Singer songwriter Robyn Hitchcock‘s lyrics include surrealism, comedic songs, characterizations of English eccentrics and melancholy depictions of everyday life. As the frontman of Cambridge’s brilliantly awkward Soft Boys, he unleashed a stream of psychedelic consciousness into a punk-rock world; as a solo artist fascinated by love, death and all the hatching creatures of the planet, he was the toast of America’s Eighties college rock underground; and in recent years, he has worked with alt-country heroine Gillian Welch and, on the tremendous Ole! Tarantula (2006), his backing band the Venus Three, consisting of REM’s Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey and Bill Rieflin.