Online review by Illinois Entertainer
Robyn Hitchcock
Athenaeum Center
Chicago, IL
April 10, 2026

Review and photos by Jeff Elbel

Pop surrealist Robyn Hitchcock has been good to his devotees in Chicago, making regular visits to town with his engaging one-man shows. On Friday, fans got a special treat when the English musician and former Soft Boys frontman stopped at the Athenaeum Center, supported by a terrific three-piece rock band of Nashville-based friends. For those who fondly remembered tours to the region for albums including Perspex Island and Jewels to Sophia, it was a throwback to the chiming sound of yore and a closer reflection of Hitchcock’s recorded output in recent work like 2022’s Shufflemania! The show also served to raise awareness and introduce a pair of songs ahead of the upcoming album The Confuser.

The set began with Hitchcock’s solo performance of “I Often Dream of Trains,” played on a polka-dot Fender Telecaster to match his polka-dot shirt. He was soon joined by lead guitarist Jeremy Fetzer (Steelism, Caitlin Rose), ace session bassist Todd Bolden, and drummer Eric Slick (Dr. Dog, Adrian Belew Power Trio), the three musicians who populate the arrangements of The Confuser. Based upon the band’s effervescent interplay with Hitchcock, whether channeling the Egyptians on “Balloon Man” or the Soft Boys on “Kingdom of Love,” The Confuser promises to be a prime set of 21st-century jangle-rock. New single “I Am This Thing” was a propulsive statement of self, recognizing the transient nature of existence and the potential for joy in the process.

As ever, Hitchcock blended the psychedelic pop of Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett with Dali-esque imagery and the literate (if lunatic) wordplay of Bob Dylan. His stream-of-consciousness anecdotes and stories were worthwhile companions to the music. “As you can probably tell by my accent, I’m not from around here,” said the London native. “I’m from Tennessee.” The singer painted a portrait of his adopted homeland in “America” from the 1982 album Groovy Decay, while Bolden played the late Matthew Seligman’s bubbling, McCartney-ish bass line over Slick’s exotic rhythm. Fetzer added early electric Dylanesque twang to “The Shuffle Man.”

“I’ve been a folk singer for hundreds and hundreds of years,” said Hitchcock, explaining that crowd favorite “Madonna of the Wasps” was written in the key of D in the pattern of other folk-rock heroes including the Byrds. Soon afterward, he reminisced about his first time headlining in Chicago, performing at Metro more than 40 years ago. To the audience’s cheers, he added, “I suppose you were all there? I thought you looked familiar.”

At least initially, Hitchcock skirted political statements except in metaphor. While introducing “Alright, Yeah,” he spoke about the current climate. “We’ve got the Joker, and we don’t have a Batman,” he said. He soon edited himself, saying that as a Pisces, he wasn’t equipped to deal with reality.

Hitchcock’s partner and opening artist Emma Swift joined the band for a set of sparkling rockers, including the sublime psych-pop drone of “Oceanside” and the Soft Boys’ “Queen of Eyes.” “Flesh Number One” was recast as a medley incorporating Roxy Music’s “More Than This.” Afterward, the Hitchcocks traded quips about an ocean journey accompanying Bryan Ferry in a bathtub.

The players more than proved their worth during Hitchcock’s “Autumn Sunglasses” and the Soft Boys’ “Insanely Jealous.” Hypnotic The Confuser song “My Dead Astronaut” was happily not directly applicable to the day, which had just earlier seen the successful splashdown of Artemis II with all four NASA astronauts alive and thriving. Fetzer and Hitchcock played sinewy, intertwining guitar lines between verses. Bolden sang high harmony to Hitchcock while keeping a taut groove with Slick.

Hitchcock unleashed his barbs directly at the administration ahead of the Soft Boys’ best-loved single, describing “I Wanna Destroy You” as a song that was originally a “protest song against the destructive impulse in the human being.” To cheers of agreement, Hitchcock explained that the song currently served as a protest against divisive government policies and “how contagious hatred is, and how hard it is to get rid of it once it’s unleashed.” The band tore through the song with energy and abandon. Hitchcock altered a line to cast “a pox upon Fox media.”

The show’s final segment was an encore, for which the band had never left the stage. Hitchcock announced a series of tributes to “dead British songwriters” that he treasured. First came “Soul Love” from David Bowie’s album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Next was an on-the-nose performance of Syd Barrett’s “See Emily Play” from Pink Floyd’s genre-defining psychedelic rock debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released during the year examined by Hitchcock’s 2024 memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. John Lennon’s “Dear Prudence” was drawn from The Beatles’ self-titled white album. The still-living and touring Dylan received tribute from Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower,” featuring spellbinding solos from guest and Swift accompanist Rick Lollar.

Following bows and goodbyes by the band, Hitchcock came into the crowd with his acoustic guitar to lead a sing-along of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” It was another touchstone to that pivotal year of 1967. The song offered a final moment of connection with the crowd that felt moving and personal. It was a reminder of the intimate power of those frequent solo shows. Still, fans can hope that Hitchcock returns with this lineup once The Confuser has been released into the wild.

