Basementlife.com
March 17, 2001
The Soft Boys
It's St. Patrick's Day closing in on 10:00 p.m. in the Austin Music hall, during the frenzied SXSW music conference. The venue is hosting the Matador showcase, featuring the newly reformed Soft Boys, Mogwai, and Stephen Malkumus. The huge hall, a giant barn-like structure, is swarming with humanity. The place is full, but not packed; maybe a fourth fewer heads than at the Ryan Adams Rawk And Roll show the night before.
The respectful crowd, buzzing but not on fire, waits as the roadies and other techs finalize the stage for The Soft Boys, looking much like the construction workers from Fraggle Rock. It's nearly time for the fabled band to take the stage, the first public performance of the band that produced the seminal Underwater Moonlight in over twenty years. There has been a good buzz about the show -- both word-of-mouth and in the Austin Chronicle -- which has produced an amalgamated audience composed of the curious, the converted, and the ambivalent: people waiting for their favorite band to grace the stage. The lights go down. People are yelling in anticipation. Some clap unconsciously. But something is not quite right.
Robyn Hitchcock, speaking from his Detroit Hotel room eleven days later, explains the first strained moment of their triumphant return: "There were a bit of technical problems at the beginning. We were going to walk on one by one and start playing. And somewhat immaculately Moris went on, and then Matthew went on. But his amp didn't work. And it was going to be me next, but Kimberly went on instead and started playing, because Matthew was inaudible. So I got there, and my guitar wasn't on either. So there we were, for the first time in twenty years, and half of us were dead sound-wise."
The show is good -- not great, the crowd trying hard to find a reason to dance in place. The sound is tinny and the Boys are dwarfed by the stage -- Hitchcock and Rew may as well be in different venues. There is that much space between the musicians.
Kimberley Rew, with an almost cliched English drawl, gives his two cents about the show: "Um, the stage was kind of full of equipment belonging to other groups. The whole place was like a huge barn. It was a festival gig, really. And it was also our first gig. So it was not totally bulletproof on that stage. The audience is there to see a number of bands in different
styles, and you get on and you get off very quickly. And it's your first gig -- as opposed to now, where it's The Soft Boys' audience, and it's your call. You see a lot of smiling faces."
To be fair, it is the first time this incarnation of the Soft Boys has played live in twenty years. One must remember also that the band -- Robyn Hitchcock, songwriter, guitar and vocal; Kimberley Rew, lead guitar; Matthew Seligman, bass; and Morris Windsor, drums -- are touring behind a seminal-but-obscure album released in 1980. A record that was out of print until Matador and the band decided to re-release Underwater Moonlight.
Rewind to England, 1980. Punk is king. Harmony and musical acumen are punishable offenses. Hitchcock and the Boys playing smart funny complex music, touched by Syd Barrett and The Byrds -- to just give an overview of the sound -- were woefully out-of-step with the Punk revolution.
When I asked Robyn about a general Punk audience's reaction to a Soft Boys show, he spits bile. "Punks spat at you if they liked you and they spat at you if they didn't. I'm a physically timid person, and I didn't like having the microphone smashed in my mouth and being menaced by people in the audience. It was a drag. I'm a musician, not a street fighter. The whole thing was bogus. It was all engineered by middle class people pretending they weren't. It just became a product -- but a rather brutal product."
Hitchcock nicely sums up the situation in the comprehensive liner notes for Underwater Moonlight written by David Fricke. The quote reads: "We were the wrong ship on the wrong planet."
Hitchcock's twenty-plus-year career has always reflected an insular sensibility, seemingly unaffected by trends in popular culture. Beginning with the quasi-psychedelic The Soft Boys in the late-'70s, Hitchcock and crew were making music that forecasted "Alternative" music of the mid-to-late-80s, rather than reflecting Punk. It's a familiar story: the
band, out of step with other musical happenings, was largely missed in its time. Playing only songs from the wonderful but largely interior Underwater Moonlight in the cavernous hall was a twofold mistake. While the band played their hearts out, Kimberley Rew resembling a Muppet version of Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap, bopping up and down and displaying great chops and high energy. The song selection and the venue choice didn't do justice to this great old band.
