Robyn Hitchcock’s Stranded in the Future

There’s something quietly hypnotic about the way Robyn Hitchcock writes about his own past. He doesn’t just remember things, he circles them, obsesses over them, reshapes them until they feel half real and half myth.

His second memoir, Stranded in the Future, isn’t your standard rock autobiography. Forget the usual checklist of gigs, excess, and name-dropping. This one lives in the in-between spaces. It’s a kind of hazy, self-built mythology that stretches from 1968 to 1978, the years when everything started to click, and unravel at the same time.

If his first book, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, was about a single year shaping his DNA, this one zooms out and shows what that DNA actually did once it was set loose in the world.

And it gets weird in the best way.

There’s a ghost of Syd Barrett floating through these pages. Not named, but unmistakable. Hitchcock builds this internal mythology where Barrett and his unnamed teenage girlfriend become linked figures in his imagination. They never met in real life, but in Hitchcock’s mind, they orbit each other like strange twin suns. That’s the book in a nutshell. Not what happened, but how it felt.

Running underneath it all is the slow comedown of the 1970s. Not a crash, more like a lingering hangover that never quite clears. You can feel Hitchcock teaching himself how to write songs, figuring out how to stand on a stage, and eventually pulling together The Soft Boys. It’s less about the moment they form and more about the mindset that made them inevitable.

And yeah, somehow trolleybuses make an appearance. Because of course they do.

What makes this work isn’t just the stories, it’s the voice. Hitchcock writes like someone tuning a guitar in a dream. Precise, but slightly off-center. Funny without trying too hard. Wistful without slipping into nostalgia overload.

Even if you’ve never heard a note of his music, there’s something here. It’s about obsession, the kind that quietly drives creativity forward while also messing with your head. It’s about how we build our own personal myths just to make sense of who we’re becoming.

And like his first book, it sticks with you. Not because of what happened, but because of how he remembers it.

Street date: July 7, 2026