\u2018I owe a lot to a dead man\u2019s cock.\u201d So begins the first song, a propulsive piece of Lennonesque powerpop called I Am This Thing, on The Confuser, the latest album by the 73-year-old English gentleman survivor of the 60s\/70s frontline, Robyn Hitchcock. The album has been recorded by a crack team of session guys in Nashville, where Hitchcock lives and runs a boutique record label with his second wife, the Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not just some sort of old public school dilettante floating around the South Bank or whatever,\u201d Hitchcock protests, unbidden. \u201cMaking it work in Nashville means I actually am a real musician songwriter in the real musician songwriter town. And I think, \u2018OK, I actually did do this!\u2019 I wanted to go to Nashville when I, as a 13-year-old boarding school boy, heard those Dylan records he made here. And a mere 60 years later, here I am!\u201d<\/p>\n
Hitchcock, in his sixth decade of songwriting, is very much alive. The dead man to whom he is indebted, meanwhile, is presumably Hitchcock\u2019s father Raymond Hitchcock, a bohemian artist and satirical novelist. And the penis in question, I assume, is either Raymond\u2019s, which co-spawned Robyn. Or else it\u2019s Percy, the eponymous penis hero of one of Raymond\u2019s novels, subsequently filmed with Hywel Bennett and soundtracked by the Kinks. It\u2019s not made entirely clear, and the possible double reading is totally typical of Hitchcock\u2019s tricksy refusal to be transparent. But we\u2019ll get to that.<\/p>\n
Robyn Hitchcock performing with the Soft Boys in London, 1978. Photograph: Gus Stewart\/Redferns<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a framed poster for the Italian dub of the film on the right behind Hitchcock as I talk to him via video call. \u201cYes,\u201d he explains in that compressed voice, one that seems designed to penetrate your forehead, \u201cthe Italian version was called Il Complesso del Trapianto, The Complications of Transplants. And the poster shows Hywel Bennett looking down at an extremely high mound under his sheet in the presence of a scantily clad nurse.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Hitchcock\u2019s left is another framed print, a rainbow-tinged silhouette of Bob Dylan dissolving in Duchampian shadows by Milton Glaser. Hitchcock has arranged the two images perfectly, a summary of the influences that shaped him. As his first memoir, 2024\u2019s engrossing 1967, details, the young Hitchcock, taking inspiration from a hip older beatnik boy called Brian Eno, got all the musical tools he needed in one year \u2013 Pink Floyd\u2019s burned-out founder Syd Barrett, acid-folk avatars the Incredible String Band, the psychedelic-era Beatles, and Dylan \u2013 and he\u2019s spent his life honouring his teenage taste by endlessly recombining those canonical sources.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough my prime influence was Bob Dylan,\u201d Hitchcock says, \u201cand Dylan showed me what I wanted to be, Syd Barrett showed me how I could be it. And I actually wound up sounding like John Lennon. To me, the Beatles are at the beginning and the end of everything. But my role has always just been to carry on a certain kind of music, which appeared in 66 and 67. My influences are all those old dead English blokes, basically.\u201d<\/p>\n
I put it to Hitchcock that he is the last old dead English bloke who isn\u2019t actually dead. \u201cWell, I\u2019m the last high-functioning one,\u201d he laughs in agreement. \u201cI mean, there\u2019s Julian Cope and Andy Partridge of XTC, but they\u2019re out of commission for playing live. But you can go and see me. I didn\u2019t invent this field of music, but I\u2019ve perpetuated it. I wanted to maintain a tradition and do new work in that tradition. But the guys I worship were innovators. I\u2019m the opposite. I\u2019m sweeping up after them. It\u2019s like, \u2018Oh God, here comes Hitchcock with the broom.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Dylan showed me what I wanted to be\u2019 \u2026 Hitchcock performing in 2019. Photograph: Suzi Pratt\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Hitchcock sells himself short of course, but deliberately so I imagine. No horses will be spooked by The Confuser, a comfortable sock of an album that Hitchcock the eternal disruptor has earned the right to slip on at this stage, though he still attempts to force his way into areas he\u2019s never explored before. On the new album, those Nashville cats find a walking bass and cowbell groove on My Dead Astronaut that swings in the way this septuagenarian hasn\u2019t before; Hitchcock\u2019s 70s collaborator Kimberley Rew adds a typically luminescent guitar to the shimmery Breathless; Building from the Ruins is a white funk workout; Monday for Me is a waltz-time folksy critique of the working week.<\/p>\n
Hitchcock\u2019s peculiar vision was an awkward fit for his punk-era debut, as frontman of Cambridge\u2019s the Soft Boys, who despite being raucous and ragged, displayed enough pop classicism and ostentatious intellectualism to displease equally middle-class journalists who were in search of noble rock savages. The contradictions of the time are detailed in Hitchcock\u2019s latest volume of memoirs, the typically evasive Stranded in the Future. It\u2019s a writerly work where the personal and the painful are sublimated and stories are chosen for their poetic, rather than their literal, truth. (Did homeless Cambridge mystics really participate in an early Soft Boys recording session?) It reads as a fascinating piece of unreliable-narrator fiction, whether you are interested in Hitchcock\u2019s music or not.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of it technically couldn\u2019t have happened at all,\u201d Hitchcock agrees. \u201cBut that\u2019s to do with my capacity to embrace delusion. And my tendency to create my own personal myth. You mythologise your life and then you can plunder it for songs or jokes or stories or whatever.\u201d I remind Hitchcock of a time we were standing on Westminster Bridge when two elderly ladies approached and asked us for directions. And he answered them in such a flamboyant way they left clearly delighted at having met this dapper and eloquent man, who was surely someone significant, and who even questioned whether they really needed to go to the place that they were looking for anyway. Was he aware of having created a moment?<\/p>\n
