1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

‘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 sacri-ficing its sense of the breath-taking sweep of time. I absolutely adored every line of 1967 and every moment I spent reading it’ Michael Chabon ‘1967 . . . in which our hero looks down from the future at his squeaky realm of boyhood, a world of dayglo sunsets, and would-be denizens of music and the mind. Cometh the year, cometh the groover’ Johnny Marr ‘Page Turner could be the name of a lead singer in a sixties psychedelic band, but it’s not – it’s a description of Robyn Hitchcock’s tender and hilarious memoir’ Joe Boyd A bright, obsessive compulsive boy is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding school just before he reaches his thirteenth birthday; just as Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles’ Revolver explodes. In January 1966, Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for his green Dalek sponge and his family’s comforting au pair, Teresa. By December 1967, he’s mutated into a 6 ft 2-inch 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 (think Gormenghast via Evelyn Waugh), 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 bat-winged 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