‘I was a self-centred, entitled little horror ... arguably I still am’: cult psych rocker Robyn Hitchcock talks to Stewart Lee
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- Robyn Hitchcock, 73, releases 'The Confuser,' recorded in Nashville with session musicians; he lives there and runs a boutique label with his second wife, Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift
- The album opens with 'I Am This Thing,' whose first lyric is 'I owe a lot to a dead man's cock' — a Hitchcockian double reference to his late father, the bohemian novelist Raymond Hitchcock, and Raymond's novel 'Percy,' later filmed with Hywel Bennett
- Hitchcock has published two memoirs in quick succession: 2024's '1967' and the latest 'Stranded in the Future,' which Stewart Lee describes as a 'fascinating piece of unreliable-narrator fiction' where personal and painful material is sublimated into poetic, non-literal truth
- In '1967,' Hitchcock disclosed being 'on the spectrum, at the high-functioning end of autism' — 57 years after writing the bluntly autobiographical 1984 a cappella song 'Uncorrected Personality Traits,' which lists adult psychological conditions and their childhood roots
- Hitchcock's 1980 Soft Boys album 'Underwater Moonlight' has emerged from punk-era obscurity as an all-time classic and proved hugely influential on the American indie scene of the 1980s
- Signing to A&M in the late 80s, Hitchcock became an 'accidental college rock star in America,' feted by REM and the Replacements, and scored hits with 'Balloon Man' and 'So You Think You're in Love'
- Hitchcock self-describes as 'the last high-functioning old dead English bloke,' carrying on the psychedelic-era music of Syd Barrett, the Beatles, and Dylan — influences he absorbed as a 13-year-old boarding school boy hearing those Dylan records
Why it matters: Hitchcock positions himself as the living preserver of a specific 1966–67 psychedelic tradition, and his late-life autism disclosure — buried mid-interview — reframes 57 years of deliberately opaque, estrangement-driven songwriting as autobiography rather than affectation. The album and memoir land together as a retrospective from an artist who says he has 'avoided both success and failure.'
