Rolling Stone
March 16, 2001
Hitchcock Talks Soft Boys
On Twentieth Anniversary, Legendary Underwater Moonlight Is Re-released
by Michael Ansaldo
For every Sgt. Pepper or Nevermind -- albums whose impact was immediate and indelible -- there are those post-dated masterpieces that serve notice of their charms only when the world's ears are ready to hear them. The Velvet Underground And Nico and Big Star's No. 1 Record both spring to mind. No less deserving of a spot on that short list is The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight. Hardly noticed by the British music community on its release in June 1980, the album eventually found an audience in the American underground of the mid-'80s, where bands as diverse as R.E.M., Yo La Tengo and The Replacements all shared a fondness for the then-unheralded treasure. The album's jangling arpeggios, harmony vocals and psychedelic undercurrents provided a link to Pre-Punk Rock 'n' Roll that was crucial to the renaissance of Stateside guitar bands. But by then, The Soft Boys were little more than a vague memory.
Robyn Hitchcock formed The Soft Boys in 1976 in Cambridge, England. During their five-year life span, they released only two albums, one EP, and a few singles -- seemingly altering their lineup with each recording. Even the incarnation that made Underwater Moonlight -- Hitchcock, guitarist Kimberley Rew, bassist Matthew Seligman, and drummer Morris Windsor -- had a brief shelf life. Within a year of the album's release, the band quietly split. Hitchcock embarked on a solo career, eventually reuniting with Windsor and original Soft Boys bassist Andy Metcalfe as Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians; Rew formed Katrina And The Waves and scored a Grammy-nominated hit with "Walking On Sunshine"; and Seligman began a successful career as a session musician.
Despite its growing stature, Underwater Moonlight has spent the better part of its existence out of print. This week it returns to record store shelves as a two-CD set: the original album with outtakes, plus a second disc of rehearsal recordings featuring many songs that never made it out of the practice room. With The Soft Boys reunited and ready to tour the U.S. (a particular treat for American fans as the band's commercial realities twenty years ago prevented them from touring beyond New York), Robyn Hitchcock talked with us about the making of a masterwork.
What are your memories of recording Underwater Moonlight?
Well, it was in the days before mobile phones and e-mail. I don't even think we had a tuning machine -- I think we probably tuned to a tuning fork. When I tried to re-learn some of the songs off the record, they didn't seem to be in any recognizable key. So everything's probably sped up or slowed down. Most of the time we were in this place that had lots of mattresses tied to the walls. It wasn't a sexy, state-of-the-art recording studio on a farm or in an industrial complex (or anything). It was actually a flat in South London. The guy lived in it -- it was his own house, and it was also a studio. He had cats, and the cats used to use the mattresses quite a lot. So the mattresses smelled of cat. It was cold, very Victorian, really. Probably like you imagine traditional London studios are [if you live] in The States. It was cold and smelly, but it was fantastic. We managed to produce music in there that was far better than things we'd done in state-of-the-art twenty-four-track studios the previous year or so when there was a record company funding our first aborted record. I think we spent something crazy like £20,000 trying to record various things for them, and we made Underwater Moonlight for, effectively, about £600.
Why was recording in that environment so much better?
It wasn't really the environment, it was the state of the band. I had to do a, sort of, dodgy publishing deal in order to finance the record. I think Matthew's father paid for a track, and there were a couple of things left over from the session the previous year. But I guess we just had better material by then. We were a kind of different shaped Soft Boys anyway. What we were trying to do was probably simpler. The songs were more songs and less arrangements, I suppose.
Did you go into the studio with a conscious idea of what kind of album you were going to make?
It was all done in rehearsals. Every incarnation of The Soft Boys was based around heavily rehearsing. We were the antithesis of, say, the Rolling Stones (or something), who write their records in the studio. Everything was always rehearsed someplace near a cafe where you could buy egg and chips. The songs were probably written fairly concisely, but I would have rehearsed them with the others so the arrangements would have been worked out communally. That bit on "I Wanna Destroy You", where Kimberly hears what I'm singing so he hits his harmony and then Morris hears what I'm singing so he hits his harmony, and each person responds in turn to what the other person's noise is. That was the way the arrangements were done.
When an album like this becomes so influential, history seems to rewrite itself. But you were just a little indie band at that time, weren't you?
[laughs] It wasn't even called "indie" in those days. [Indie] just meant that you didn't have a major record deal, and you didn't sell very much. But I think also, we weren't a trendy indie band. There were trendy indie bands like Spizz or Swell Maps. Or there were certainly people like Joy Division who were very successful, even in Ian Curtis' lifetime. They may not have sold millions of records, but they had a very high indie profile. We didn't really have any of that.
Was your profile diminished because your sound was so different from the other bands of the time?
