‘I was selfish, a bit scared… no doubt still am’: Robyn Hitchcock singer talks to Stewart Lee | Music

‘Me he owes a lot to the dead rooster.” It reprises the first track, the powerful Lennonesque ballad I Am This Thing, on The Confuser, the latest album by 73-year-old English survivor of the 60s/70s front line, Robyn Hitchcock. The album was recorded by a crack group of session guys in Nashville, where Hitchcock lives and runs a boutique record label with his second wife, Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift.

“I’m not some kind of old-school guy who floats around on the South Bank or anything,” Mr Hitchcock argues, disapprovingly. “Making it work in Nashville means I’m a real musician in town writing real music. And I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I actually did this!’ I wanted to go to Nashville when I, as a 13-year-old boy, heard Dylan’s records that he made here. And 60 years later, here I am!”

Hitchcock, in his sixth year of writing music, is very much alive. The dead man who owes it, in this case, is probably Hitchcock’s father Raymond Hitchcock, a bohemian artist and author of occult novels. And the penis in question, I think, probably belongs to Raymond, who fathered Robyn. Or it’s Percy, the titular hero of one of Raymond’s novels, drawn by Hywel Bennett and voiced by the Kinks. It is not clearly defined, and the possible double counting is akin to Hitchcock’s sly refusal to be seen. But we’ll get to that.

There’s a shot of an Italian film on the right behind Hitchcock when I talk to him through video. “Yes,” he explains in the printed text, which seems intended to be inserted into your forehead, “the Italian versions were called Il Complesso del Trapianto, The Complications of Transplants.”

To Hitchcock’s left is another print, a rainbow painting of Bob Dylan melting into Duchampian shadows by Milton Glaser. Hitchcock has arranged these two pictures perfectly, the epitome of what made him who he is. As his first memoir, the fantastic 2024 of 1967, details, the young Hitchcock, the inspiration of a big hip boy named Brian Eno, found all the musical instruments he needed in one year – the founder of Pink Floyd who was burned Syd Barrett, the avatars of the acid of the Incredible String Band and Dylan, used this song. his life honoring his youthful taste by constantly repeating those canonical sources.

“Although my biggest influence was Bob Dylan,” Hitchcock says, “and Dylan showed me what I was.” they want being, Syd Barrett showed me how he can be it. And I ended up sounding like John Lennon. For me, the Beatles are the beginning and the end of everything. But my work has always been to continue a certain type of music, which appeared in 66 and 67.

I say to Hitchcock that he is the last dead Englishman who is not dead. “Well, I’m the last one to do really well,” he laughs in unison. “I mean, there’s Julian Cope and Andy Partridge from XTC, but they’re not allowed to play live. But you can go see me. I didn’t make this part of the music, but I’m still going. I wanted to keep the tradition and do new work in that tradition. But the guys I idolized were the innovators. I’m against them. I’m like ‘Ochsck, God’s coming. With a broom.'”

Hitchcock sells himself short, but on purpose so I guess. No horses will be confused by The Confuser, a good sock of an album that the eternally confusing Hitchcock has earned the freedom to sneak in for now, even as he still tries to force his way into unexplored territory. On the new album, the Nashville cats find a rolling bass and cowbell groove on My Dead Astronaut that moves in a way this septuagenarian has never done before; 70s Hitchcock collaborator Kimberley Rew adds a shimmering guitar to the shimmery Breathless; Building from the Ruins is an exercise in white funk; Monday for me is a long-term critique of the work week.

Hitchcock’s unusual vision was at odds with his punk origins, as the leader of Cambridge’s the Soft Boys, who despite being rude and anxious, displayed a classicism and a familiar intelligence that did not appeal to middle-class journalists who were looking for rock stars. The controversies of the time are detailed in Hitchcock’s latest novel, which eludes Stranded in the Future. It is a literary work where the personal and the painful are changed and the stories are chosen to be poetic, not literal, true. (Did the homeless Cambridge magicians play a part in the original filming of Soft Boys?) It reads like a fun piece of unbelievable fiction, whether you’re a fan of Hitchcock’s music or not.

