STRANDED IN THE FUTURE

In his second memoir, the English singer-songwriter recounts the birth of the Soft Boys, his legendary psychedelia-sweetened punk band.

Hitchcock’s first memoir, 1967 (2024), chronicles a vital year in the life of the future musician, who was born in 1953. In his follow-up, he picks up essentially where 1967 leaves off and charts his ensuing louche and noisy decade. Readers initially find young Hitchcock in his hometown of Winchester in 1968: He’s a middle-class teenager attending private school with others “being groomed to spawn more of our kind,” although he’s committed to doing nothing of the sort. Hitchcock goes to art school in London, largely to shield his mother from the fact that “her son, once a preteen prodigy, is now a feckless pot smoker who measures out his existence in guitar solos.” His band plays its first gig and falls apart shortly thereafter; he moves to Cambridge to start another one, which becomes the Soft Boys. As a lyricist, Hitchcock is clever and funny, and he’s no different when faced with a memoirist’s broader canvas, trafficking in self-effacement and wry observations: “The Soft Boys are now very loud, playing a kind of prog-folk-metal that encases my compositions like batter around a frying cod.” To appreciate this book, one need not have much familiarity with Hitchcock—just a passing-or-better interest in the birth of English punk and a taste for irreverent silliness (sample Hitchcock song title: “Where Are the Prawns?”). Included are his spare drawings of heads, presumably belonging to this book’s featured players, as well as his occasional interruptions from “here in the distant future,” from which vantage he is hopefully already scribbling away at a memoir dedicated to his post–Soft Boys shenanigans.

Another marvelously rollicking, cheeky, Hitchcockian look back, with notes of Monty Python.