The Independent
April 27, 2001
Soft Boys Harden Act With New Tricks And Space-Rock Riffs
The Soft Boys
Electric Ballroom, London
by Nick Hasted
Today, You can hear the sound of The Soft Boys in bands as big as R.E.M. and the many more who have recycled '60s guitar music for their personal use. But in 1980, when Robyn Hitchcock's men recorded their swan song LP Underwater Moonlight in Cambridge, you couldn't hear them anywhere at all. In those Postpunk days, the '60s were thought to be gone for good, and The Soft Boys were dismissed. But Hitchcock has refined his surreal songs in the years since, to eventual American acclaim. So the point of this year's sudden Soft Boys reunion is unsure. Shorn of their countercultural context by Britpop, does the world really need another '60s-style guitar band?
"The last time we played here was in January 1980," Hitchcock said in wry greeting. "I expect you were all at that gig." But the churning Space Rock riff with which they begin suggests a band who have learnt new tricks in the intervening years. Loud, sharp playing in mystique-enhancing silhouette, they are immediately more powerful than in their first re-formed UK gig, in a Clerkenwell pub full of friends two months ago. But Hitchcock, his tousled hair now grey, is too touched by irony and the absurdity of life to sustain something as pompous as mystique for long, and what follows totters between heartfelt emotion and its masking.
So "Old Pervert" is introduced with a distancing smirk, as Hitchcock's youthful notion of how he'd grow up. But "Insanely Jealous" has the raw, dissatisfied feelings that make his songs more than '60s rehashes. He imagines humanity's helpless possessive streak as a hallucinogenic drug and gives himself over to it, in a ridiculous list of thwarted desires for a loved one's attributes -- even down to hairs left in the bath -- and the whole band escalate in speed and intensity beneath Hitchcock's raging voice.
A cover version near the end defines The Boys' relationship to passing time with more optimism. Pink Floyd's 1967 "Astronomy Domine" now sounds more vintage than the band playing it, a quarter-of-a-century old themselves. At such moments, accusations of antiqueness seem irrelevant.
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