\u201cOh no, not really,\u201d Hitchcock reflects. \u201cBut I think I just rise to the bait of attention, don\u2019t you? Oh, jolly good. Someone wants me to perform.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know that they did,\u201d I offer. \u201cThey just wanted directions.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, but I wanted an excuse to perform and two kindly old ladies have turned up. Now\u2019s my chance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hitchcock has mastered the public mask then, but in the new memoir the younger man is separated socially and emotionally from people, and aspects of normal human behaviour baffle him \u2013 yet these problems become strengths of the work. \u201cIt seems like estrangement is an essential part of the journey,\u201d Hitchcock concedes. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t give you carte blanche to be an asshole, but you\u2019re liable to be one in the course of it. There\u2019s also a degree of narcissism that is on some level necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n
In one section of the book, the young Hitchcock writes a nasty song about the elderly neighbours complaining about the punk noise of the Soft Boys\u2019 terraced street rehearsals. \u201cI was a self-centred, entitled little horror and arguably I still am. I\u2019ve just learned to mask it more, and also I\u2019ve learned to make a living out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now the specifics of punk\u2019s particular culture wars are a distant memory, the Soft Boys\u2019 second album, 1980\u2019s Underwater Moonlight, subsequently hugely influential on the American indie scene of the 1980s, has emerged from the haze of battle as an all-time classic, like the shell-shocked figure of Private William Pennington stumbling out of the canvas of Lady Butler\u2019s Balaclava. Hitchcock had a good late 80s and a better early 90s, reconvening fragments of the Soft Boys as Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, getting a major label deal with A&M, and becoming a kind of accidental college rock star in America, feted by REM and the Replacements, and scoring actual hits such as Balloon Man (which Hitchcock says he would \u201cbe happy to never hear again, although I do like the money I get from the royalties\u201d) and the irresistible Byrdsian head rush of So You Think You\u2019re in Love.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s funny when people think of me as an 80s artist,\u201d Hitchcock reflects, \u201cbecause I think of myself as a 60s artist. I literally am the last to hatch out, I think. I should be in a museum with Ron Wood. I was never actually a pop star. I was on MTV quite a lot in the States in the late 80s and early 90s, but that\u2019s a long time back. I always manage to dodge the extreme limelight. You know, in some ways I\u2019ve avoided both success and failure. It\u2019s fantastic. And it\u2019s always a bit of a shock when somebody identifies me. Mostly they think I\u2019m Nick Lowe, which is great. But then occasionally people then think Nick is me. I\u2019ve signed an autograph as Nick Lowe once or twice.\u201d<\/p>\n
For me, the albums from Hitchcock\u2019s MTV era, Globe of Frogs and Perspex Island, now seem cluttered by the cacophonous production ethos of the times and, the acoustic outlier of 1990\u2019s mesmerising Eye aside, Hitchcock hits his stride in the late 90s when the director Jonathan Demme, a fan who subsequently cast him in The Manchurian Candidate, shot him in a low-key trio for a concert film, Storefront Hitchcock. The show seemed to presage a path of greater musical clarity, resulting in nearly three decades of great solo releases. But Hitchcock\u2019s work, though often inexplicably moving, remains emotionally opaque.<\/p>\n
What did Hitchcock mean when he wrote, 48 years ago, I Want to Be an Anglepoise Lamp? Does the toy town psychedelia of 1981\u2019s The Man Who Invented Himself refer to its writer? Who is the eponymous subject of 1990\u2019s Zen ballad Cynthia Masque, its lyrics ranging voraciously through history? In contrast, 1984\u2019s blunt Uncorrected Personality Traits, a simple a cappella list of psychological conditions in adults and their roots in childhood experiences, is uncommonly direct. In the memoir 1967 Hitchcock was finally to concede, 57 years later: \u201cI [was] what would in the 21st century be called \u2018on the spectrum\u2019, at the high-functioning end of autism.\u201d<\/p>\n
So is rock\u2019n\u2019roll where Hitchcock hides? \u201cI\u2019m not a conventional soul-barer. I\u2019m probably more interested in creating a version of my existence than actually showing people the real Robyn. Maybe there isn\u2019t a real Robyn. Someone described me as \u2018the Peter Sellers of rock\u2019, which I took as a compliment. I did have a therapist once who said, \u2018You\u2019ve really built some place to hide and it\u2019s extremely difficult to get at you,\u2019 which I thought was interesting.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the new book, I talk about my first concept for the Soft Boys, which was to build a robot that would front this band and I would be the guitarist. And the handsome robot would be singing my lyrics and people would go, \u2018Oh, isn\u2019t he wonderful\u2019?\u201d But now you are the robot? \u201cWell, I became the robot because I didn\u2019t have the technical abilities to make one. But that\u2019s an interesting thing. It\u2019s like, \u2018What is there about me that seeks attention but then doesn\u2019t actually want to give anything away?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Personally I\u2019m glad that Hitchcock, at 73, is yet to close that contradiction, even though, as Stranded in the Future often inadvertently reveals, it\u2019s a condition that has made life difficult for him, and the people in his orbit or perhaps, more accurately, in his wake. It\u2019s what makes Hitchcock so much more than simply the sum of the carefully balanced influences he chose as a teenager in 1967. Long may he remain unresolved.<\/p>\n
The Confuser is released via Tiny Ghost records on 24 July. Robyn Hitchcock tours the UK and Europe from September<\/p>\n
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours the UK until the end of 2026, with a final November and December London run just announced<\/p>\n
This article was amended on 9 July 2026. It previously featured a photograph of the Go-Betweens that had been mislabelled by an agency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018I owe a lot to a dead man\u2019s cock.\u201d So begins the first song, a propulsive piece of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":682144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-682143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/682144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}