Robyn Rowan Hitchcock (born 3 March 1953) is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. While primarily a vocalist and guitarist, he also plays harmonica, piano and bass guitar.
Coming to prominence in the late 1970s with The Soft Boys, Hitchcock afterward launched a prolific solo career.

His musical and lyrical styles have been influenced by the likes of Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Syd Barrett. Hitchcock’s lyrics tend to include surrealism, comedic elements, characterisations of English eccentrics, and melancholy depictions of everyday life.

He was signed to two major American labels (A&M Records, then Warner Bros.) over the course of the 1980s and ’90s, but mainstream success has been limited. Still, he has maintained a loyal cult following and has often earned strong critical reviews over a steady stream of album releases and live performances.

Recent history… In 2006 Olé! Tarantula was released with the Venus 3, a band which consisted of longtime friends and collaborators R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Young Fresh Fellows’ frontman Scott McCaughey, as well as Ministry’s Bill Rieflin (by then also R.E.M.’s full-time drummer). The song “‘Cause It’s Love (Saint Parallelogram)” was written with Andy Partridge of XTC.

In 2007, he was the subject of a documentary Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death… and Insects directed by John Edginton,[13] shown on the U.S. Sundance Channel and in the UK on BBC Four (and later released on DVD). “Food, sex and death are all corridors to life if you like. You need sex to get you here, you need food to keep you here and you need death to get you out and they’re the entry and exit signs.”

The filmmaker eavesdrops on Hitchcock at work on his latest collection of songs with contributors including Nick Lowe, former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, Peter Buck and Gillian Welch. The film culminates with Hitchcock and the band taking the songs on the road in America. A live EP with The Venus 3, Sex, Food, Death… and Tarantulas, was released in conjunction with the documentary. The film also includes candid interviews with Hitchcock, who reveals much about the source of his work: “At heart I’m a frightened angry person. That’s probably why my stuff isn’t totally insubstantial. I’m constantly, deep down inside, in a kind of rage.”

Late in 2007, Hitchcock’s music was again re-packaged and re-released in the U.S., as Yep Roc Records began an extensive reissue campaign with three early solo releases and a double-CD compilation of rarities, which would be available separately or as part of a new boxed set release, I Wanna Go Backwards.

In 2008, that boxed set was followed up with Luminous Groove, a boxed set of three early Egyptians releases and two further discs of rarities. In 2009, the electro-pop artist and remixer Pocket released an EP featuring Hitchcock called “Surround Him With Love”, while Hitchcock released an entirely separate new album, Goodnight Oslo, with the Venus 3. At the end of the year, a live album called I Often Dream Of Trains In New York documented the late-2008 onstage re-creation of his acclaimed 1984 acoustic album (a limited-edition deluxe version also included the materials to construct a kind of moving-image generator called a phenokistoscope).

Concurrent with the redesign of his official website in early 2010, Hitchcock began to offer an occasional series of “Phantom 45s” as downloads, each “45” being two newly-recorded songs that would initially be offered as a free download. He also released the Propellor Time album, containing new material partially based on the “Sex, Food, Death” sessions shown in the 2007 documentary, but mainly featuring the Venus 3. In 2011, he released Tromsø, Kaptein, an album of songs written in Norway, and released physically only in that country. Hitchcock was chosen by Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel to perform “I Often Dream Of Trains” at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, to be curated by Mangum in March 2012 in Minehead, England. • • • Wikipedia