The Toronto Sun
March 24, 2001
Soft Moon Rises
Legendary Band Reborn
by Kieran Grant
"I remember there was some talk of us going to Toronto," Robyn Hitchcock was saying over the phone recently as he muses back over two decades to the final days of his now-legendary band, The Soft Boys.
"It was in 1981," he says. "We broke up instead."
That they did. And while few tears were spilled over that original demise -- after which Hitchcock went on to his solo career as one of the English-speaking world's most tuneful and consistently out-there voices -- The Soft Boys' legacy has lived on in the hearts of a gradually growing cult fanbase, which includes such famous champions as R.E.M..
The not-so-long-lost Cambridge, UK, group -- consisting of singer-guitarist Hitchcock, guitarist Kimberley Rew, bassist Matthew Seligman, and drummer Morris Windsor -- finally make good on that Toronto date when they bring their current reunion tour to the Horseshoe on Wednesday.
The shows are based around Matador Records' just-released, double-CD reissue of their classic 1980 album, Underwater Moonlight.
Some unfinished business to take care of, then?
"It just wasn't the right climate for The Soft Boys back then," says Hitchcock, still affably whimsical at 48. "We just thought, 'Well, there's treasure buried at the bottom of the sea.' I guess that's the way 'Underwater Moonlight' goes."
"There was a brief flurry of interest, and then that was switched off," Rew says in a separate interview. "Fair enough. That's not up to us. We're not entitled to have people going around saying how great we are -- it's up to us to prove it. We decided to go our own way."
Hitchcock never lost touch with the others, and teamed up with each of them regularly over the ensuing years.
"It was like in an adventure film," he says, "where they say, 'Let's split up: you go up the northface, you go through the tunnel, and you see if you can get a balloon.'"
Rew rejoined his old band The Waves and went on to pen the inescapable-but-lucrative song, "Walking On Sunshine".
"It's never been my intention to be eclectic, or a cult," Rew says. "But it sometimes ends up that way."
As was the case with Underwater Moonlight.
A shimmering, blistering Power Pop album with unabashed Beatles, Byrds, and Syd Barrett leanings, it is barely dated at all. Songs such as "Tonight" and "Queen Of Eyes" housed weirdly intricate, dovetailing guitar parts in brilliantly catchy casings (hear R.E.M.'s Reckoning for the U.S. response). "Old Pervert" and "Vegetable Man" are stark, strange, and silly. "I Wanna Destroy You" poked fun at the empty rage of the day's fashion punks. It was just the sort of thing that got a British band hated in the late-'70s.
"Punk was very dictatorial," Hitchcock says, laughing. "It was practically illegal to have Beatle influences. It felt like you were being tried by a Maoist court for being a revisionist if you did that kind of thing. And the people who tried you were usually these middle-class types. I think they recognized that we, too, were middle-class wiseguys and they didn't like the reflection."
As for re-learning Moonlight now that people admire it?
"I've been playing along and wondering why the record doesn't seem to be any particular key," he muses. "We didn't have electric tuners in those days. We were a humble band. The Police probably had electric tuners. We had harmonicas and tuning forks.
"But the main problem is just running out of breath. As time went by I tried to put fewer and fewer words in songs, because I'd be wondering why I was always standing there panting at the microphone like a beached fish."
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