Description

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The great eccentric of British psychedelia—beloved by everyone from Led Zeppelin and R.E.M. to the late Jonathan Demme—pens a singularly unique childhood memoir . . .

“Memoirists rarely begin their work with a stroke of genuine inspiration, and Robyn Hitchcock’s ingenious idea to limit his account of his life to the titular year gives this sharp, funny, finely written book an unusually keen, wistful intensity without sacrificing its sense of the breathtaking sweep of time. I absolutely adored every line of 1967 and every moment I spent reading it.” —Michael Chabon, author of Telegraph Avenue

“1967 . . . in which our hero looks down from the future at his squeaky realm of boyhood, a world of Day-Glo sunsets, and would-be denizens of music and the mind. Cometh the year, cometh the groover.”—Johnny Marr, guitarist and co-songwriter of the Smiths

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left explores how that pivotal slice of time tastes to a bright, obsessive/compulsive boy who is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding school as he reaches the age of thirteen—just as Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band explodes.

When he arrives in January 1966 Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for the comforts of home and his family’s loving au pair, Teresa. By December 1967 he’s mutated into a 6'2" tall rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really stoned and move to Nashville.

In between—as the hippie revolution blossoms in the world outside—Hitchcock adjusts to the hierarchical, homoerotic world of Winchester, threading a path through teachers with arrested development, some oafish peers, and a sullen old maid—a very English freak show. On the way he befriends a cadre of batwing teenage prodigies and meets their local guru, the young Brian Eno. And his home life isn’t any more normal . . .

At the end of 1967 all the ingredients are in place that will make Robyn Hitchcock a songwriter for life. But then again, does 1967 ever really end?

About the Author

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With a career now spanning six decades, Robyn Hitchcock remains a truly one-of-a-kind artist—surrealist rock ‘n’ roller, iconic troubadour, guitarist, poet, painter, performer. An unparalleled, deeply individualistic songwriter and stylist, Hitchcock has traversed myriad genres with humor, intelligence, and originality over more than thirty albums and seemingly infinite live performances. From the Soft Boys’s proto-psych-punk and the Egyptians’s Dadaist pop to solo masterpieces like 1984’s milestone I Often Dream of Trains and 1990’s Eye, Hitchcock has crafted a strikingly original oeuvre rife with sagacious observation, astringent wit, recurring marine life, mechanized rail services, cheese, and innumerable finely drawn characters real and imagined. He was the subject of Jonathan Demme’s 1998 concert film Storefront Hitchcock, conceived as “a document not a documentary.” His songs have been covered by R.E.M., Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Neko Case, and Suzanne Vega with the Grateful Dead, among others. His main interest outside music, writing, and drawing is obsolete electric traction. He lives in London with his wife Emma, their cats Ringo and Tubby, and their twee dog Daphne.

Praise For…

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A bright, nostalgic look at the exhilaration of 1967, this book—illustrated throughout with Hitchcock’s surreal sketches—will appeal to not only the author’s many fans but also anyone interested in the music and culture from the golden age of psychedelia. Wistfully reflective reading.
— Kirkus Reviews

Memoirists rarely begin their work with a stroke of genuine inspiration, and Robyn Hitchcock’s ingenious idea to limit his account of his life to the titular year gives this sharp, funny, finely written book an unusually keen, wistful intensity without sacrificing its sense of the breathtaking sweep of time. I absolutely adored every line of 1967 and every moment I spent reading it.

— Michael Chabon, author of Telegraph Avenue

1967 . . . in which our hero looks down from the future at his squeaky realm of boyhood, a world of Day-Glo sunsets, and would-be denizens of music and the mind. Cometh the year, cometh the groover.

— Johnny Marr, guitarist and cosongwriter of the Smiths

Robyn Hitchcock belongs to an almost extinct species, ‘The Totally Original Artist,’ once relatively commonplace, now only occasionally glimpsed in the dense tree canopy of the pop rainforest. Mysterious, elusive, a kind of rock ‘n’ roll olingo . . . 1967 presents his many fans with a tantalizing print-bite of how he wound up in those trees and in so doing (whether he likes it or not) became a National Treasure.

— Nick Lowe, singer-songwriter