The Honorable Epigone (Are You Inexperienced)

Saw Robyn Hitchcock doing "Brenda's Iron Sledge" on Old Grey Whistle Test and took against it. Witnessed a support slot for R.E.M. in '87 and that sealed the aversion. Then I'd run into college rock types in America and be mystified by their veneration for his Eighties albums. Even hardheads like Forced Exposure - who usually disdained college radio lightweights like Let's Active - reckoned Robyn to be some sort of visionary.But in recent years I have found myself warming to the honest way Hitchcock describes himself as a man out of time, an epigone, someone gleaning up in the wake of visionary pioneers. Viz his memoir part 1...In a recent Guardian interview around his memoir part 2, Stranded in the Future, he says: “Although my prime influence was Bob Dylan and Dylan showed me what I wanted to be, Syd Barrett showed me how I could be it. And I actually wound up sounding like John Lennon. To me, the Beatles are at the beginning and the end of everything. But my role has always just…