Real Detroit
March 22, 2001
The Soft Boys
by Nate Cavalieri
This might be the era of the revival acts. As spring breathes life into the dead Rock of yesteryear, Detroit will be under siege from hair bands, '80s bands, and reunion tours as venues will fill up with somewhat self-conscious young adults who will dust off their White Lion T-shirts and drink a few beers in memory of their younger days. But if mentioning the fact that The Soft Boys haven't been on the road since 1983 gives you a squint-eyed suspicion that they are just another revival act pulling the "reunion tour" card to earn some drug money, you couldn’t be more wrong.
"The last time we were on the road was 20 years ago," said guitarist Kimberly Rew through a barely comprehensible South England accent. "There has been some rust which has needed to be brushed away with a stiff wire brush, and that is what we are doing. But the main feeling is that it is very natural, and we are just more or less picking up the threads."
Seeing the band come back from the grave at the Matador Records Showcase at SXSW was all the evidence anyone would need to affirm the band's vitality. Under the indomitably gay (as in happy) leadership of now-cult legend Robyn Hitchcock, the band reeled through a cheery set of quirk, which was revolutionary at the time of its making. Aggressively separating itself from the huge Punk trends of the late-'70s, The Soft Boys laid the foundation for the Melodic Pop of major underground stalwarts like The Smithereens and R.E.M.. But talking to Rew on the phone makes him seem like the most modest revolutionary of all time.
"We had this melodic guitar style that was coming out of the '60s a little bit, but this was the late-'70s and it didn’t fit in with what was happening in the music world at the time. And taking those influences were not really in," he said. "The current style that was getting really big was Punk, and we certainly didn't fit into that. When a new band comes along it is important to be able to give them a quick explanation of what it is so they have something as a point of reference. And with The Soft Boys, it wasn't easy to do that."
And even if the music is regarded as 20 years ahead of its time in retrospect, looking at it in today's musical environment is just as odd and equally hard to quickly understand. Hitchcock led the band through song after song of triumphant sexuality and surrealist stories of strange deaths and troublesome love. These are hardly things that have become commonplace 20 years later.
"It was never our intention to just be different for the sake of being different," Rew said. "Obviously Robyn sets the tone of the band with his songs and his personality and his tunes. But he was looking for people who were very sympathetic. Whether or not there was something that we got along with at the time —- like bitch or aggressive or Punk Rock, which was heavily dominating the scene at the time -— was not as important to us as it was to just play the music that we loved to play."
Now The Soft Boys have returned to that love with the first national tour of The United States since the Carter administration and have done so because of a growing rediscovery of their music. "This tour was precipitated by a slowly growing interest in the music because of the re-issues on Rykodisc that happened in 1992, but particularly in the last few years," Rew explained. "Also we have been lucky because of the interest that has stayed with Robyn Hitchcock himself, which has been strong over the duration of those 20 years. He has had a consistent career, and now it seems kind of natural for him to come back to some of the things of his past. We have all kept in touch and we are all still reasonably healthy and we can still play. That is something to be thankful for."
And without drug overdoses or drama, The Soft Boys have escaped the Behind The Music attention that befalls many of their peers and have only their credentials as musicians keeping them active. If Rew credits most of this interest to Hitchcock, he might be right. Robyn Hitchcock has probably fronted as many criminally underrated bands as any, and has stayed in the shadows of the Pop Rock world long enough to secure a place as a cult hero. Even though the work of Hitchcock is at the heart of The Soft Boys, his work with this group marks his only long stay with a band (except for a short run in the '80s with Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians) and to Rew the reunion of The Soft Boys is something mystical.
"You have to go back to Cambridge, England in 1976 to the little music scene that was there to really know how extraordinary the whole thing is," Rew said. "Robyn came to Cambridge and recruited some musicians out of the local music scene and set about with this musical style that had a lot of unexpected twists and turns. And we were all interested in playing songs that would appeal more directly to people's feelings. That is all we are still interested in doing, and it is something that is unfortunately rare. When you see it happen as a performer, there is nothing else like it in the world."
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