1993
The Soft Boys 1976-81
by Bill Holdship
One of legendary Rock writer Lester Bangs' most famous pieces ends with the line: "It's just that some people are recognized in their own time, and some aren't." Bangs was referring to the Count Five of "Psychotic Reaction" fame, but he could've just as easily been referring to any number of bands that made a difference in the history of Rock 'n' Roll. It's just that not many people realized it at the time. At this point, any such list would have to include Robyn Hitchcock and The Soft Boys.
When we put Hitchcock on the cover of the old Creem magazine in early 1987, we knew that the former lead Soft Boy's face would probably sell...oh, maybe 15 copies of that particular issue. An independent American label had just licensed to release Hitchcock's post-Soft Boys LPs in the U.S., but with the exception of a very small cult following, most people -- including most Rock fans -- had still never heard of him at the time. A full year earlier, however, Creem had proclaimed that Hitchcock might be like Lou Reed in that his influence will begin to really be appreciated ten or more years down the road. Even then, though, some people were already referring to Hitchcock as "the father of the psychedelic revival", thanks primarily to The Soft Boys' influence on a growing number of American and British "Alternative" bands.
"I think The Soft Boys may have been like The Velvet Underground of their time in that we were going in the opposite direction of everyone else," Hitchcock said in 1987, in response to that possibility. "I suppose The Soft Boys are having an effect on people now with the 'Paisley Underground' movement in L.A. (and all that). Of course, lumping them all together is a bit of an insult to those bands, because they're all different. One of the few things they all have in common is they know The Soft Boys. They've heard our stuff. But I personally wouldn't really call it a 'psychedelic revival'. The word 'psychedelic' is bandied around unwisely, if you ask me. I don't really know what it is yet."
Whatever it was, The Replacements were asking him to produce some of the sessions that would eventually become Tim. "They approached me," he recalls, "but by the time I responded, they'd got Alex Chilton instead. From what I've heard of The Replacements, though, I don't know that I'd have been able to do much for them. I think we'd have all gotten uncontrollably drunk, and that would have been it." Nevertheless, the 'Mats included a drunken version of Hitchcock's "Ye Sleeping Knights Of Jesus" on their live Twin/Tone cassette, The Shit Hits The Fans -- and they also recorded a version of the Soft Boys' "I Wanna Destroy You" (which was never released). The latter song, in fact, has become a cover staple among "underground" bands over the years, ranging from The Comsat Angels to Buglamp (the current L.A. band fronted by former Circle Jerk Keith Morris). Let's Talk About Girls -- another current L.A. club favorite -- regularly throws The Soft Boys' "Queen Of Eyes" into their sets.
The strongest evidence of how pervasive Hitchcock's influence has become, however, is the mainstream success of R.E.M.. Peter Buck has often said that R.E.M. was more influenced by The Soft Boys than they were by The Byrds -- and it's an influence that's grown into a friendship over the years. The band asked Hitchcock to be the opening act on their first mega-tour after signing with Warner Brothers. Michael Stipe sang backup vocals on a recent Hitchcock release, while Buck has actually toured as second guitarist in The Egyptians (Hitchcock's current band, which -- with Andy Metcalfe on bass, keyboards and vocals, and Morris Windsor on drums and vocals -- is basically the same unit as the original Soft Boys, excluding lead guitarist Kimberley Rew).
Brain Eno once suggested that even though not many people bought that first Velvet Underground album, everyone who did eventually went out and formed their own band. Perhaps the Soft Boys' influence hasn't been on quite the same level, but the fact of the matter is that Rock 'n' Roll itself isn't on quite the same level it was in 1967 (when The Velvet Underground's first LP was released). Nevertheless, when one compares Hitchcock's influence today to his influence in the mid-to-late-'70s -- when nearly every "underground"/"Alternative" musical group was classified as a "cult" band -- an argument could be made for The Soft Boys as the last real Rock "cult" band. For Hitchcock as Rock's last real "cult" artist.
