Publishers Weekly
05/13/2024
British singer-songwriter Hitchcock wistfully reflects on boarding school and the music that shaped him in this captivating chronicle of the year he credits with sculpting his artistic sensibility. “Maybe I will become real to me, before I finally disappear,” Hitchcock muses in one of the book’s five preludes, before plunging into his memories of being a 14-year-old “inmate” at Winchester College. He recalls being bowled over by artists including the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie, many of whom he encountered for the first time at Winchester. As he set about decoding the school’s social hierarchies—he especially admired the “groovers” (Beat-influenced music lovers) and “scholars” (upperclassman)—Hitchcock designed posters for shows he wasn’t old enough to attend and weaseled his way into late-night parties featuring jazz, incense, and the occasional performance by Brian Eno, who attended art school nearby. He also reflects on how time away from his family shifted their dynamics and recounts growing closer to his parents as they mourned the death of his grandmother. Hitchcock is loose, energetic company, writing with infectious enthusiasm about the liberatory sights and sounds that continue to inspire him. Readers need not be fans of Hitchcock’s music to find this enchanting. (July)
Chapter 16
"It’s daft (but smart), ever so surreal, and pure Hitchcock . . . Yes, this is a book for Hitchcock fans and music geeks generally. But it’s more. It’s an Anglophile’s dream, set in the world of cloistered boarding schools and the quite English eccentricities of family life . . . After giving us so many memorable songs, he’s given us music on the page, a singular memoir that was one wild year—and a lifetime of memories—in the making."
Johnny Marr
"1967 . . . in which our hero looks down from the future at his squeaky realm of boyhood, a world of Day-Glo sunsets, and would-be denizens of music and the mind. Cometh the year, cometh the groover."
Nick Lowe
"Robyn Hitchcock belongs to an almost extinct species, ‘The Totally Original Artist,’ once relatively commonplace, now only occasionally glimpsed in the dense tree canopy of the pop rainforest. Mysterious, elusive, a kind of rock ‘n’ roll olingo . . . 1967 presents his many fans with a tantalizing print-bite of how he wound up in those trees and in so doing (whether he likes it or not) became a National Treasure."
Booklist
"Robyn Hitchcock, the English singer and guitarist and former member of the Soft Boys and later the Egyptians, is a sui generis figure. No one quite like him exists in pop culture. His quirky memoir, 1967, focuses on a crucial year in his life—the titular 1967 when he was a precocious 14-year-old boy and left home for the first time to attend boarding school … Like Hitchcock and his music, the memoir is wild, surreal, and wonderfully weird … These small but important glimpses into his still-developing psyche add up to a portrait of a young burgeoning artist and point the way to the Robyn Hitchcock of this moment."
Michael Chabon
"Memoirists rarely begin their work with a stroke of genuine inspiration, and Robyn Hitchcock’s ingenious idea to limit his account of his life to the titular year gives this sharp, funny, finely written book an unusually keen, wistful intensity without sacrificing its sense of the breathtaking sweep of time. I absolutely adored every line of 1967 and every moment I spent reading it."
Kirkus Reviews
2024-03-29
A noted British singer-songwriter tells the story of a pivotal year in his personal and artistic evolution.
In early 1966, Hitchcock’s parents jettisoned their 12-year-old son into the “alien world” of the all-male Winchester College boarding school. What intrigued Hitchcock the most had little to do with education and colorful faculty members and everything to do with the music, including the Beatles’, to which he was exposed from the first day. As he went through rituals of new-kid initiation, which included learning a student-only language called Notions and finding his place in a strictly defined internal hierarchy, Hitchcock found his salvation in Bob Dylan. “He looks calmly furious, beneath a lacquer of indifference,” writes the author. “But he also looks like he understands that, on some level, everything is a joke. He looks wise. Wise and dangerous.” Hitchcock’s love of music did not emerge from a vacuum: His father loved traditional folk music and introduced his son to the BBC’s Pick of the Pops radio program. The author’s life then underwent an artistic revolution that began with his parents’ gift of a “cheap but functional nylon stringed guitar.” That event coincided with the rise of famous guitarists like Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, who inspired the author to begin playing his own guitar. Also in 1967, Hitchcock’s childhood began falling away as he shot up to over 6 feet tall, came into contact with experimental musician and “groover” Brian Eno at school “Happenings,” and began actively exploring not only music, but also writing and drawing. A bright, nostalgic look at the exhilaration of 1967, this book—illustrated throughout with Hitchcock’s surreal sketches—will appeal to not only the author’s many fans but also anyone interested in the music and culture from the golden age of psychedelia.
Wistfully reflective reading.
