‘I owe a lot to a dead man’s cock.” So begins the first song, a propulsive piece of Lennonesque powerpop called I Am This Thing, on The Confuser, the latest album by the 73-year-old English gentleman survivor of the 60s/70s frontline, Robyn Hitchcock. The album has been recorded by a crack team of session guys in Nashville, where Hitchcock lives and runs a boutique record label with his second wife, the Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift.
“I’m not just some sort of old public school dilettante floating around the South Bank or whatever,” Hitchcock protests, unbidden. “Making it work in Nashville means I actually am a real musician songwriter in the real musician songwriter town. And I think, ‘OK, I actually did do this!’ I wanted to go to Nashville when I, as a 13-year-old boarding school boy, heard those Dylan records he made here. And a mere 60 years later, here I am!”