Like The Velvet Underground -- who went against the love 'n' peace vibe of their time -- The Soft Boys were definitely an anomaly when they formed in Cambridge, England in late 1976 -- right during the birth of Britain's Punk Rock revolution. Ten years later, Hitchcock recalled those times: "When Punk came along, it looked like it was going to knock all the turgid stuff out the window. Unfortunately, Punk went the wrong way. If you look at Dylan and The Beatles, they both had a strong backlog of material by other artists. Their roots went really deep, and they drew on a lot of different things. The Sex Pistols, however, were based on Iggy Pop and only a few other things. There was no love of music involved in that. And so they weren't able to develop. They could do one thing really well, and that was it. They got a disproportionate amount of media attetnion, and Rock history changed for the worse for ten years or so. Punk was justifiably negative, because the times were so negative. But it was a horrible time for Rock to be negative. Rock 'n' Roll didn't need to be destroyed. It needed to be nourished.
"When I was growing up, everyone still wrote within a disciplined framework. The drugs, Dylan, and all that all arrived together...and it just exploded! For about a year, it was incredible. Unfortunately, what made it great was also what destroyed it. Everyone got introverted. They got caught up in meaningless jams and laid-back, West Coast self-pity. I was learning my craft right then -- I started writing songs in the early-'70s -- and I drew on a tradition to create what I do. I'd never thought of being a songwriter before I started doing it. But I had learned hundreds of songs by other people.
"So then Punk came along to change the bad things that Psychedelia had wrought. But -- speaking for the other three members of the band as well -- we couldn't un-learn our craft and suddenly pretend that we knew only one chord. We were interested in three-part harmonies, and middle eights, and bridges (and all the rest of it). And then it went from Punk to Defunk and Talking Heads (and all that). But there still weren't many songs. The only songs out there seemed to be left to the Top 20 (which was still based on the Tin Pan Alley instinct). And we never really felt part of any of that, either. So I guess you could say that, musically, The Soft Boys were, sort of, a reaction to everything that was going on around us at the time."
Hitchcock was an art school dropout when he arrived in Cambridge in late 1974 to try to find musicians to put together a band. His parents had first met in that city when they were attending the university there, but Hitchcock claims that even though he was born in West London in 1953, "I really don't come from anywhere." He was the product of a proper, British, all-male boarding school ("An interesting form of emotional atrophy," he says today. "They cripple your mind, and then they send you out to run the country,") as well as a father who was a writer, humorist, cartoonist and painter -- with ideas that sound as though they'd be at home in one of Hitchcock's later songs. "He wrote a book in which Stonehenge was stolen by the British version of the CIA. They removed it, and anyone who saw what they did was rounded up. And then Merlin the magician suddenly shows up as a stoned-out hippie. He wrote another one in which people had sex organs in their armpits, and a woman gives birth to a tire." Suffice it to say that by the time Hitchcock reached Cambridge, his worldview was already a little bit...well, eccentric.
Not long after his arrival, Hitchcock began playing every weekend at Cambridge's Portland Arms Folk Club, where he began meeting the crew who'd eventually form The Soft Boys. Actually, Hitchcock ended up "inheriting" The Soft Boys from Rob Lamb, the band's original guitarist and something of "an arbitrator of taste" on the local music scene. "I used to try to get anybody I could to play onstage with me and do whatever songs I'd written -- which really weren't all that good at the time," Hitchcock recalls. "I'd already met Andy Metcalfe at the club. But we were in different camps, because Andy was playing Bluegrass. Not long after I began playing the club, I was told by a friend of mine -- who was called 'The Great One' -- that there was this very talented guy on the local scene named 'Morris Windsor', who I should meet.
"Morris was very quiet, but everyone thought he was very cool. Rob Lamb was Morris' friend, and he heard my demo tape and basically offered to lend me the new band he was forming (which included Andy and Morris). Then he waited around to see what the artistic community was going to make of this local, eccentric folkie and his material. Now, you have to understand, these guys were the serious musical types. They knew Steely Dan and Little Feat, and lots of people I didn't know anything about. I was perceived as this, sort of, wayward individual. And the musos didn't like it at all. As a result, Rob panicked and he left. He said I could keep the band for a while, but I think he thought they'd come back to him. Morris and Andy and I were getting on quite well, though, and they both decided to stay. They all knew licks and harmonies and the like -- and I was kind of a primitive at the time. Not a primitive, really. But it took me 18 chords to get where it takes me one chord to get to today. And they didn't think I was a good enough guitarist -- which I wasn't at the time. So we recruited a new lead guitarist."
