Odd Man In

Robyn Hitchcock’s new memoir, Stranded in the Future, is a lot like the pop surrealist’s music — lyrical, jangly, more than a bit weird, and full of wonder.

The book follows the Nashville-based British singer-songwriter’s first memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. That was the year Hitchcock turned 14. He was in a boarding school. He was lonely, confused, curious. Songs were his gods.

You don’t have read 1967 first, but why not? It’s a breeze and a blast. As is Stranded in the Future, which picks up in 1968 and covers about a decade, from the rest of Hitchcock’s teenage years into his early days as a professional musician with the Soft Boys.

He recalls his teenage self and the “extraordinary” feeling of being within kissing distance of a girl. The terror of it, too: “… she feels, close up, like a bird of prey.” The girl is known as “Ms C” and is one of young Robyn’s obsessions.

Music is likewise exciting but mystifying for the boy. Early on, he doesn’t play guitar so much as “throw chords together at random,” while a friend named Martz sings in an “even, cornflower tone,” a “light blue” voice not “edgy” enough for their purposes. Martz sings the last word of the song in a hurry, “like it was tumbling downstairs and smashing into an ironing board.”

Hitchcock is a lively writer, a close observer of life and its curious ways. He writes as an alien might if it just landed on this odd orb — taking in every little thing, ever aware that he’s the stranger here: “Most of my focus is on writing incomprehensible songs. Do I mean them to be incomprehensible? Not really: I’m just evolving my own language — and other people feel a long way off these days.”

His interests have a way of turning into obsessions (Ms C, Pink Floyd co-founder Syd Barrett, and Britain’s trolleybuses), and those obsessions float (or trundle, in the case of the trolleybuses) through this narrative.

Well, I say narrative; Hitchcock’s writing style is more scattershot. Tangents abound. A year may fly by, but he’ll linger for several pages over a dispute with some neighbors about his band’s noisy practice sessions.

It somehow all works because Hitchcock seems such a likeable fellow: smart, funny, talented, but self-aware and generous in sharing the air in the room. Even as he goes from teenage unknown to a version of pop stardom with the Soft Boys, he stays true to himself. Turning pro doesn’t turn Hitchcock pompous and self-important, as it does some artists. He seems to feel like too much of a weirdo — out of touch with the times, out of tune with the trends — to take himself that seriously:

But we are so not [the Clash’s] “White Riot” or [the Sex Pistols’] “Pretty Vacant,” nor do we want to be, which is a bit of a problem. Then again, in our twee, cucumber-sandwich-eating way, we are possibly even more nihilistic than the punks themselves. We are, however, terminally middle class and this is currently out of fashion. Worse, we reek of education.

Or put another way:

I’m not always sure what to make of us either.

Which is not to say Hitchcock’s professional life has been a lark, or that his work — on record, lately also in books — lacks depth and substance. Rather, he’s one of those rare artists whose creative impulse doesn’t seem to dim. He’s been at it for some 50 years, and the work’s still smart, fresh, and wonderfully askew.

He’s singular. He’s Robyn Hitchcock.

Bring on memoir No. 3.