Financial Times
April 23, 2001
Old Softies Are Still Rocking
by Ian Shuttleworth
Twenty years after they first split up, the reunited Soft Boys are surely the only Rock band who can boast both a neo-psychedelic guru and a Eurovision-winning songwriter. While Robyn Hitchcock released a string of cultishly admired albums with titles like Groovy Decay and Gotta Let This Hen Out, Kimberley Rew penned Katrina And The Waves' 1997 Euro-biggie "Love Shine A Light". In The Softs, the two guitarists mesh admirably.
Following a batch of American dates, their first British gig at The Junction in Cambridge (supported by the dishearteningly archaic and self-indulgent electronic noodlings of former Spacemen 3 linchpin Sonic Boom) was a celebratory hometown affair. Hitchcock engaged in less surreal between-songs spiel than in his solo incarnation, but still managed to explain how various numbers such as "Old Pervert" were written about odd characters on the streets of 1970s Cambridge or composed in a boathouse by The Cam. When told by a spectator that one of his subjects had since passed on, he inquired with characteristic obliqueness: "When did he die -- roughly? Before Aliens came out?"
Seeing the band on their own manor, it's also interesting to realise how their vocal harmonies and chord progressions fit into an historical "Cambridge sound", being frequently reminiscent of early Pink Floyd. Indeed, the debt was openly acknowledged during the first encore when, after asking about the city's legendary reclusive acid casualty, "Anyone seen Roger [alias Syd] Barrett?" they launched into a driving rendition of the Floyd's "Astronomy Domine". Other covers included The Velvet Underground's "Train 'round The Bend" and Hitchcock's own heartbreakingly beautiful post-Softs number "Airscape". Hitchcock's often deceptively complex guitar figures, too, are better grounded in the context of a band than in solo performance, especially when twinned with the Rock-ier tones of Rew, who looks bizarrely like The Perishers' cartoon sheepdog Boot anthropomorphised into a strutting, grinning axe hero. At one point the pair go the whole hog, playing harmonised phrases a la Thin Lizzy.
The off-the-wall lyrics and angular tunes of songs such as "Underwater Moonlight" (the title track of their now re-released 1980 album) and "Insanely Jealous" alternate with powerful straight-ahead grinds like "I Wanna Destroy You" (written when Reagan came to power and now dedicated to George W. Bush "and his lovely wife") and the still-blistering "Only The Stones Remain".
The rest of the tour may be less musically archeological than their homecoming, but The Soft Boys give heart to their main audience demographic by suggesting that Rock 'n' Roll at its most inspired may now be becoming increasingly the province of the middle-aged.
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