1967 : How I Got There and Why I Never Left

The great eccentric of British psychedelia and unsung national treasure - beloved of everyone from Led Zeppelin, R.E.M. to Stewart Lee and the late Jonathan Demme (who directed Storefront Hitchcock, a 1998 concert film conceived as 'a document not a documentary') - pens an idiosyncratic childhood memoir . . .

1967 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 13; 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 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?