Said guitarist was one Alan Davies, AKA "Wangbo Trotter", another friend of Morris' -- this one from Gloucester. The band had been playing its first gigs with Rob Lamb under the name Dennis And The Experts. But with Lamb's exit, some change was definitely in order. "We didn't know what we were doing, really," recalls Hitchcock. "We were mainly doing covers -- stuff like Jerry Lee Lewis' 'It'll Be Me'; 'Heartbreak Hotel'; 'Substitute', by The Who; 'The Shape I'm In', by The Band; 'Clear Spot', by Captain Beefheart; 'Station To Staion', by David Bowie; and a few of my songs (which hadn't really got to 'Go' yet). They were mostly elaborate novelty songs -- 'Wey Wey Hep Uh Hole', "Give Me A Spanner, Ralph', 'It's Not Just The Size Of A Walnut'. Stuff like that."
Elaborate novelty numbers or not, the new band was now taking itself more seriously -- they were playing the local pubs and doing "the usual hustling to try to get stuff put out in London" -- and not long after recruiting Davies, they recorded a demo tape in Hitchcock's Cambridge living room. Which led to an EP for the independent Raw Records -- and EP that was titled Give It To The Soft Boys.
"The first gig we did with Alan, I announced onstage that we were now called 'The Soft Boys', and not 'Dennis And The Experts' anymore," Robyn explains. "I'd just made up that song right before the gig. The concept, really, was, kind of, science fiction in nature. I envisioned these crawling, bloodless, boneless, and colorless things that had a lot of power -- but which were invisible. And they had some kind of an unpleasant erotic appeal. Sort of, William Burroughs outtakes, is what they were supposed to be. That was the idea. But it had never actually occurred to me that we would be The Soft Boys until I just said onstage, 'Okay, now we're The Soft Boys.' Which I regretted after a while, because it seemed incredibly wet. It also implied that we were a bunch of wimps. And we were, in a sense. We were all a bunch of very non-confrontational, uptight, middle-class kids. When everyone else was throwing beer glasses at the stage and putting safety pins through their noses, all we wanted to do was eat cucumber sandwiches. In those days, we opened every show with 'Give It To The Soft Boys', and we always closed with Elvis' 'Heartbreak Hotel' (via John Cale). We were wet, when you think about it. But we weren't by the time The Soft Boys finished, because we had to stick through and deal with a lot."
Whatever they were doing, it seemed to be working. The Soft Boys soon became one of the most popular bands in Cambridge, particularly respected for Hitchcock's onstage sense of humor. The other big Cambridge band at the time was The Waves, which was led by local guitar hero Kimberley Rew (and which had preceded The Soft Boys on the town's music scene). "They had good harmonies, and Kimberley was an excellent lead guitarist," Robyn remembers. "To me, they always sounded like The Kinks -- but with much heavier drums and guitar. Sort of, The Kinks meeting Jimi Hendrix. By this time, The Soft Boys had evolved a great deal from that first EP. Maybe it was because we just rehearsed so much. Whatever the case, I'd always had this concept of doing stuff with a, sort of, Captain Beefheart approach, where you'd have two guitars doing totally different things (as opposed to just lead and rhythm).
"Plus, it was the summer of New Wave, and my girlfriend told me, 'God, look at what's happening in music now. You should speed things up a little bit.' We all went to London to Dingwall's [One of the longest-running London music clubs] that summer, where we saw The Vibrators. Not the most macho Punk group there was -- but it was amazing! They played 15 songs in half an hour. It was all that high-speed, intense, Punk kind of thing. So when we got back to Cambridge, we decided to speed the whole thing up. We got spikier (and personally, I also got more paranoid for various reasons). So it all got more unpleasant and less whimsical. And more elaborate, but condensed. The Waves were floundering at the time, and we'd just released an EP -- which got us lots of attention in Cambridge. Their singer was sick, and the band just began to disintegrate. And we'd had our eye on Kimberley for a long time. Alan was okay, but he wasn't anything special. So we had to fire Alan. And suddenly Kimberley Rew was a Soft Boy.
