Robyn Hitchcock is a true Renaissance man – a man of many talents and interests: painting, writing, and not the least: songwriting and performing music. As a member of The Soft Boys in the late 1970s, he crafted pop songs and witty lyrics with a psychedelic bent like “I Wanna Destroy You” – which were very much at odds with the punk and new wave musical happenings at the same time. Following his time with that band, Robyn embarked on a solo career in the early 1980s. He eventually regrouped with several of his Soft Boys band to form The Egyptians – one of several lineups he would front over the next three decades.

 

Possessed with a remarkable vocabulary and a flair for descriptive writing, Robyn’s voice is similar to that of John Lennon and others from the late 1960s. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has read his excellent memoir “1967: How I Got There and Never Left” and the musical references he

“The Beatles was what everybody had in common. It was a sort of meeting place.”

makes throughout. Personally, this writer is lucky to have not only reviewed the memoir for this site but also interviewed Robyn as well. It was a delightful interview that covered a wide range of topics from bees to fountain pens and hummingbirds to 12-string guitars and Peter Buck.

 

“1967: Vacations in the Past” is a companion album to the memoir. Covering a single year, more or less, from 1966 to the end of 1967, the book was intentionally written to show Robyn’s origin story rather than a history of his career. Robyn’s wife, the singer Emma Swift, was the instigator of the record as a companion to the book. In a small house, suffering from persistent insomnia and the fear of making too much noise with a typewriter, Robyn wrote the majority of the book on his iPhone in the early morning hours while the rest of the house was asleep.