Robyn Hitchcock

Robyn Rowan Hitchcock (born March 3, 1953) is an English musician. Primarily a singer and guitarist, he also plays harmonica, piano and bass. After leading The Soft Boys in the late 1970s and releasing with them the influential Underwater Moonlight in June 1980, Hitchcock launched a prolific solo career.

His early lyrics draw on a typically English surreal and comic vein, depicting an eccentric and sardonic worldview. His music is influenced by Bob Dylan and by the English folk revival of the 1960s and early 1970s, later filtered through psychedelic rock, then unfashionable, during the punk rock and new wave periods of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This combination of styles earned his band of the time, The Soft Boys, an enthusiastic but limited audience; their final album together, Underwater Moonlight, would nonetheless earn them, posthumously, a solid reputation, particularly in America, as a major influence on bands such as R.E.M.

After finding some success in America in the late 1980s, Hitchcock recorded for two major American labels (A&M Records, then Warner Bros.) throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and was the subject in 1998 of a concert/documentary film, Storefront Hitchcock, directed by Jonathan Demme. Since the turn of the millennium, he has continued to tour and record prolifically.