“Some of it technically wouldn’t have been possible at all,” Hitchcock admits. “But that has to do with my ability to accept deception.” It’s my habit to make up my own stories. You just make up your life and then you can rob them of a song or a joke or a story or whatever.” I remind Hitchcock of the time we were standing on Westminster Bridge when two old women came and asked us for directions. And he answered them so harshly that he was happy to meet this intelligent and eloquent person, who was an important person, and he doubted if he really needed to go to the place he wanted. Did he know that he created a moment?

“No, no,” says Hitchcock. “But I guess I’m just looking for attention, right? Oh, good. Someone wants me to do it.”

“I don’t know that they did,” I begged him. “He just wanted a way.”

“Yes, but I wanted to find an excuse to do it and two kind old men are coming. This is my chance.”

Hitchcock was well aware of the human mask of that time, but in the new story, the boy is separated from the people, and the human behavior confuses him – yet these problems become the strength of the work. “It seems like conflict is an important part of the journey,” says Hitchcock. “It doesn’t give you carte blanche to be loud, but you have to become one after a while. There’s also a degree of narcissism that’s important to some degree.”

In another part of the book, the young Hitchcock writes a bad song about elderly neighbors who complain about the punk noise of the Soft Boys’ street experiments. “I was selfish, a little self-doubting, and I’m sure I still am. I’ve learned to hide a lot, and I’ve learned to live.”

Now the reality of the punk cultural wars is no longer remembered, the second album of the Soft Boys, 1980’s Underwater Moonlight, which had a major impact on the American scene in the 1980s, emerged from the war as usual, like the shell-shocked bullet of Private William Butvackla of Missing Lady Pennler stumbling. Hitchcock was in the 80s and early 90s, reassembling the pieces of the Soft Boys as Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, getting a big contract with A & M, and becoming a college rock star in America, carried by REM and the Replacements, and scoring a real hit like Balloon Hitch Mancow says “Hechbeck” like the money I get from respectable things”) and the Byrdsian head rush of So You Think You’re in Love.

“It’s funny when people think of me as an artist of the 80s,” says Hitchcock, “because I consider myself an artist of the 60s. I’m actually the last to break, I think. I should be in the museum with Ron Wood. I’ve never been a pop star. I was on MTV a lot in the States in the late 80s, but I always had a lot of time. You know, in some ways I’ve avoided success and failure.

For me, the albums of Hitchcock’s MTV era, Globe of Frogs and Perspex Island, now seem to have been confused by the trends of the time and, the producer of the 1990’s mesmerizing Eye aside, Hitchcock hit his stride in the late 90s who loved Demancume who burned Jonathan. The chosen one, shot him in three low-key scenes in the concert film, Storefront Hitchcock. The show seems to reflect a clear path to music, which has resulted in almost three decades of great personal releases. But Hitchcock’s work, although it often moves in an ambiguous way, remains ambiguous.

What did Hitchcock mean when he wrote, 48 years ago, I Want to Be an Anglepoise Lamp? Does the 1981 toy town psychedelia The Self-Made Man mention its author? Is the title of Cynthia Masque’s famous Zen ballad of the 1990s, her voice strangely echoed throughout history? By contrast, 1984’s Uncorrected Personality Traits, an a cappella-style collection of psychological traits in adults and their roots in childhood experiences, is surprisingly direct. In the memoir 1967 Hitchcock finally admitted, 57 years later: “I (was) what in the 21st century will be called ‘on the spectrum’, at the end of the spectrum of autism.”

So is rock’n’roll where Hitchcock hides? “I’m not a conservative. I’m more interested in creating a version of my existence than showing people the real Robyn. Maybe there’s no real Robyn. Someone called me the ‘Peter Sellers of rock’, which I took as a compliment. I had an agent once who said, ‘You’ve built another hideout and I thought it was too difficult for you.’

“In this new book, I am talking about my first idea for Soft Boys, which was to make a robot that will be in front of the band and I will be the guitarist. But now you are a robot? “Yeah, I became a robot because I didn’t have the skills to make it.

Personally, I am happy that Hitchcock, at 73, still closes that contradiction, although, as Stranded in the future often unwittingly reveals, it is a condition that has made life difficult for him, and the people who are in his way or perhaps, more accurately, in his wake. That’s what makes Hitchcock so much more than the sum of the well-deserved influences he chose as a teenager in 1967. Long may he remain unsolved.

The Confuser is released via Tiny Ghost records on 24 July. Robyn Hitchcock is touring the UK and Europe from September

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf is touring the UK until the end of 2026, with November and December London dates just announced.