Robyn Hitchcock is embarking on a book tour for his witty new memoir

Robyn Hitchcock – now 71 – is hitting the road with his new memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left out June 28th. 

Here's the scoop from Robyn: 

Hello dear reader, 

To celebrate the release of my memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, I will visit a series of bookshops and record stores, talk about the book with esteemed friends and writers, and play a few songs. 

Here are the places you will find me: 

June 26 - Resident Music, Brighton (in conversation with David Quantick)

June 27 - Rough Trade East, London (in conversation with Barney Hoskins)

July 2 - Foyles, Charing Cross, London (in conversation with Tom Pinnock) 

July 18 - Parnassus Books, Nashville (in conversation with Sean Nelson)

July 31 - Little City Books, Hoboken NJ (in conversation with Todd Abramson) 

August 1 - Rough Trade, New York (in conversation with David Fricke) 

August 5 - Porter Square, Boston (in conversation with Harold Lepidus) 

Event details are on Facebook and my website.

Love on ya, 

RH

 

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

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’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 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? 

Robyn Hitchcock's new memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left is published on June 28th by Little, Brown Books (UK & Europe) pre-order here and Akashic Books (USA) pre-order here. Check out some of Robyn's favourite music of 1967 on Youtube right here or Spotify over there.

What Robyn's acquaintances are saying...

“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 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

"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 tantalising 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