Review
"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
"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 . . . 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."
― Publishers Weekly
"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
"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 . . . 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, guitarist and cosongwriter of the Smiths
"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, singer-songwriter
"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, author of White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s
"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)
"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
"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
"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
"In 1967, Hitchcock deftly captures the mercurial spirit of the time, and his luminous prose shows he’s not only a singular maker of music, but has been a secret writer of books all along."
― Rain Taxi Review
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.
