All humans have a formative year. It’s most often a teen one, an annum during which a person discovers and then latches onto passions that can become lifelong pursuits, during which the elasticity of childhood hardens into the individual identities we wear for life.
For Robyn Hitchcock, the surrealist British singer-songwriter, that year was 1967. It was a pivotal time in both music and life for Hitchcock. While the sounds of the hippie revolution blossomed outside, 13-year-old Hitchcock encountered the hierarchical and homoerotic world of a 600-year-old boarding school, Winchester College. Here, the child grew into a young man who navigated through academia, adolescence, and his often-offish classmates to a soundtrack of Dylan, the Beatles, the Kinks, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, and more. By the close of this formative year, he is set on his goals for life: to become a singer-songwriter like his idol Bob Dylan and to stay high for eternity.