"It really wasn't that constructive of a move in the long run, though. I remember playing somewhere in London a few months later. Rob Lamb was there, and he yelled, 'Suicide's a great thing, isn't it, Robyn?' The chemistry wasn't the same after we lost Alan. Kimberley was very, very good as a guitarist. But he just, sort of, overloaded the whole thing, basically. He spoke through his guitar. And the whole thing got incredibly heavy. He, kind of, kicked the whole thing up -- but it was all driven up to 11. You know what I mean?"
Nevertheless, Radar Records was impressed enough with the new Soft Boys to make them one of the first bands signed to that London-based label. The band went into the studio and recorded numerous tracks for an LP, but the only thing that was ever released was a single of "(I Wanna Be An) Anglepoise Lamp". Hitchcock: "That was Radar's idea. They released that one because it was Power Pop. We thought the best song from that session was actually 'Where Are The Prawns?'. But they released what they thought sounded closest to what other people might be listening to, rather than what we were good at doing. That's a problem that's dogged us throughout the years.
"We kept trying to make the LP, but it didn't seem to ever fit in with how we sounded -- because we were very loud and very variable. And we couldn't find the right producer. We couldn't find a manager. We just didn't fit in with any of those things. We weren't the kind of organism that could be absorbed into show business and take off. It was very frustrating for us -- as well as the people involved with us. As a result, we suffered the consequences for many, many years."
The band eventually completed an album for Radar, but the label decided to scrap it. Sometimes referred to as the "Legendary Lost Album" ("Legendary only because it was too bad to release," Hitchcock has said), some of the songs would end up on the band's later, posthumous Invisible Hits LP. "Quite a bit of good stuff was done for Radar, actually," Robyn recalls. "The big problem was we just kept recording stuff over and over again until it got sterile. For instance, 'Sandra's Having Her Brain Out' was done about five different times. And by the time it came out on A Can Of Bees, it was probably too mechanical. It had lost its edge." Radar and The Soft Boys soon parted company. The band, after all, had spent a lot of the label's money, and a single was all Radar had to show for its efforts. "So after that, we just decided to be ourselves, and damn what everyone else might think," says Hitchcock. "We went into the studio and recorded all this rather indigestible stuff. And that's what became the Can Of Bees LP. Which is great...just as long as you take it in small doses."
The Soft Boys' first album was released on the independent Two Crabs label in 1979. More than any of their other albums, A Can Of Bees probably best demonstrates what Hitchcock meant in later years when he said: "The Soft Boys really evoked only one emotion -- and that was psychosis. A lot of the earlier stuff was terribly psychotic." Although all of his earliest works reveal a developing talented artist at work; this quirky, eccentric, Beefheart-like LP was the sound of entropy (or of things falling apart). It's easy to understand even today why the music wasn't all that accessible, especially to the Punk Rock audience. As Hitchcock has said repeatedly, the band's sound was a reaction to everything that was going on around them at the time.
Two live performances captured on tape during that same period may better illustrate what The Soft Boys' appeal was all about at the time. An all-acoustic gig at The Portland Arms Folk Club -- recorded "on somebody's portable tape-recorder" -- displayed some of the humor that turned the band into local Cambridge heroes, including as it did crazy covers of Elvis Presley's "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" and The Monotones' doo-wop classic "Book Of Love" (the latter of which, in this context, could be looked at as a precursor to Hitchcock's later "Uncorrected Personality Traits"). A tape of this show was later offered by mail-order only to purchasers of the Invisible Hits LP. That same month, the band recorded another show -- this one electric -- at the Lady Mitchell Hall -- a small concert venue in Cambridge -- mixing Hitchcock's original material from A Can Of Bees with choice covers (including a version of Lou Reed's "Caroline Says II").
The band began working on a new album shortly thereafter. But not long after the release of A Can Of Bees, Andy Metcalfe decided to quit the band. Hitchcock explains that the bassist wasn't happy with the direction in which The Soft Boys seemed headed. "As I've said, Kimberley was so competent that he made the group sound very top-heavy," he recalls. "As a result, we could now sound like The Byrds, or The Beatles, or whoever it was we wanted to sound like at the time. The tradeoff was we, sort of, became a very high-grade covers band, (combined with this, sort of, psychotic coven). The other side of it was we would go into these long, ten-minute, howling jams onstage -- and the volume of the guitars would just, kind of, drown everything else out. It wasn't a happy combination. All of us were much too similar (but not in a compatible sort of way)."
