Stranded In The Future

1967 leaves the 14-year-old Robyn Hitchcock determined to become a songwriter and follow his dream to Nashville: but how to get there? Exiled from his happy place of the late 1960s, Robyn must navigate his way through the hungover 1970s. Fuelled by his obsessions with two people - an enigmatic teenage ex-girlfriend and a burned-out rock star whom he never actually meets - Hitchcock slowly learns to write songs (with a little help from his friends). In the course of this he must learn to handle adult vices and pleasures, all the while adjusting to strangers from worlds utterly unlike the one in which he grew up. It's no surprise that Robyn gravitates towards misfits and people at a tangent to life, as increasingly the place he feels most at home is in his imagination... Finally, ten years after his psychedelic epiphany, and now marooned in the dystopian wasteland of 1977, Robyn Hitchcock has his art-rock module assembled in the form of The Soft Boys. However, they arrive just in time for Punk Rock to point music in a very different direction from theirs. The Soft Boys get as far as opening for Elvis Costello, but will they get any further? In the course of this journey through the 1970s, we meet sirens, street people, bullies, pedants and wannabe musicians, all gazing out at existence from their own peculiar points of view, and filtered through Robyn Hitchcock's. Welcome to the future!