I think sound, image, and attitude. We really weren't part of the time at all. I mean, we did speed up a little in 1977. And we went to see The Damned and The Vibrators (and everybody). And we, kind of, knew what was going on. But it didn't really effect the songs I wrote or the way we played them. We were still based around harmony and melody (and that kind of thing). After Andy Metcalfe left in '79, we became less experimental. And that coincided with a gear change in my songwriting, which means I finally started writing halfway decent songs. I don't think I wrote anything good 'til I was twenty-six, which was the age I was when I wrote most of the songs on Underwater Moonlight.
What was the response when the album came out?
It was all right. They really didn't like our previous record [A Can Of Bees], which was a difficult record. I think they could have given us points for trying, but they weren't even prepared to do that. But in the end it's down to whether you enjoy the record or not. And it wasn't an enjoyable record, so you can't really blame them for responding negatively. The response to Underwater Moonlight was Okay. I don't remember it being demolished by anybody. But there wasn't much of a fanfare either. To give you some idea of the way things have changed, apparently we have a nice review in the NME [New Musical Express] this week. Now the record isn't actually out yet. But when it first came out in 1980, the NME didn't review it for three months. That gives you an idea of what kind of priority we were. It might have taken them three months to find a journalist who could be bothered to review it.
When did you realize that the album was influencing a lot of the American bands?
About 1984, I think. Various feelers were coming out from R.E.M., and then people started to ring up from America and ask if we wanted to do things. The Replacements asked me if I wanted to produce them (which I didn't because I didn't think I'd be up to the job, really). But there was a general breeze coming over from The States that indicated that the seeds that we'd sown there had begun to sprout. But that was three or four years after The Soft Boys stopped.
Did you hear The Soft Boys' influence in these bands?
No, I've never heard Soft Boys' or my influence in anybody. I think probably all it was was that we were the connection between their generation and the people in the '60s, because music in the '70s (on the whole) was in denial of -- or in recovery from -- what happened in the '60s. In the '80s they were ready for that kind of thing, and we were revealed to have been the missing link. Underwater Moonlight was a great album, and I think I've got some damn good songs on it. So I'm not belittling us. I just think in terms of stylistic influence, it's a big difference between whether we were a good band (or whether the songs were good). But if you're talking about style -- putting it very crudely, we were the link between The Byrds and R.E.M..
Why do you think the album has held up after all these years?
Great band, good songs, and most importantly, just a vibe about the recordings. There was something about our collective state of mind when we recorded them. It's not the notes you play, it's the life that's in the notes you play. And I think there was a spirit in us -- we were going against the times. Also, politically things were getting darker and darker as time went on. The Russians invaded Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter looked like he was on the way out. Reagan became a serious contender. Margaret Thatcher was elected in Britain. The swing to the right that had been first noticeable in the late-'70s had really arrived. This produced a deep feeling of dread. We didn't even know if we were going to be alive by Easter (or whenever). It was just that we've got to make this record. [I remember] sitting in the VW with Matthew and saying, "God, we could be gone by Christmas, but at least we'll have this record out." So, there was that, kind of, urgency in the air, socially. And then there was my own personal paranoia (or whatever). There was an urgency and a life to what we were doing. And that's really what shines through on the record.
Why did the band break up after Underwater Moonlight?
We probably knew we weren't in a climate that could sustain us. I think that was part of the intensity of making it. We probably knew that we had a record in us that we could deliver. It's like a salmon swimming upstream to lay her eggs and then dying: she knows she's not going to go back out to the Galapagos Islands (or wherever it is) and conceive another batch of eggs and swim back up to Nova Scotia. She's got one load of eggs, and that's it. We had this one record that we wanted to yield up. And that felt like our function, really. Beyond that, Kimberley was writing songs, and you could feel the genesis of his career with The Waves building up again. He'd been with Alex (the drummer for The Waves) before we recruited him for The Soft Boys. So, Kim had these songs that needed an outlet, and they wouldn't have fitted with mine. Although it's a beautiful picture, I can't really imagine the Soft Boys having scored with "Walking On Sunshine". Certainly not with me singing it [laughs]. So he had that career that was gestating inside him, and I'd already got halfway through a solo album. And I really wanted to be a solo artist anyway. I didn't see myself being in a group indefinitely. I think we may have all re-thought that if the group had been making lots of money. But it didn't look like we could do any worse on our own.
How does it feel playing together after twenty years?
Quite good really, but different. The currents inside the band have changed. Everyone's magnetic fields have altered. It's probably more comfortable, which unfortunately may mean it's less exciting. I think it's more fun, it's probably more good natured and less spikey. But that's probably as it should be -- we're all in our late-40s now. I hate Middle-Aged Rock 'n' Roll, and part of me is really galled to be doing this (especially as I've gone on record so many times as saying people over forty shouldn't be allowed to wield electric guitars). But I've been solo now for about seven years, just borrowing musicians and being musically promiscuous. And I definitely feel ready to be submerged in a band again, even if I'm basically the frontman and the songwriter still. I quite like the difference of focus between being Robyn Hitchcock and being in The Soft Boys.
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