Robyn Hitchcock
1967: Vacations In The Past
Tiny Ghost
Nostalgia is a powerful beast and, in our current cultural ecosystem, one that only grows larger each day. Today’s freshly-recorded music has to compete with everything that was available yesterday, and tomorrow’s entries will have even more to contend with for attention.
This brings us to Robyn Hitchcock’s 1967: Vacations In The Past, the audio companion to a similarly-titled book from Hitchcock which came out a few months ago. In the book, Hitchcock fearlessly guides us through his first year of boarding school in Winchester, England, and the correlated awakening of his musical predilections. In this album, Hitchcock presents his personal interpretation of that music, with a selection of a dozen or so impeccably-selected covers dating to that seminal year.
The choices encompass tracks that would become standards (The Beatles’ ”A Day In The Life,” Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale”), deep cuts (Jimi Hendrix’s “Burning of the Midnight Lamp,” Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play”), some truly beautiful numbers that have been tragically neglected (like Traffic’s “No Face, No Name, No Number”), and even some that in time have become wonderfully paradoxical (the Incredible String Band’s “Way Back In The 1960s”).
The delivery is low-key and while not always entirely acoustic, always in the realm of something you could hear a handful of friends play in your living room. Some notable guests (including fellow Soft Boy Kimberley Rew) make an appearance, and there is also one original song, the title track if you will: “Vacations In The Past,” which has the more elaborate dreamlike studio sound and narration you would associate with the rest of Hitchcock’s career.
1967: Vacations In The Past engages the nostalgia beast in a surprisingly graceful dance. These songs are good, and they in turn inspired countless other good songs. You don’t have to have experienced them decades ago on a shared phonograph, scouring the album cover for details with bated breath, to appreciate the resonance they carry across time.
