Westender
March 28, 2001
Soft Boys Resurface, 20 Years Later
by Tom Zillich
The other day I read a great Robyn Hitchcock quote about his old band, The Soft Boys: "When everyone else was throwing beer glasses at the stage and putting safety pins through their noses, all we wanted to do was eat cucumber sandwiches."
Yeah, that pretty much sums up late-'70s life for The Soft Boys, whose slightly anachronistic ways during the heyday of Punk anarchy didn't sit well with enough people (notably, the majority of critics in the band's native England). Smart as it was, Hitchcock's band was more in tune with the melodic Psychedelia of The Beatles and Pink Floyd surrealist Syd Barrett than the more fashionable nihilism of the times. Sure, their guitars chugged and clanged with the best of them, but they sang harmonies, for christ's sake. By 1981 the UK crowds had turned away in disgust, and the Cambridge lads disbanded in a fit of disillusionment.
But not for long, really -- and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that The Soft Boys never really went away. In the mid-'80s Hitchcock formed The Egyptians with the band's rhythm section and became an Alt-Rock icon for the R.E.M. generation. By 1994, The Soft Boys had reunited for real, for a short UK tour.
So here we are in 2001 and Hitchcock's cucumber sandwich-loving band is back on tour. This time it's North America's turn, due largely to the Matador label having the smarts to re-release The Boys' most acclaimed album, Underwater Moonlight, as a two-disc set complete with studio outtakes and forgotten songs.
For good reason, the original Underwater Moonlight is listed among The 100 Most Influential Alternative Releases of All Time in Rolling Stone's Alt-Rock-A-Rama book (1996), in there with other 1980 albums The Pretenders, Boys Don't Cry (The Cure), Unknown Pleasures (Joy Division), and The Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables. Certainly, it's as good as any Jam or XTC album of the day (no faint praise from me, people).
"We made this great album and then broke up, and that's the last we thought we'd hear about it," recalls Soft Boys bassist Matthew Seligman. "But it's been this really strange buildup over the past two decades."
Seligmans on the line from Austin, Texas, where The Soft Boys played the huge SXSW fest this month. Fresh from a cross-Atlantic flight (and a couple weeks into a three-month break from his law practice), Seligman is buzzing about playing now-classic Boys songs such as "I Wanna Destroy You". Above all, this was the band's most successful attempt at writing a three-chord Punk song with three-part harmonies.
Now reliving such exhilarating moments from the band's slim discography, Seligman and the others (Hitchcock, Rew, drummer Morris Windsor) have lingering doubts about the split of 1981.
"I was talking to Morris about that on the plane, whether it was a mistake to break up when we did," says Seligman. "It makes me think that if we'd gone on another six months, maybe we'd be The Police or The Cure. But the bust-up is really part of our story, more interesting that way. The right place for us would have been America, 10 years later -- or even right now. But I don't think the world wanted to hear what we were doing -- except for some American critics, who stuck to their guns and, over time, kind of broke the ice for Underwater Moonlight. America actually saved the album, which is strange because we never went there and the album wasn't released there. We were very much killed in the pram, in England."
There's talk of Matador recording the current tour for a new album, probably with some new songs that have been written. Seligman is scheduled to return to his law firm mid-May, but will take some more time off for summer tours of Germany and Japan.
"I think there will be a new Soft Boys album," he says, "but we mustn't be vulgar or hang around too much. It's really fun right now, because we never really felt like we had a record company before. Now we're getting picked up at the airport, having them pay for meals and all that. It's quite nice."
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