The Washington Post
March 23, 2001
Soft Boys: Angry Young Men, 20 Years Later
by Mark Jenkins
In 1980, The Soft Boys released an album of melodic but uneasy Folk Rock, Underwater Moonlight. On Wednesday night at the 9:30 club, the British quartet finally played a Washington show to promote it.
The Boys split in 1981 without ever doing an American tour, but Underwater Moonlight's enduring appeal and singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock's subsequent solo career has kept the band's legend fresh. Several hundred fans turned out to hear the reunited Boys play much -- but not all -- of the 1980 album (as well as other songs from that era and a few tunes that Hitchcock described as being from "the next record.)"
With Kimberley Rew shaking his guitar to produce bell-like notes and drummer Morris Windsor adding high harmonies atop Hitchcock's tenor, the Boys sounded something like The Byrds, whose arrangement of "The Bells Of Rhymney" was among the set's many encores. Yet both the music's vehemence and the songs' queasy view of romance reminded listeners that the group forged its sound in the Punk era. The set had many playful touches, including the unexpected reappearance of the opening act, the Young Fresh Fellows, to perform the mock-anthemic "Give It To The Soft Boys". But after Hitchcock dedicated "I Wanna Destroy You" to George W. Bush, the Boys didn't play the song as if they were joking.
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