The Guardian
April 20, 2001
Robyn Hitchcock's Psychedelic Flashback
Soft Boys: Junction, Cambridge, 4/5
by Adam Sweeting
With their final album, Underwater Moonlight, recently reissued in time for its 21st birthday, The Soft Boys decided there could be no finer moment to attempt a belated reunion. If the Cambridge psychedelicists were ahead of the curve in the late-1970s, suddenly they sound like a lost legend from a mythical era.
Back at the helm is Robyn Hitchcock, somewhat greyer-of-hair but no less oblique in mind. He explained that the quartet had just returned from the U.S., and were grotesquely jet-lagged. "We don't look like this and we don't sound like this," he warned. But if you can live with Hitchcock's Lewis Carroll imagery and magic-mushroom logic, you can quickly appreciate that The Soft Boys offer as fine a brew of Psychedelic Pop and classic English whimsy as anybody has mustered since Syd Barrett went AWOL.
Refreshed by their 20-year layoff, the Boys ripped through their set with energy and dazzling expertise. They limbered up with "You'll Have To Go Sideways", a tricky instrumental in 7/4 time, then started piling on the harmonies and the meshing guitar parts through the likes of "Sudden Town" and the ingenious, devious "Kingdom Of Love".
With Matthew Seligman and Morris Windsor supplying simpatico support on bass and drums, the decks were cleared for the interlocking guitars of Hitchcock and Kimberley Rew. The pair never merely fill space with vacuous axeman bluster because the guitar parts are integral to the structure of the songs. Rew's muscular playing dovetails eloquently with Hitchcock's glassier, more quavering tone -- nowhere more impressively than on "Insanely Jealous".
The combination of instrumental guile and three-part harmonies gives the Boys options that the bog-standard guitar combo can never dream of. They handled the off-centre harmonies and ringing chords of "I Wanna Destroy You" with aplomb (it was dedicated to George W. Bush), and comfortably embraced songs as different as the anthemic "Mr. Kennedy" or the riffed-up "Only The Stones Remain" without breaking their stride. There was even a bonus Spinal Tap moment with "Rock 'n' Roll Toilet", which had Rew grinning idiotically from beneath his pudding-basin Brian Jones haircut. As reunions go, this one goes miles further.
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