Robyn Hitchcock 1967: Vacations in the Past LP

Robyn Hitchcock is a rock'n'roll surrealist. Born in London on March 3rd, 1953 he describes his songs as "pictures you can listen to." As much a child of Dali, De Chirico, and JG Ballard as of his 1960s musical heroes, he is a master of the absurd, reveling in the beauty of the unexpected. His first publicly visible band The Soft Boys (1976 – 81) has remained an influential art-rock touchstone for generations of musicians. "I just want to be an obscure cult fringe," he told the NME in 1978; the NME didn't believe him, but he's been true to his ambition. Without ever breaking the surface of pop culture Hitchcock has floated at a tangent to the mainstream for nearly five decades. His songs have been performed by R.E.M., The Replacements, Neko Case, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Lou Barlow, Grant Lee Phillips, Sparklehorse, and Suzanne Vega with the Grateful Dead among others. A confirmed outsider, he nonetheless has devoted listeners around the world who attend his concerts, and also tune into the online streaming shows Robyn seasonally does with his wife, the singer Emma Swift. In 1996 he was the subject of Jonathan Demme's in-concert film, Storefront Hitchcock.

Robyn Hitchcock came of age in the 1960s when he attended Winchester College, an eccentric hothouse boarding school in the south of England. This is the subject of 1967, which is both a memoir and an album. The memoir is a book, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, describing how the music of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and others drastically transformed the direction of his life when he left home for this strange new world. The companion record album 1967: Vacations in the Past is a selection of the (mostly) hit songs of that year, re-recorded acoustically by Robyn with the help of some friends in Cambridge, San Francisco, and Sydney.

"For me, 1967 was the portal between childhood and the adult world, where these songs flickered in the air to greet me like hummingbirds," says Robyn. "They're full of saturated colour and melancholy, just as I was charged with hormones and regret as one part of me said goodbye to the other. Perhaps I peaked then – at the supernova of boyhood – the black hole of the grownup world awaited me with its dwarf-star mentality, all beige and hell and compromise."