LESS THAN A MONTH after Taylor Swift’s gargantuan Eras Tour landed at Wembley Stadium, apparently grossing more than the combined GDP of several continents, comedian Stewart Lee ambles on stage at EartH (Evolutionary Arts Hackney) to introduce Robyn Hitchcock.

As the applause dies down, Lee's boots make the stage boards creak. ‘Not only was Robyn Hitchcock responsible for the folk revival,’ he says, ‘but he also invented psychedelia and punk’. The joke carries a trace of truth about Hitchcock's importance and influence. Lee could have added, putting on his reading glasses, squinting and taking a deep breath, that Hitchcock is a surrealist troubadour, alternative national treasure, uncompromising artist-survivor and cult icon, who has impacted far more commercially successful artists like the Flaming Lips and R.E.M.. But instead he just says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Robyn Hitchcock!’

With his bone-white head of hair, faded blue jeans and a shirt patterned with an unidentifiable vegetable, Hitchcock walks on looking like an aging dad with an oversized vinyl collection. Instead of opening with a foot-stomping banger like ‘The Shuffle Man’, Hitchcock begins strumming the intro of ‘September Cones’. It is a thing of such wistful melancholy, with a tune as delicate as the falsetto vocal, it genuinely seems to bewitch the audience.

Suffused with its inter-war ghosts from its days as a Savoy cinema, the EartH theatre turns out to be the perfect setting for Hitchcock’s opening half-hour acoustic set, haunted with old lovers, ringing telephones and geraniums. ‘There was someone standing with you,’ he sings on ‘Glass Hotel’, ‘who just wasn't there at all.’ Sitting in the audience, one couldn't help but think the ‘eccentric-outlier-legend’ plinth Hitchcock stands on – crumbling and overgrown with ivy – needs some critical maintenance work. Hitchcock’s oft-told story, with its twists and turns through dada-post-punk and acoustic singer-songwriting, simply doesn't do him justice. His way with melody – from the catchiest of pop tunes to soul-stirring ballads – is rarely acknowledged adequately. The ‘surreal lyricist’, too, is a meagre tag for the writer of ‘Queen Elvis’, which contains one of the most memorable couplets about emotionally repressed suburbia. ‘See that man who mows his lawn,’ Hitchcock sings, bringing the first segment of the evening to close, ‘he'll hang in drag before the dawn’.

After another half hour of stand-up from Stewart Lee, Hitchcock returns with a band and plugs directly into 1967. Over the last few years Hitchcock has combined taking artistic stock with a creative bender. ‘Every day, there is one less day for me to be Robyn Hitchcock,’ he told CNN, ‘(and)…the more motivated I am to use that time.’ In 2021 he released a book of lyrics, Somewhere Apart: Selected Lyrics 1977-1997. In 2022 he put out a full-length studio album of new songs, Shufflemania!, and the following year another of intrumentals, Life after Eternity. In addition to near constant touring, he published a memoir this summer, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, accompanied by a studio album mostly consisting of covers, 1967: Vacations in the Past. In the final hour of the show, he gleefully take several such ‘vacations’, mixing them with his own effervescent discography. Somehow he makes it all sound of a piece – the Soft Boys’ acid post-punk ‘Kingdom of Love’ emanating from the same place as the Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’.

On the night of the performance, just several weeks after the UK general election, there are headlines about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East; Donald Trump is neck and neck in the polls with Kamala Harris in the race for the presidency. It won't be long before Taylor Swift continues her Eras Tour Experiment in Choreographed Gigantism in Toronto, Canada. But tonight, Robyn Hitchcock is a balm to all that – an otherworldly wonder, a man able to conjure from his battered guitar worlds more entrancing than a stadium light show. One suspects that from the back of his head invisible wiring connects to the outer reaches of the solar system. Only he can feel the eternal hum of the universe beyond the sound of falling bombs and rattling guns, an ex-president’s lies and Swift's meticulously crafted smiles and winks.

Whether it comes from somewhere in the stratosphere or some place deep in his technicolour unconscious, Hitchcock's music is not of this planet. And on this magical night, it feels like the only answer to a world gone wrong. May he visit us on Earth for years to come.