Matthew Seligman played the very first gig Hitchcock had done with Rob Lamb as Dennis And The Experts -- but the bassist was committed to another Cambridge band at the time. An accomplished musician, Seligman had played with Alex Chilton And The Local Heroes, and he turned down a stint in New Wave star Bruce ("Video Killed The Radio Star") Wooley's band to replace Metcalfe in The Soft Boys. The band had already finished two-thirds of a new album by the time Andy left. "At which point," recalls Robyn, "we were playing Heavy Metal Death Folk (for lack of a better description). Things were difficult for us then -- within the band and within the business of the band. What was happening at the time was Joy Division, The Ruts, and Gang Of Four. And we just weren't on the musical map. It's sort of like [The Damned's] Captain Sensible later said: we were doing the right thing at the wrong time. So we'd recorded a bunch of songs in Cambridge during April of '79, after which Andy left. A week later, we got Matthew in. And we did a bunch of more Pop-y sort of things. 'He's A Reptile' (and things like that). But now it wasn't very cohesive. So there was an album's worth of material that just laid around for a few years."
That album would eventually be released in 1983 as Invisible Hits, which only added fuel to the cult that was growing around the already-defunct Soft Boys. Before disbanding, however, the band went into the studio to cut one final album -- and they emerged with one of the classic Rock LPs of the 1980s. Underwater Moonlight -- which was originally released on the Armageddon label in mid-1980 -- was the place were The Soft Boys' vision totally clicked, and the band's '60s-influenced Pop sensibilities merged perfectly with Hitchcock's brilliant non-sequiturs. Not only that, but the album was one of Rock's great guitar records, right in a league with historical antecedents like The Byrds and The Rolling Stones.
"I remember sitting in the VW with Matthew," recalls Robyn, "and he said, 'Look, let's make this one brilliant album. The world can then end -- but at least we'll know we made it.' It was a bad time from a political perspective. Russia had just invaded Afghanistan. The hostage thing was going on in Iran. Cold War paranoia had finally struck all over the place. Thatcher and Reagan had just got in. I wasn't writing things based around these problems, but the atmosphere was bad at the time. When you look at it, the political reality is probably much worse right now than it was then. But everyone's got used to it. But I saw it all as just one more blow to the cortex of the '60s (or whatever). Things were so bad, in fact, that I wrote 'Positive Vibrations' because I just wanted to reverse it, y'know? I think the dog had been put down that day, as well. I had a hangover, the dog was dead, and the world was ending. So I wrote that song.
But we didn't know the album would eventually be considered a classic when we were recording it. We weren't much in an ego position at that stage of the game. What I do remember, though, is recording 'Kingdom Of Love', and thinking immediately afterwards, 'God, I might go to Hell, but this is great!' Basically, though, we just did what we did. We had no idea it would become this...meaningless.
"We made that record for less than 600 quid," he continues. "[Producer] Pat Collier made a deal with somebody so we could record it, but we didn't have much money to subsidize it. We got a great guitar sound, but we didn't get much of a bass-and-drum sound on it. Most of it was done on 8-track -- and you have to remember that this was the era of Steve Lillywhite and the gated snare sound (and all that). We needed the proper sound to get noticed at that time, but we didn't have the money to achieve it."
As a result, The Soft Boys never caught on throughout the rest of Britain (even today, there seems to be a certain bias against Hitchcock among certain members of the press in his native land). In fact, over half of Underwater Moonlight's total sales came via U.S. imports. So, after the band had spent two years playing the Hope And Anchor (North London's legendary pub that had given a start to Dr. Feelgood, The Stranglers, The Damned, Evlis Costello, The Specials, Madness, and the like), it was off to America for a series of New York shows.
The band even merited a feature in Trouser Press during that tour, at which time Hitchcock explained the group to that publication's Tim Sommer: "We work from the point of Psychedelia -- and we want to carry on from that point [Where Psychedelia originally started] and do it right [this time], rather than imploding like Syd Barrett, or degenerating into long jams or trashy Pop music." The magazine predicted that if there was ever a psychedelic revival, "The Soft Boys will be the first to benefit." If only they had known....