The evening began with a brief but captivating set by Swift, featuring tender songs from her recent release The Resurrection Game. The symphonic grandeur of the album’s “Nothing and Forever” was made more intimate by presenting Swift’s lilting melody with the minimal adornment of Lollar’s spacious electric guitar. “Somewhere between nothing and forever,” sang Swift in the emotional torch ballad. “That’s you and me.” The album’s title cut depicted a tempestuous relationship, with the image of “breathing in fire and calling it air.” Swift paused to explain herself to the crowd. “I’m naturally an optimist,” she said, “but I married a nihilist. I didn’t know it was a sexually transmitted disease.” Swift explained “No Happy Endings” as a song about trying to reconcile those extremes. “There are no happy endings, but baby, I’m trying,” she sang. With its keening soprano melody, “Beautiful Ruins” was played in answer to a fan’s request. Swift’s set concluded with a pair of cover songs. First was a Bob Dylan song not included on her 2020 homage to Blonde on the Tracks. Lollar stretched his guitar lines into nimble jazz-influenced figures as Swift wrung the pathos and resignation from “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” The final song was a riveting torch-blues interpretation of Prince’s bereft, heartbroken “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

---
Online review by Immortal Science

A House Burning Down on the Radio
Getting older is rough when you're a music lover, which is why it's probably a good idea not to make it your entire personality. (Where was someone with this advice when I was in my late teens?) You don't have the energy – and, increasingly, you don't have the money – to go see live shows all the time. You got a job, you got kids, you got responsibilities. It's harder to keep up with new music, especially with good places to learn about it getting more and more scarce. It costs money, time, and attention, and all your friends stopped caring about cred a long time ago.

And, of course, time makes fools of us all; the bands and performers you used to love, that set you apart, that established you as a person of particular taste and discernment...well, they're getting older too. Older, even, than you. So old that anyone younger than you is going to scoff at the idea of you spending several hours listening to a literal senior citizen play the guitar. It's very easy to just stop caring altogether, to just retreat into yourself, dust off the old records, and pretend it's still 1985, or whatever year it was when you were young and full of promise.

This is, of course, a perfect illustration of the folly of letting an imaginary person you made up and whose existence is completely confined to your own head dictate your behavior. If I'd listened to that made-up 20-something who thinks I'm lame for going to see a musician who could be their grandfather, I wouldn't have gone with my wonderful wife to see a 73-year-old man on Friday night at the Athenaeum in Chicago, and I wouldn't have seen one of the best shows of my entire life. The guitar-playing senior citizen in question was Robyn Rowan Hitchcock, and the show was transcendent.

It's always hard to be objective about live music at the best of times, and that's especially true as you get older, go to fewer and fewer shows, and begin to start thinking of concerts as a special treat and not a regular weekly occurrence. The ordinary starts to seem special. You begin to build a calculus in your mind: How good the act is likely to be gets balanced against the question of how likely you are to ever see them again. When a show represents a major investment of cash, hours, and energy, it can be tempting to think of it as a lot better than it really is. But I don't think I'm kidding myself when I say Hitchcock's show was as good as almost any I've ever seen, and certainly the best Hitchcock gig of my life, which has consisted of quite a few Hitchcock gigs.

This judgement may also be colored by the fact that I was powerfully stoned for the entire set. But I don't think that's a problem; powerfully stoned turns out the be a pretty fucking great way to see Robyn Hitchcock, himself someone with a biographical interest in the notion of altered perception. The Doors of Perception was a formative influence on him, and it just so happens that my wife's middle name is Huxley; who am I to fight back against the echoes of history? I tend not to be judgy or evangelical about drugs, and I avoid making them my entire personality as well, but sometimes I feel a little involuntary sting of pity for people who never see, or even listen to, music when they're high. Music, more than any other art form, expands and deepens and intensifies when you're on drugs, and it makes me a little sad that for some people, the way they hear it straight is as good as it's ever going to get for them.

The Athenaeum is a gorgeous old theater in Lakeview, and since this show was affiliated with the Old Town School of Folk Music, it was timed to be over and done with at a relatively early hour. Why this was a good thing could be seen in the gray hair and slow gaits of a lot of the attendees; I am not used to being one of the younger people at any kind of public event, but it certainly seemed like most of the people there had become fans of Hitchcock in the '70s and not a decade later, when I got on board. Regardless, the lighting and sound techs were at the top of their game; lighting has become a lost art as mid-sized concert venues themselves become lost, but everything was on point for Hitchcock's show. The mix was very bass-forward, providing a solid, heavy bedrock for the guitar interplay to rest on.

