1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

1967 explores how that pivotal slice of time tastes to a bright, obsessive/compulsive boy who is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding school as he reaches the age of 13; just as Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles' Sgt.Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band explodes. When he arrives in January 1966 Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for his green Dalek sponge and his family's comforting au pair, Teresa.By December 1967 he's mutated into a 6 ft 2 inch rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really stoned and move to Nashville. In between - as the hippie revolution blossoms in the world outside - Hitchcock adjusts to the hierarchical, homoerotic world of Winchester (think Gormenghast via Evelyn Waugh), threading a path through teachers with arrested development, some oafish peers, and a sullen old maid - a very English freak show.On the way he befriends a cadre of bat-winged teenage prodigies and meets their local guru, the young Brian