New York Daily News
March 23, 2001
Quirky Soft Boys Are Hard To Beat
by Lance Gould
In the mid-'70s, British working-class heroes like The Sex Pistols and The Clash jump-started the flatlining entity known as "Rock" with politically charged Punk anthems.
Around the same time, four middle-class kids in Cambridge were crafting snarky, almost daft Pop tunes with jangly guitars that owed heavy debts to Syd Barrett, leader of Pink Floyd, a group that was anathema to the "Anarchy in the UK" set. Soft Boys' songs like "Sandra's Having Her Brain Out" and "(I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp" left listeners, well, puzzled. Critics assailed them as "the cerebral Monkees" which, at the height of the Punk movement, was a much more poisonous barb than it might sound today.
But 21 years after the band released its masterpiece, Underwater Moonlight, hindsight has revealed that Robyn Hitchcock and his bandmates' album was one of the most influential works in the Postpunk era. Acts like R.E.M. and The Replacements sprang up in Underwater's wake. And today, The Soft Boys find themselves at the pinnacle of the Oddball Pop pyramid.
"We thought Moonlight was great at the time," mused Hitchcock in a phone interview, "but we weren't really able to do anything about it."
Now they are taking things into their own clever, if deranged, hands. The band has reunited for a 26-city tour to promote the re-release of Underwater Moonlight (Matador Records). They kicked it off last week in Austin, Texas, and come to this area for two shows (tonight at Maxwell's in Hoboken, tomorrow at Irving Plaza). The CD reissue also features a second disc of outtakes and rehearsal material.
The Soft Boys' lineup has changed a few times over the years, but this tour will feature what Hitchcock jokingly refers to as "the Moonlight Quartet" -- the foursome that recorded the album. The guitarist, Kimberley Rew, later went on to Pop glory with Katrina And The Waves, of "Walking On Sunshine" fame.
"Kimberley was working on his own songs -- he wanted to be in a Pop band -- and I wanted to be a solo cult figure," joked Hitchcock on the dissolution of the group back when. "We weren't a very successful act in the first place. We were like a fish in an aviary.
"It was certainly more vogue-ish in the Punk era in Britain to at least pretend you were of working-class," he added. "And we didn't. We're just bourgeoisie, really. But I've always been about content, not style. The Soft Boys never had any style. We just showed up. We weren't even consciously downbeat. We were just nice middle-class lads who washed our hair."
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