Hitchcock's wife and collaborator, Emma Swift, came out first for a short set, starting with his song “Somewhere Between” and closing with Bob Dylan's “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right” (she recorded an excellent album of Dylan covers a few years back), with some of her own originals and other covers – including a heart-stopping take on “Nothing Compares 2 U” – in the interval. Swift has Hitchcock's gift of being a strong interpreter of other peoples' material; it was astonishing that a song which entirely belongs to Sinéad O'Connor, but which could not be more unmistakably the work of Prince, can still have new and exciting elements brought to it.

The man himself came out after with his new band, who will be featured on his forthcoming album The Confuser. (Hitchcock is ridiculously prolific and constantly working.) It was three young guys, all hot-shit musicians, but the kind of group of odd ducks that makes you wonder how they ever even met in real life, let alone ended up in a band together. The configuration was drums, bass, two guitars, and vocals, which Lou Reed long ago correctly identified as the ideal setup for rock 'n' roll music; he leaned heavily on his more psychedelic, jam-heavy material to ensure a nice groove was going from the outset.

The material ranged across his entire career, quite a feat considering that it dates back hundreds of songs and six decades. He played a Soft Boys number that I'd never seen him do live before, and a couple of songs off the upcoming record, replete with snappy hooks and capable boogie riffs; say what you will about Hitchcock as a live performer, and it cannot be denied that his voice is not as strong as it once was, but he has not lost a fucking step on the guitar. Trading rhythm and lead duties with his guitarist, he pushed out some hard-hitting and intricate solos that he might as easily have produced when he was in his twenties.

Hitchcock has always had a touchy relationship with his 'hits' (so-called with the understanding that we are using that word within a very relative definitional framework), but several of them appeared in the setlist, which I reproduce below, and he did right by all of them, including a stellar rendering of the underrated “Oceanside”. Some of the best renditions drew from his heavier psychedelic pop stuff of the early 1980s, which perfectly fit both my mood and the concert's format. He's always worn his influences on his sleeve (Dylan, the Beatles, the Byrds, Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention; as he has written and sung about extensively, 1967 was to him what 1985 was to me), and in almost every song you could really hear the through-line of those performers and understand how they all came together in the jangle-pop years of the '80s and early '90s, when R.E.M. counted him as both a predecessor and a contemporary.

For the encore, Swift and her guitarist came back out to join the four-piece and do a set by British songwriters who, unlike Hitchcock, are no longer with us, including stunning renditions of David Bowie's “Soul Love” (a favorite of my wife's) and “Dear Prudence” (maybe my favorite Beatles song). With three guitars on stage it attained an absolutely tidal wall-of-sound quality, as always held down by the bedrock bass, and was performed with feeling and skill that surprised even me. Afterwards, everyone but Hitchcock left the stage, and – entering no more than five feet from where we were standing – he moved through the audience with an acoustic guitar, leading a magical and unexpected singalong of “A Day in the Life”.

We met him briefly after the show (my wife got him to sign an empty bag of Swedish Fish, something I found charming but made me realize, given both his oeuvre and fanbase, may have not been the first time he was asked to do so), but I generally don't like to meet my idols. They're busy, they're tired, and you can't really make a connection with them before they have to move on to brightening someone else's life. But all the time, I thought, without shame and with considerable joy, about how here was a man whose work has been a constant source of pleasure in my life, whose songs have been an integral component of so many parts of my history and the history of the people around me, who doesn't know me and will never really know me but is as big a part of who I am as many of my friends and family. That is the power of culture. That is the power of art. And you're a fool if you let anyone take that away from you.

ROBYN HITCHCOCK SET LIST, ATHENAEUM THEATRE, CHICAGO, IL., 04/10/2026

"I Often Dream of Trains" [solo electric], from I Often Dream of Trains (Robyn Hitchcock, 1984)

"Kingdom of Love", from Underwater Moonlight (The Soft Boys, 1980)

"I am This Thing", from The Confuser (Robyn Hitchcock, 2026)

"Balloon Man", from Globe of Frogs (Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians, 1988)

"America", from Groovy Decay (Robyn Hitchcock, 1982)

"The Shuffle Man", from Shufflemania! (Robyn Hitchcock, 2022)

"Madonna of the Wasps", from Queen Elvis (Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians, 1989)

"Driving Aloud (Radio Storm)", from Respect (Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians, 1993)

"Alright, Yeah", from Moss Elixir (Robyn Hitchcock, 1996)

"My Dead Astronaut", from The Confuser

"So You Think You're in Love", from Perspex Island (Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians, 1991)

"Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)"/"More Than This", from Globe of Frogs/Roxy Music cover

"Oceanside", from Moss Elixir

"Queen of Eyes", from Underwater Moonlight

"Autumn Sunglasses", from Robyn Hitchcock (Robyn Hitchcock, 2017)

"Insanely Jealous", from Underwater Moonlight

"I Wanna Destroy You", from Underwater Moonlight

"Airscape", from Element of Light (Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians, 1986)

"Soul Love", David Bowie cover

"See Emily Play", Pink Floyd cover

"Dear Prudence", Beatles cover

"All Along the Watchtower", Bob Dylan cover

"A Day in the Life" [solo acoustic], Beatles cover