There’s nobody in rock music quite like Robyn Hitchcock. Come to think of it, there’s nobody quite like Robyn Hitchcock in anything. A childhood fan of psychedelia and the 60s music he spent his teens immersed in, until the dam broke about the time of punk. But instead of being like everyone else and emulating Sid Vicious, Hitchcock and his new band The Soft Boys owed a debt to a different Syd – Barrett, once of Pink Floyd.
In the 80s he ditched the Boys and embraced the new decade by sounding exactly the same, except with a new level of strangeness and maturity. Songs like Brenda’s Iron Sledge perfected Hitchcock’s unique vision. Now he wrote and recorded immaculate guitar pop welded to lyrics that owed as much to Salvador Dali as to Syd Barrett. The result was a growing following that spilt over from British cult to American college radio, and Hitchcock found himself friends with R.E.M. and the subject of his own concert film directed by Jonathan Demme.
