The eccentric British singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock seems intent on telling his life story not in a grand rock opera but in a series of verbal 45s. The latest installment is Stranded in the Future, the follow-up to his sublime 2024 micro-memoir about the one year that most shaped his artistic vision and future, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left.
Hitchcock’s latest continues where his debut left off. It spans the years from 1968 to 1978 as he teaches himself to write songs, perform live, and eventually form his breakthrough but sadly short-lived band, the Soft Boys. It is a series of short, sharp chapters filled with his singularly comic wordplay and the occasional slip through a trap door into pure surrealism.
The beating heart of Robyn Hitchcock’s latest offering is not necessarily his career but two great obsessions that inspired it. The first and most interesting to music lovers will be the vanishing legend, his greatest artistic influence, Pink Floyd’s legendary and ill-fated founder, Syd Barrett.
Barrett is not named in the text but is referred to as a veritable Jekyll & Hyde, Mr. A and Mr. B. The former is the old, glorious Syd, who was in full command of his mind and creativity during the early Pink Floyd era. The latter is the ghostly, post-mental-breakdown visage, the musical mute and reputed acid casualty who lives as a recluse in London and later in Cambridge, where Hitchcock attends college and begins his musical journey.
The second obsession, referred to only as Ms. C., is Hitchcock’s high school girlfriend, his counterpart in a frustrating relationship he never consummates, a figure who tantalizingly appears and disappears from his life throughout the decade Stranded in the Future covers. There is also a third, minor but very Hitchcockian obsession: trolleybuses. These perhaps symbolize both his romantic life and his career: freedom to roam yet tethered to rails and electric power, like a baby to a mother’s breast.
“Mr. B lived alone inside mansion apartments in the aftermath of a breakdown that left him withdrawing from human company, human responsibilities, and human schedules,” writes Hitchcock. “He was drip-fed money like a hamster in a cage, royalties accruing to him from music he had once recorded.”
We read of Robyn Hitchcock’s many near misses in meeting the man who shaped his lyric narrative and vocal style. He will miss Syd Barrett during a visit to his apartment at the Chelsea Arms in London, while attending the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969, and when dropping by Syd’s mother’s home in Cambridge, where Barrett would ultimately come to reside and pass away.
Even though he doesn’t get face time with his idol, Hitchcock will hear many teasing tales and sad reports from friends who will run into the increasingly obese and disoriented specter on the streets in Cambridge, and as he binges on candy and cakes at Harrods department store in London. Through the engineers at the recording studio where he will get his start, he will hear many as-yet-unreleased artifacts of the disintegrating Barrett, including a hissy tape of his last-ever live performance at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1972. Hitchcock will also experience another close miss with another musician who shaped him, Bob Dylan, when they are both at the same kibbutz in Israel on the same day.
Robyn Hitchcock’s the Soft Boys come of age in the era of punk, which he writes “is best defined by what it doesn’t have: melodic vocals, harmonies, guitar solos, and any kind of mercy. Listening to it makes me feel like I’m being repeatedly hit in the face by a muddy ball.” His band will gain traction in that era, with help from the management team and by sharing bills with the then-rising Elvis Costello, but he believes his band “are from the previous generation: already passé.”
Indeed, the Soft Boys were almost sunk before they released their first single. The song is about a couple of neighbors who complain to the authorities about the noise from their band’s rehearsal. When the lyrics leak to the press, the husband thinks they refer to his wife being in an orgy, and they threaten to sue. Robyn rewrites the lyrics for the song that will become “Wading Through a Ventilator”. In one of his many wonderful turns of phrase, Hitchcock compares the portly neighbor to “blood pressure on legs”. In another, he says his dancing “has the agility of filing cabinets”.
Hitchcock saves the best for last. It is a fantasy entitled “Interlude in the Otherworld”. This is a hallucinatory, Lewis Carroll-esque outing in which he slips through a portal in the spoon he is using to stir his tea into a universe where he copulates with Medusa and where his hero(s), Misters A and B, play chess, perhaps in a battle for Syd Barrett’s sanity. This and an earlier piece, set in a chip shop, are dazzlingly creative and reminiscent of the works of one of my favorite authors, Italo Calvino.
With Stranded in the Future, Robyn Hitchcock has once again hit the mark, creating something that rivals the best of his musical work. I look forward to what will come when he brings the story of his life and his imaginary detours into the 1980s and beyond.