The final tracks The Soft Boys recorded together were the terrific "Only The Stones Remain", which almost celebrates the concept of mortality; and a cover of The Byrds' version of "The Bells Of Rhymney". Both songs were eventually fleshed out with three other tracks and five live tracks from the aforementioned Hope And Anchor gig in London, and posthumously released by Armageddon in 1981 as Two Halves For The Price Of One. "We just petered out after Underwater Moonlight," Robyn explains. "When Andy was in the band, I felt we had to come up with something different to keep him interested. He always wanted an angle on things, which is what made the original Soft Boys quite exciting and unique. After he left, it was more just a band playing my songs. There was perhaps a future for us in The States, but the whole thing didn't really feel like it was going to get anywhere.
"I started to make Black Snake Diamond Role [His first solo LP] on my own, and Matthew helped me out on that one. He, sort of, masterminded my second LP, Groovy Decay, as well. But not long after that, he joined The Thompson Twins (when they were still a seven-piece unit) and he supplied me with [Bassist] Sara Lee [B-52s, Gang Of Four] because he wasn't going to be around." The solo albums, although brilliant, didn't sell any better than The Soft Boys' releases, and, frustrated with the business, Hitchcock retired from music for two years. He wrote lyrics for his friend, Captain Sensible -- "That kept me afloat, financially" -- and continued his drawing and painting. He eventually returned to the studio, recording the all-acoustic, all-masterful I Often Dream Of Trains -- sort of his Plastic Ono Band in concept and technique.
It was at this time, in 1984, that The Soft Boys' first EP was re-released in England under the title of Wading Through A Ventilator. "I heard that," recalls Robyn, "and it just suddenly seemed to me that we had been extremely good -- but somehow we'd got lost along the way. And made me think that getting back together with Andy and Morris might be a good idea. After getting I Often Dream Of Trains out of my system, I decided I wanted to make another Rock record. So who better to do it with than Andy and Morris? We hadn't played together in five years, but it was like one day's rehearsal, and BANG!. It was really fresh all over again." Thus was born Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians, through which The Soft Boys' cult and legend has continued to thrive and grow. The band, in fact, recently sold out the Hollywood Palace and has made several appearances on Late Night With David Letterman -- which, when you think about it, is a long, long way for the band that once actually tried to be an "alternative" to the Rock Alternative during its earlier existence.
Other former Soft Boys haven't done badly themselves. Matthew Seligman went on to play with Thomas Dolby (on Blinded By Science), David Bowie (at Live Aid), Morrissey, and Chrissie Hynde (amongst others). As for Kimberley Rew, following a 1982 solo release, The Bible Of Bop -- which featured the dB's as his backing band -- the guitarist went on to form Katrina And The Waves, with lead vocalist Katrina Leskanich. The band managed to score two major American hits with "Walking On Sunshine" and "Going Down To Liverpool" (the latter in the form of a Bangles cover version). As for Rob Lamb, Hitchcock believes the former Cambridge tastemaker is a computer programmer somewhere in Australia these days.
Robyn Hitchcock: "One of the problems that led me to stop doing music after The Soft Boys was that people kept saying, 'Look, if you sounded more like The Pyschedelic Furs....' Or, 'Why don't you get a groove like Haircut 100 (or something)?' 'You write lovely melodies Robyn, why don't you turn into somebody else?' But that's not what I'm about. What I'm about is something long and inevitable -- and I haven't finished yet. But it's a very long train, and you can't see the beginning or the end of it. It's just, sort of, endlessly pulling through the station. One day, it'll stop, and somebody'll get out and explain everything."