Unfortunately The Soft Boys were a mere blip on the Rock 'n' Roll radar, quietly dissolving in 1981. Hitchcock attests: "I don't think anyone even noticed when we split up." Fortunately they left behind a brilliant gem, Underwater Moonlight. This album, while never a financial success, refused to die. And this document of the band and their music went on to
inspire many a young musician. Like the Velvet Underground and Big Star, The Soft Boys' music, especially Underwater Moonlight would not go away.
Only years later when bands like R.E.M. paid homage to Hitchcock and The Soft Boys, in part by taking Hitchcock on the road for their Green Tour, did the band and the man begin to get their due.
Underwater Moonlight itself is something to behold. To quote again from Fricke's erudite liner notes, "We can listen to these songs now and wonder why the world did not freeze in astonishment. The audacious opening of 'I Wanna Destroy You', a sunlit whirl of guitars coated in Beach Boys vocal chrome; 'Kingdom Of Love', a sweet slap of sexual tension and exploding-Byrds chorales; the way Hitchcock wired the emotional electricity and metaphor of Syd Barrett and '66 Bob Dylan into his own rich language of love and self-examination."
The re-issue features the album proper, an album length compilation of outtakes, and another album's worth of rehearsal tapes. It is a two-CD-three-LP celebration of Underwater Moonlight and that incarnation of the band. It was recorded for very little money, something in the rage on £700; it is an idie masterpiece before that term even existed. The
Trouser Press Record Guide writes this about the album: "Underwater Moonlight is one of the New Wave's finest half-dozen albums and unquestionably its most unjustly underrated one."
Robyn remembers those days of drudgery and uses imagery of a salmon swimming upstream to describe those days. "It wasn't easy. It wasn't just to do with us. It was to do with the circumstances. It was a pretty wretched existence. It's a bit like celebrating being out of jail for twenty years. We didn't have any fun. We certainly some fun in The Egyptians days. But I remember The Soft Boys days, we were lucky if we had a free pint of beer. All the perks that the other bands had, we didn't have any of that stuff. Various forms of glory and ways of sticking your snout in the Rock 'n' Roll trough were not available to us. And it was pretty ignominious."
But now all that toiling and getting booed off the stage for properly harmonizing has come full circle. Matador has championed the album, and the band is getting better each show, now more than half way through their sixteen-stop Stateside tour. The band then goes on to play nearly ten shows in Europe, and an extended European tour is rumored.
Hitchcock doesn't try to quash the idea that the band may release new material. They played a new song called "Sudden Town" in Austin, and he says it's more a matter of what format the band will choose to release the material they have already written -- as well as music yet to come. "We've recorded quite a lot of it," says Hitchcock. "It's just a question of whether it comes out as a live record or an mp3 or a vinyl-only disk, or if it goes to a label or through our web site. You know, in the old days you made LPs, and that was it. 'You're up for a record deal.' Now there are so many more options."
"That was part of the appeal for me to do this tour: was to have access to the band, to this particular group to arrange and play some new songs with, rather than just going through "I Wanna Destroy You" and "He's A Reptile". We spent most our rehearsals actually arranging stuff rather that going through old songs. I think if there hadn't been any creative juice left in the battery, we wouldn't have done very much. It would have been doing a couple of shows, a, sort of, hall of fame thing. For us, we are not re-creating anything or re-living anything. We are very much carrying on from where we left off -- but we've had a decent break. We haven't been rammed down each other's throats." Apparently a decent break to Hitchcock is no less than twenty years.
Hitchcock was very much down to business during our conversation. It seemed like he would much rather be eating a sandwich or combing his hair -- very much different that surrealist jokester he presented last time we spoke. But there was a glimmer of the Flesh Cartoon behind our factual conversation. At one point he was describing the month of rehearsals that preceded the tour. The band rented a place the band had used before to make music, and for a moment Robyn lost track of himself: "I looked in the mirror. I saw myself as a middle-aged man. I saw me first, and then I looked around and there we were. As if we had been put into a trance twenty years ago, playing the same song. And we suddenly come-to as middle-aged men. Sometimes it seems like that. But it's all changed a lot, really. The energy currents in the group have changed -- and the climate has changed -- very much in our favor. We seem to be welcomed for doing the same things that we were mistrusted for twenty years ago."
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