Pulse!
April, 2001
Soft Boys Weigh In Again
by Bill Forman
Luckily for Soft Boys fans, Robyn Hitchcock's mom tends not to throw things out. "You'd know that if you saw the inside of her fridge," says Hitchcock, adding a bit of unwanted insight into The Soft Boys' penchant for catchy Pop tunes about hatching larvae. "I knew somewhere there was this box of tapes, and suddenly there it was, underneath the very bed where I had slept as a lad, with my old copies of Rolling Stone and Melody Maker."
The object of Hitchcock's quest-recordings of The Soft Boys rehearsing in a Cambridge boathouse are included on Underwater Moonlight (Matador), a two-CD reissue of the band's acclaimed 1980 album that coincides with this year's most anticipated reunion tour.
For those who missed them the first time around, The Soft Boys were a kind of reverse supergroup led by Hitchcock and guitarist Kimberley Rew (who later found commercial success with Katrina And The Waves' "Walking On Sunshine"). More Syd Barrett than Sid Vicious, The Soft Boys' psychedelic predilections set them apart from the era's prevailing Punk scene.
So was the acid-damaged Pink Floyd founder's spirit still hovering over Cambridge by the time The Soft Boys showed up? "Probably in my imagination it was," says Hitchcock, who moved there from London in 1974. "I mean, Barrett was very much a one-off -- although Cambridge does have its casualties. I think it's one of those places where, if you spend long enough there, it's hard to obtain escape velocity and get away from it. You know, we all left in 1980, except for Kimberley Rew. And Kim's still there, in fact."
So what better place for a Soft Boys reunion to get started? "Every time I played in Cambridge, Kim would be there and he'd play on the encores," explains Hitchcock. "And then he started playing on the encores in London. And pretty soon there we were in the studio." After guesting on each others' 1999 solo albums, the duo went on tour together. "It sounded great
with just the two guitars, and obviously it wasn't such a big leap from that to re-forming the Underwater Moonlight Soft Boys."
With bassist Matthew Seligman and drummer Morris Windsor onboard, the reunited Soft Boys are finally doing their first proper American tour (making it only as far as New York the first time). They've even recorded a cover of Paul McCartney's "Let Me Roll It" for a breast cancer charity album. So what are the chances of a new Soft Boys album?
"The organism is definitely intact," allows Hitchcock. "But I think with things like that, you don't want to put all your weight on the floorboard in one day -- in case the floorboards still aren't strong enough to take the weight. And we've definitely put on a bit of weight since 20 years ago."
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