"The damage that we do is just so powerfully strong, they call it love/And the damage that we do it just goes on and on and on/Not long enough"
--Robyn Hitchcock, "Insanely Jealous"
Even more so than with Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians (which is saying a lot), The Soft Boys' musical legacy often comes across as weird and eccentric. But also never anything less than promising. Not too many people have been able to explain what it was all about -- least of all Hitchcock himself. Of course, you can already hear a fine songwriter on those earliest demo tapes and on the Give It To The Soft Boys EP. But also one that was just beginning to develop (as well as one with a very British -- almost Monty Pythonesque -- sense of the absurd). You can also already hear the two major themes that have continued to develop throughout Hitchcock's career: death, and the potentially pyschotic side of sex and modern romance. Or as the lines from "Insanely Jealous" above illustrate, love 'n' death in 4/4. With harmonies, no less. What fun!
There was also the unspoken element of dealing with all things that are hideous and horrible about being human, as well as nature in general (an argument could be made that both death and the potentially psychotic side of sex fits well in that category) -- which Hitchcock sometimes expressed by using such objects as insects, reptiles, and, especially, sea creatures. "I get the feeling that a lot of my early stuff was really depressing," he once said, "because it was based on a negative viewpoint about being human. All my stuff wishes that it was anything else but human." As for the sea creatures? "I like fish," he once told Creem's John Kordosh, "because they represent a lot of things. There's the spiritual representation -- the early Christians used the sign of the fish. They're also quite funny. Fish make people laugh. They're very sexual, very phallic. And they're also very beautiful to look at (or hideous). That is, they're very evocative. And then there's the Piscean symbol of the fish going in two opposite directions at the same time -- which, sort of, symbolizes the perversity of things. And truth is perverse. Our brains aren't designed to deal at all with logic, or the way things really are. Which is why great philosophers and people go insane all the time. I know how people work, and they're a lot more bizarre than shrimps."
All of which sounds pretty heavy, if a tad whimsical. And The Soft Boys' early stuff was a little more cynical and less comical than Hitchcock's later solo material with The Egyptians. "The problem with cynicism," he later explained, "is it's always comfortable. And it gives you an excuse to then become what you despise." Nevertheless, even with the early Soft Boys, Hitchcock managed to avoid morbidity due to his sense of humor and melodic gifts. His three biggest influences have always been said to be Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett, John Lennon, and Bob Dylan. And he manages to merge some of their best -- albeit most darkly comic ("groovy decay", as he titled one of his LPs) -- aspects into his own music and lyrics. From the beginning, he was aiming for a form of Psychedelic (or Pscyho-delic) Pop. "We used to go to Robyn's house and learn entire Beatles albums," Andy Metcalfe recalls. And you can still hear The Egyptians cover tunes like The Fab Four's "Rain" or "Dr. Robert" during their soundchecks today.
It must have been a bit difficult for Hitchcock to come of age when he did, as he was a Rock 'n' Roll artist at a time when Rock 'n' Roll was no longer the world's primary Pop art form. "When I was a kid, the thing to be was a Rock musician," he once told Spin's Deborah Frost. "Nowadays, though, it's settled back down into entertainment again. It's show business. It's Tin Pan Alley. In those days, it was like prophets of a new consciousness. Dylan, Lennon, and The Beatles -- comparisons to 'The Waste Land' (and stuff like that)." After all, Hitchcock was a Rock artist with not only a strong literary sensibility (his later songs would explore territories previously explored by such British writers as J.G. Ballard and Noel Coward), but someone with very strong Pop musical roots as well. The Byrds, The Incredible String Band, and Captain Beefheart have all been brought up in relationship to his music, but his Rock roots run much deeper than that.
Even though The Soft Boys' intentional aim was to pervert conventional Rock forms: "He's A Reptile", from Invisible Hits, features a classic '50s-Rock chord progression, with a Phil Spector-like chorus; while "Have A Heart, Betty (I'm Not Fireproof)", from the same LP, is actually Beach Boysesque, featuring a capella vocals and a '50s-ish shuffle. And speaking of '50s roots, The Soft Boys not only covered the various Elvis tunes found on this anthology, but also "All Shook Up" and Elvis' cover of Junior Parker's "Mystery Train" (by way of Robbie Robertson). "Rock 'n' Roll Toilet", meanwhile, is a raucous Rolling Stones kind of thing, even as it begins to explore the contempt Hitchcock has for the modern cliched trappings of Rock 'n' Roll, as well as Rock success in general (a theme that would be developed even more on the brilliant "Trash" from his later Invisible Hitchcock LP).
