The San Francisco Chronicle
April 9, 2001
Soft Boys Soar At The Fillmore
Reunion Tour Features '70s Classics
by Neva Chonin
Some bands become legends in their own time. The Soft Boys are not one of them. In fact, they had to wait 20 years to enjoy the fact that their witty, Neo-Psychedelic Pop has become a vital reference point for everyone from The Replacements and The Pixies to R.E.M. and the Stone Roses.
The Cambridge, England, quartet's brilliant final album, 1980's Underwater Moonlight, was recently reissued on Matador to thundering acclaim. It's also prompted a reunion tour by the formidable lineup that recorded it: singer-guitarist Robyn Hitchcock (a solo legend in his own right), guitarist Kimberley Rew, bassist Matthew Seligman, and drummer Morris Windsor, who are finally playing before the packed houses that eluded them in their late-'70s heyday.
Judging by their performance at The Fillmore on Saturday night, The Soft Boys are feeling no pain over history's belated recognition. A sold out crowd -- much of it too young to have heard the band the first time around -- hailed each song with cheers of recognition and ended the night by enthusiastically dragging their heroes back for three encores.
Hitchcock and company gave them a show to remember. Classic songs such as the rousing "Kingdom Of Love" and "Queen Of Eyes" soared with Punk Pop urgency and layered harmonies; the jagged Postpunk arrangements and barbed choruses of "Insanely Jealous" and "Only The Stones Remain" resonated ferociously. These old favorites were punctuated with new numbers -- raising hopes for a reunion album -- like "Sudden Town", the dreamy "Mind Is Connected" and the phantasmagoric "Mr. Kennedy".
Throughout the 90-minute set, Hitchcock's trademark wit was in fine fettle. "Human Music" prompted an observation that "Heaven is dull; all the interesting paintings are in hell." And by way of introducing the gleeful "Old Pervert", the singer offered a tongue-in-cheek bit of biography: "When I was young, I was very unhappy. I was mean to ants; I was mean to grasshoppers. And I projected a future for myself." That future, ripe with hilarity and untrammeled lechery, never happened. Other lyrical predictions rang too true, as when Hitchcock dedicated the anti-war anthem "I Wanna Destroy You", originally penned at the start of the Reagan-Bush era, to the current President Bush.
Rew and Hitchcock reignited their celebrated guitar duets on the instrumental "You'll Have To Go Sideways", with a dialogue that ranged from shimmering riffs to dissonant shared rhapsodies. The title track from Underwater Moonlight highlighted the band's talent for lavish melodies and Hitchcock's keen ability to intersect death, obsession, and desire in a single love song.
Original material was augmented by a spate of inspired covers that included The Byrds' "Bells Of Rhymney", Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine", and the Velvet Underground's hypnotic "Train 'round the Bend".
For the final encore, tunefully raucous openers The Young Fresh Fellows joined the headliners onstage for a ripping version of "Give It To the Soft Boys". This Seattle-born band is a cult classic in its own right, recently reunited around a new double album with The Minus 5, Because We Hate You/Let The War Against Music Begin.
"You can get behind the music, but you can never get far away from it," Hitchcock said by way of introducing the spacey, '60s- inflected "Airscape". His quip summed up both the superb Fillmore show and, more generally, The Soft Boys' two-decade journey from lost band to reborn legend. If their music sounds timelier today than when it was first written, that's probably because it was ahead of its time to begin with -- or perhaps just timelessly great.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE