Launch.com
April, 2001
The Soft Boys
21 Years Of Moonlight
by Mac Randall
If you've never heard of them before, there's no reason to be ashamed; you're one of at least several hundred million. Even in their so-called "heyday", they were barely noticed. Their Retro Jangle music and surrealistic lyrics didn't fit in with the Punk and Disco that dominated the late-'70s. Without the backing of a major record label or a powerful promotional machine, their efforts to crack the hit parade were doomed to failure. When they broke up, almost exactly 20 years ago, all concerned breathed something of a sigh of relief before moving on to more rewarding ventures. The Soft Boys -- a band whose very name suggested a lack of the tenacity needed to survive in the Pop biz -- would, it seemed, soon be forgotten.
And yet they were not. Instead, slowly, quietly, via fanzine, cover version, and word of mouth, this defiantly odd quartet from Cambridge, England in its posthumous years joined the ranks of Rock's most significant artists. The list of bands they've influenced, though too long to detail here, is nothing if not illustrious. Perhaps the most important of their disciples, and certainly the biggest-selling, is R.E.M.. The final Soft Boys album, Underwater Moonlight, which vanished almost as soon as it was released in June 1980, has since been hailed by critics, players, and music junkies as not just one of the greatest albums of New Wave, but one of the greatest Pop albums of all time.
Getting curious? If so, you couldn't have picked a better time to investigate. For not only has Matador just released an expanded, two-disc re-reissue of Underwater Moonlight, but the four musicians who made that record -- singer-songwriter-guitarist Robyn Hitchcock, guitarist-singer Kimberley Rew, bassist Matthew Seligman, and drummer-singer Morris Windsor -- have agreed to reunite in support of it and embark on their first true U.S. tour. (Their only previous visit, consisting of eight 1980 gigs, all in or near Manhattan, doesn't really count as a nationwide sojourn.)
Reached by phone at his London home, Hitchcock describes The Soft Boys reunion as serendipitous and unplanned. "Things just coincided with each other," he says. "Kimberley and I found ourselves playing together again, but it hadn't really occurred to me to do anything Soft Boys-related. And then we found that the album [Underwater Moonlight] was out of print, and its 21st birthday was coming up. It seemed really appropriate to do something to celebrate that. From there, it was just a matter of auditioning ourselves to see if we'd be able to do it. We passed the audition. I do like the fact that Matador is the label putting the album out, since they don't do a lot of reissues. And because we're going to tour, it's a current band on a current label. It's not being treated simply as an historical exercise."
With hindsight, the band's re-formation seems to have been almost inevitable from the moment in the spring of 1998 that Hitchcock and Rew got together to work on some of Robyn's new songs -- the first time they'd seriously collaborated in over 15 years. Rew made an appearance on Hitchcock's next album, Jewels For Sophia, Hitchcock returned the favor on Rew's album Tunnel Into Summer, and the two ended up touring together in 2000. With Windsor and Seligman easy to reach, the next step was clear. Right?
Not quite, says Rew. "It was more of a mutual convergence than anything else. Robyn was ready to do something different, and we were ready to take up our instruments. It is nice that we didn't simply re-form and tour without there being a record that people can actually find in the shops."
Whether or not the reunion was pre-planned, it's heartening to see that all the principals have come together to acknowledge the importance of their past work. A major element of that work, besides Hitchcock's insinuating melodies and lyrical fascination with the animal and vegetable worlds, was the Hitchcock-Rew guitar partnership; one of the most distinctive in Rock history. It paired Kimberley's fiery confidence with Robyn's angular intuitiveness. "We've got very different styles," Hitchcock says, "but they do blend rather beautifully -- especially on electric guitar. [The Soft Boys] was largely about two dueling guitars -- or, if not dueling, then at least saying parallel things. Kim just loves playing; it's like water to a glass when he gets hold of a guitar. And it's great to work with someone who has so much enthusiasm."
Between 1976 and 1979, along with Windsor and bassist Andy Metcalfe, Rew and Hitchcock cut a series of extraordinary tracks that wound up on a 1977 EP, Give It To The Soft Boys, and two LPs, A Can Of Bees (1979) and the post-breakup compilation Invisible Hits (1983). Although some listeners (including this writer) continue to regard that early music with awe, Hitchcock himself doesn't have a high opinion of it. In the liner notes to the new reissue of Underwater Moonlight, he states that the group responsible for the gleefully bizarre "(I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp" and "Sandra's Having Her Brain Out" was "a beast that couldn't survive." And fair enough, listening to a song like "The Pigworker" (on A Can Of Bees), which combines huskily growled lyrics about pterodactyls and 12-legged men with spastic guitar solos in three different time signatures, including 11/8. It's hard to imagine what one could do for a second act, other than simplify considerably.
Which is exactly what The Soft Boys did. Metcalfe's departure in 1979 made simplification easier. His replacement, Seligman, once cracked that the band's songs became less complex after he joined because he couldn't handle all the chord changes. "That's a good story," Rew chuckles, "but Matthew was actually quite an accomplished player even then. By the time we got to Underwater Moonlight, it was more that we just wanted to play the songs. We weren't really too worried about always doing something that was unexpected."
The second disc of the Matador Underwater Moonlight reissue is a collection of highlights from the band's fall 1979 rehearsal tapes, giving us an intimate view of them at this crucial stage in their development (as well as a chance to hear several songs that never made it out of their Cambridge boathouse practice space). Hitchcock found the tapes in a box in his mother's house. "I knew this box of cassettes existed somewhere, but I couldn't find it for a while. The prospect of having something extra for the reissue was tempting, but the question was what to use. I'd originally wanted to use a bootleg of our show at Maxwell's [in Hoboken, New Jersey, from the 1980 mini-tour], but the recording quality wasn't very good. But then these tapes turned up in good condition. And then it was just a matter of wading through them to hear what worked -- because we usually had many different versions of each song. Some of that material shows we could have been a British Talking Heads, if we'd wanted to go down that path."
The period the rehearsal tapes date from was "our lowest ebb publicly," Hitchcock recalls. "We didn't have a record deal, we didn't have a manager, we'd lost nearly all of the few fans we had and hadn't picked up any new ones. But there were a lot of ideas coming together in that boathouse in Cambridge in the hours between heading there in the morning, going to the cafe for egg and chips in the afternoon, and going to the pub in the evening." Honed to perfection in the rehearsal room and quickly caught on tape in a proper (more or less) recording studio, those ideas made Underwater Moonlight a landmark achievement, as notable for the clangor of "I Wanna Destroy You" and "Old Pervert" as for the more refined Pop of "Tonight" and "Queen Of Eyes".
With the album completed and released (by a new indie label called Armageddon), it was now time to support it, and so the band did, as best it could, to a near-unanimous lack of recognition. "In my memory," Hitchcock says, "those last months with The Soft Boys weren't very busy, though Kim recently showed me our date sheet from then -- and we had a gig almost every night. But the tide was against us. We were like some creature swimming south to lay its eggs, and then expiring immediately afterwards."
Why, exactly, did The Soft Boys break up in the spring of 1981? Disillusionment stemming from the band's non-success certainly had something to do with it. But none of the members were so disillusioned that they stopped making music. Growing pains may have been a bigger issue. "I wanted to establish myself as me, a solo artist," Hitchcock explains. "I always saw myself as Robyn Hitchcock, not Beatle Robyn or Soft Boy Robyn, even though the Soft Boys were, and still are, a great band."
More to the point, both Hitchcock and Rew were songwriters, and their work couldn't coexist comfortably in one group. "Kim had songs bursting to get out," Hitchcock says, "and this may sound egotistical, but I can't see 'I Wanna Destroy You' meshing well with 'Walking On Sunshine' [the song that Rew would go on to achieve great success with as a member of Katrina And The Waves]. There's a similarity in genre, but the approach is very different. Kim wanted to be in a band that was somewhere between Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Five Satins: rocking bobbysoxer dance music. My inspirations were cult figures who made albums. I didn't think hit singles were necessary. Obviously that makes your career passage more difficult over the years, and it wasn't Kim's vision at all."
In the years following the demise of The Soft Boys, Hitchcock became the epitome of the cult artist, reuniting with Metcalfe and Windsor to form The Egyptians and making a series of memorably inventive albums. Rew hit Pop paydirt with Katrina And The Waves. Seligman went on to play bass for Thomas Dolby, Alex Chilton, and Tori Amos (among many others). The Soft Boys got back together briefly in 1994 for a couple of UK gigs, with both Metcalfe and Seligman on bass, but Rew says that was never intended to be a permanent situation. "At that point, The Egyptians were reaching their end," he recalls, "and I don't think Robyn was quite sure what to do next. So that was a natural extension of The Egyptians, but also a chance to experiment. I don't think he ever thought of it as more than a one-off thing."
No one's talking too much about the future prospects of the current reunion, but both Hitchcock and Rew hint that The Soft Boys may still have some life in them. They recently re-entered the studio for the first time in two decades to cut a version of Paul McCartney's "Let Me Roll It" for a breast cancer benefit compilation, and at the moment everyone seems willing to continue collaborating once the tour's over -- assuming the vibe remains right.
"Is 20 a better age than 40?" Hitchcock muses. "They both have their qualities. We've all gained things, including weight. But we've lost things as well. And I think over time, the differences between us diminish and come to seem less important. We don't look as good as we did, and I feel I ought to have [frequent Hitchcock collaborator] Tim Keegan behind the curtain singing the high notes that I can't hit anymore. Younger bands have an intensity that we don't have. But it feels right to play together again."
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