Of course, it's been said before, and it'll be said again: Underwater Moonlight is the place where all of The Soft Boys' diverse elements and Hitchcock's thematic concepts came together to create a bona fide masterpiece. "Kingdom Of Love", which is still a staple in The Egyptians' shows to this day, is perhaps the best, most vivid -- not to mention most perverse -- interpretation of romantic/sexual obsession and rejection to come along since Lou Reed's "The Gift", from The Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat LP. And along those same lines, the "Queen Of Eyes", with her carapace shell and her black-lace thighs, is the best and most vivid femme fatale to come along in a Rock song since...well, since Uncle Lou's own "Femme Fatale", "There She Goes Again", or "Venus In Furs". Hitchcock even got topical and/or political on Underwater Moonlight with the trashy "I Wanna Destroy You" -- the "you" in question being everyone from the forces that would create war to the media in general.
For his part, however, Hitchcock is fairly modest. Or perhaps he really just doesn't know what it's all about. "I just present it and then other people interpret it as they will," he has said. "I don't really know why these things are there. I'm not always trying to make a point. I work fairly subconsciously or unconsciously. I mean, I'm a vehicle for whatever wants to be said. I don't know if that's a cop-out, but I think you tend to come out with the truth better if you're not trying to interfere with it. I simply recycle what is happening around me. Literally, any old thing.
"I suspect there might be a lot of magic involved. I think when people used to draw pictures in primitive times, some drew to illustrate stuff, but others drew as a form of incantation, as a form of trying to sum up what they were drawing. Or to try to get rid of things. Why did they draw demons, and the flames of Hell, and all that? To try to drive them away, or get them out of their heads. And it was very powerful stuff. Likewise, I think magic incantations have a lot to do with writing -- whether you're trying to summon something up, or trying to get rid of something. You recreate the world outside, and you then filter it back through you. And I have very wide pores -- I let all sort of things in, and the stuff then comes out -- undigested -- straight to the public. I'm not really digesting it carefully because it all comes back in recognizable forms. But then, a lot of other people digest it, and it just comes out as a need for money or a glorification of sex. Which are also important things, when you think about it, because money and sex are both deeply psychotic.
"But at the time I was writing The Soft Boys' stuff, those songs really didn't have any meaning. I don't go for meaning, even though I've tried. I've written songs like 'I Wonder What It'll Be Like Being Blown To Bits', and songs about the death of Margaret Thatcher, and all kinds of things (which Morrissey has always done far better). But it just didn't work for me. The nature of my songwriting is that it doesn't work if I try to cue it in for it to be about a specific topic. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like my songs are messages from the future. Which is really scary. The odd songs like "I Wanna Destroy You" were just written because things were so godawful at the time that you couldn't miss it. But so much of what people call 'politics' is economics -- and economics is a virus. So how do you put all of that in a song? I'm just not that clever."
Clever or not, what Robyn Hitchcock has hit upon by tapping into the themes of death and sex in his music is the basis of all modern neurosis. It might be explained thusly: little children aren't afraid of death because they don't know death yet. And little children aren't neurotic. And, of course, as everyone knows, sex (and the accompanying sexual hangups) only later complicate things. "My music isn't designed for children," Hitchcock once said. "It's desigend for adults as children." As for this obsession with death: "It's the only thing that you can't get away from, and the one thing you can never know," he says. "It's, sort of, the Christmas present that no one ever gets to unwrap and find out what it is. Some people are desparate for it, and others will save it until the end -- you know, the last minute on Christmas day -- and then they open it. Others can't wait, and they want to open it when they get up the first thing Christmas morning. That's, sort of, the fascination and the inescapability of it. Therefore, I can't think of any single thing that's more fascinating than death. All religions concentrate on death. And, of coure, death relates totally to all the insecurities that you have. You don't need religion when you're young because you have your parents. But then you grow up, and you constantly have to deal with the insecurity of carrying on a life that could suddenly be meaninglessly terminated at any minute."
And in our own current horrible and hideous age of AIDS -- an age in which sex can actually be equated with death -- you might say that Hitchcock and The Soft Boys were further ahead of their time -- at least thematically -- than anyone could ever have imagined when they were first making their music. "Messages from the future", indeed.
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