‘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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- The Confuser is Hitchcock's new Nashville-recorded album with session musicians, released from the city where the 73-year-old lives and runs a boutique label with second wife, Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift
- Hitchcock's 2024 memoir "1967" finally concedes he is "what would in the 21st century be called 'on the spectrum,' at the high-functioning end of autism," reframing decades of his oblique lyrics
- The Soft Boys' "Underwater Moonlight" (1980) is now regarded as an all-time classic and a major influence on American 1980s indie rock, despite its awkward fit for punk-era tastes
- Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians — a reconvening of Soft Boys fragments — signed to A&M, became a college rock star feted by REM and the Replacements, and landed hits including "Balloon Man" and "So You Think You're in Love"
- Director Jonathan Demme shot Hitchcock in the 1990s concert film "Storefront Hitchcock" and subsequently cast him in "The Manchurian Candidate"
- Hitchcock calls himself "the last high-functioning" survivor of his psychedelic generation, framing his role as "sweeping up after" innovators like Dylan, Syd Barrett, and the Beatles, and conceding that estrangement and a degree of narcissism are "necessary" to the artistic journey
Why it matters: At 73, Hitchcock is one of the few 1960s psych-rock figures still actively recording and touring — and his belated autism admission gives fans a biographical key to six decades of elliptical songwriting that has always resisted plain reading, while his second memoir, "Stranded in the Future," extends the same unreliable-narrator mode he uses on stage.
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