a creditable one sentence definition of the entire system: ‘One of the main functions of private education in Britain is to stunt people emotionally and then send them out to run the country’. My interest also perked up considerably when Brian Eno, then a student at the nearby art school, dropped by to give the young Wykehamists some lessons in how to be pretentious in an arty, late ‘60s sort of way.

Hitchcock was raised in a succession of suitably eccentric dwellings: a semi-dilapidated mansion on a hill in Weybridge that, if not exactly haunted, was certainly pretty eerie, and a converted watermill in Hampshire that was in the Domesday Book. Family life was cultured and creative though seemingly at one remove from the rest of the world. His father, Raymond Hitchcock, was a painter, cartoonist and author. At one point he mentions that Raymond has started writing a novel. Although he doesn’t say so, this must have been Percy, a very 1960s slice of naughtiness about the world’s first penis transplant. That could easily be the subject of a song by Hitchcock Junior. The songs in the film that was made of it were by one of young Robyn’s heroes - Ray Davies. I would love to have known what Hitchcock felt about that but, whatever it was, he’s keeping it to himself.

1967 is at its best when Hitchcock is writing about the music that invaded his psyche during the titular year and transformed his life. There’s a lovely description of him hearing a Bob Dylan record by chance, shortly after arriving at the school, which encapsulates how music can come at the adolescent mind out of nowhere, sum up everything you feel, and change you completely. His thoughts about music are eloquently perceptive throughout although, unless he was unusually precocious even for an English public schoolboy, we do seem to be hearing the considered reflections of the septuagenarian rather than the infatuated teenager.

This is an amiable book full of the qualities familiar from Hitchcock’s songs - chief among them an ebulliently wayward humour underscored by a nagging sense of melancholy and the fragility of existence. If you’re among the initiated I expect you’ve already read this or soon will do. If, on the other hand, you have never heard of Robyn Hitchcock, I recommend by way of introduction taking a stroll through the beautifully warped and hauntingly alienated twilight landscape that is I Often Dream of Trains.… (more)

Hitchcock's ode to 1967--the perfect year in pop music by his reckoning--is entertaining from beginning to end thanks to his own narration. I understand the book itself also has some drawings of his, so I need to check those out in a bookstore. There's nothing earth-shattering here, just an infatuation with Bob Dylan that so many of us can sympathize with, and a nice portrait of Winchester College, the private preparatory school he attended from ages 13-17, and its students, teachers, and other fixtures.… (more)