1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

by Robyn Hitchcock

Overview

The great eccentric of British psychedelia—beloved by everyone from Led Zeppelin and R.E.M. to the late Jonathan Demme—pens a singularly unique childhood memoir . . .

“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.” —Kirkus Reviews

“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.” —Michael Chabon, author of Telegraph Avenue

1967: HOW I GOT THERE AND WHY I NEVER LEFT 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 thirteen—just as Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band explodes.

When he arrives in January 1966, Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for the comforts of home and his family’s loving au pair, Teresa. By December 1967, he’s mutated into a 6’2? tall rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really high and fly to Nashville.

In between—as the hippie revolution blossoms in the world outside—Hitchcock adjusts to the hierarchical, homoerotic world of Winchester, 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. 

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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636142067
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	85,247
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Robyn Hitchcock is a rock ’n’ roll surrealist. Born in London in 1953, he describes his songs as “pictures you can listen to.” As much a child of Dalí, de Chirico, and J.G. Ballard as of his 1960s musical heroes, he is a master of the absurd, reveling in the beauty of the unexpected. His first publicly visible band, the Soft Boys (1976–81), has remained an influential art-rock touchstone for generations of musicians. Hitchcock has floated at a tangent to the mainstream for nearly five decades, and his songs have been performed by R.E.M., the Replacements, Neko Case, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Lou Barlow, Grant-Lee Phillips, Sparklehorse, and Suzanne Vega with the Grateful Dead, among others. He came of age in the 1960s while he attended Winchester College, an eccentric boarding school in the south of England. This is the subject of 1967, which is both a memoir and an album, released simultaneously. Hitchcock lives in London with his wife Emma Swift and two cats, Ringo and Tubby.

Editorial Reviews

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)

Publishers Weekly

"Five stars . . . It’s funny and sparkling with a wild, questioning energy . . . One of the joys of this charming and compulsively perceptive work is the way the past loops, fountain-like, into the present and back; and how sharp his sense of the source remains. It is a kind of time-travel."

Telegraph (UK)

"Page Turner could be the name of a lead singer in a sixties psychedelic band, but it’s not, it’s a description of Robyn Hitchcock’s tender and hilarious memoir."

Joe Boyd

"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."

Chapter 16

"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."

Johnny Marr

"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."

Nick Lowe

"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."

Booklist

"Riveting . . . a delightful journey into [Hitchcock’s] headspace. Part autobiography, part love letter to the music that shaped him, the book uses that year as a snapshot of his life and passion for music . . . Energetic and infectious, 1967: How I Got There And Why I Never Left doesn’t get tangled up in the brambles. Stylistically, it is a crisp read that resembles his songs in its clever wordplay and clever hooks."

Big Takeover

"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."

Michael Chabon

"Delightful . . . Dense with time-travel reminiscence and sharp musical analysis, 1967 comes closer than most to showing how music can switch on the lights, switch on a life."

MOJO

As someone who has made a living with his voice, singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock is the best person to narrate this brief memoir of the year he turned 14. That was the year, 1967, when the world first heard the Beatles' SGT. PEPPER album. With his London accent sounding both educated and edgy, Hitchcock gives an enthusiastic performance of this memoir, complete with raucous imitations of teachers and schoolmates at the boys' boarding school he attended that year. As he reflects on his musical influences at that time, he also does a passable Bob Dylan. While occasionally his voices are overly exaggerated and his delivery sounds rambling despite its brevity, in the best passages Hitchcock sounds like a trained actor. D.B. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2024 - AudioFile

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.

Kirkus Reviews

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.

From the Publisher

As someone who has made a living with his voice, singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock is the best person to narrate this brief memoir of the year he turned 14. [In] the best passages Hitchcock sounds like a trained actor.

Audiofile Magazine