Trouser Press
December, 1980
Soft Boys
by Tim Sommer
During a photo session in a cluttered downtown studio, someone asks The Soft Boys if there's any particular music they'd like to hear while their pictures are being snapped. "Got anything old?" replies guitarist-vocalist Robyn Hitchcock -- a tall, handsome, and intense-looking fellow whose deranged gaze one only expects from the truly gifted. Hitchcock and the other Soft Boys -- guitarist Kimberley Rew, bassist Matthew Seligman, and drummer Morris Windsor -- hardly have a kind word for any music under ten years old. Unlike most of their contemporaries, Engalnd's Soft Boys are influenced not by the Dolls, Bowie, or Roxy Music; but by the golden age of Pyschedelic Pop -- the years when Rock went beyond beat-era simplicty, but before it lapsed into self-indulgence. In those few neat years, British and American music was filled with challenging sounds that were still identifiably Pop. The Soft Boys aren't nostalgic or escapist, but are merely trying to capture a wonderful aspect of music overlooked in the last decade or so.
The band came together about four years ago in Cambridge. Hitchcock, Rew, Windsor have always stuck together. Seligman joined earlier this year, after working with Knox (of The Vibrators), Alex Chilton, and The Local Heroes. He says he turned down a high-paying job with the Bruce Wooley Band to become a Soft Boy.
The Soft Boys' first recording, an EP on Raw Records, came out in late-1977. They were among Radar Records' first signings the following year, but after releasing a single, they scrapped a finished LP to start anew on an album to be released independently. A Can Of Bees, complex and frighteningly psychedelic, appeared on their own Two Crabs label. Their latest album, Underwater Moonlight (on Armageddon Records), is The Soft Boys' Pop record, showcasing the less-bizarre and more tuneful side of the band. They still haven't gone beyond cult status in their homeland, however, and they claim over half their record sales have been in the U.S. as imports -- which is partly why the band is in New York playing a series of dates before touring Britain.
The spirit of Syd Barrett -- Pink Floyd's founding loony -- hangs heavily over The Soft Boys. Hitchcock's vocal resemblance to Barrett (who has been inactive since 1970) was played up for Can Of Bees' lyrical and musical oddities. By Moonlight, the band had established its own identity to the point where the Barrett influence isn't immediately evident (although Barrett's "Vegetable Man" is a B-side to their "Kingdom Of Love" 45, and "Astronomy Domine" often turns up as a Soft Boys encore).
"Inasmuch as Syd isn't anywhere," Hitchcock explains, "he can follow you around without taking too much baggage. He's always around the corner, but we just don't see him. So we have to put up with him." Clear?
If the trend-hungry UK music press ever decides it's time for a psychedelic revival, The Soft Boys will be the first to benefit. Hitchcock is not overly sanguine: "I don't think there will be a psychedelic revival. Reviving something means that it's not entirely fresh, but perhaps if it gets to a new bunch of people it will become fresh."
Guitarist Rew picks up Hitchcock's point: "There might be a revival or there might not, but it won't make any difference what we sing, what we play, or what our attitude is."
Hitchcock sums up what The Soft Boys are doing and how they try to do it. "If there's any real point to make, it's just that Pop music flowered, then degenerated, and it still hasn't picked up from the point it degenerated to. Psychedelia was great, but it was also destruction -- the end of Pop music. After that, people gave up on tunes, and it became endless jams. Rock became heavy and meandering, whle Pop became light and fluttery. There was this explosion in '77, but it hasn't yet set things to right. We work from the point of Psychedelia -- and we want to carry forth from that point -- and do it right -- rather than imploding like Syd, or degenerating into long jams or trashy Pop music. That's what I'm trying to do. I know where we come from, so half the road is complete -- even if I don't know exactly where the future lies."
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