Illinois Entertainer
May, 2001
The Soft Boys
by Jay Hedblade
The year was 1980. Ronald Regan had waltzed into the White House and was credited with the dubiously timed release of American hostages in Iran. Unemployment was at an all-time postwar high under Margaret Thatcher's eighteen-month-old administration in Britain. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, and overnight the Cold War was suddenly not so tepid. If The Sex Pistols looked like court jesters three years earlier when they were screaming "No Future," they were suddenly looking like sage prophets.
To say some found the time bleak is an understatement, as the last gasp of the late-1960s "peace and love" movement was quickly sucked into a vacuum, taking its optimistic Pop songs with it. "All You Need Is Love" had given away to the haunted sentiments of The Specials' "Ghost Town", and The Clash's "Guns Of Brixton". Among all of this were The Soft Boys, a band formed in Cambridge in 1977, wielding intelligent songs and ringing guitars that reflected their studies in the "three Bs": Beatles, Barrett, and Byrds. The timing for their masterpiece, Underwater Moonlight, was as awful.
"We just thought, 'Gee, the world could be over by Christmas, but at least we've made our album,'" says Soft Boys figurehead Robyn Hitchcock twenty years on from the record's unceremonious release on the tiny independent label Armageddon. No one could have imagined, least of all the band themselves, that two decades later Underwater Moonlight would no longer be a record, it would be a CD. Two CDs, in fact, as the Matador label has just painstakingly re-packaged the original release with an assortment of studio odds and ends and an entire disc's worth of rehearsals. Now known to the world as Underwater Moonlight...And How It Got There, Matador has seen to giving the barely known Soft Boys the type of royal treatment you might expect for Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper. It all begs the question: WHY?
The reason is simple. Underwater Moonlight is to the 1980s what The Velvet Underground And Nico, Love's Forever Changes, or Big Star's No. 1 Record, were to a decade before it. That is to say that very few people bought them upon initial release, but those who did became fervent about them and, over time, fought to keep them alive. In the case of Underwater Moonlight, those ardent fans include R.E.M., Counting Crows, The Goo-Goo Dolls, The Replacements, Old 97's, Frank Black and The Pixies, and Cake to name just a few. Some have rated it among the greatest guitar records ever released.
If you haven't heard it, here's what you're missing: the simultaneously delicate and powerful drumming of Morris Windsor, the slinky funk of Matthew Seligman's bass, the manic catharsis of Kimberley Rew's guitar, and the articulate, visual lyrics of Robyn Hitchcock. These elements are spread across a canvas dotted with impressionistic shades of Revolver-era Beatles, Byrds-like twelve-string Jangle, and touches of Hendrix-inspired Psychedelia. It's no wonder the mere mention of Underwater Moonlight in some circles elicits hyperbolic adulation these days, but at the dawn of the New Romantic movement and the Ska revival, it was as undesirable as the creepy "Old Pervert" Hitchcock congers up eight tracks into the set.
"If you stand back broadly enough, Underwater Moonlight makes perfect sense," says Hitchcock by way of explaining why the disc dipped below the radar upon its original release. "If you draw a line that runs from Bill Haley through to, say, Travis and you make that your horizon, you can imagine a dot right in the middle of all that and you could put The Soft Boys there. We were just the missing link between The Byrds and R.E.M., but at the time we made no sense at all." Guitarist Kimberley Rew concurs. "It didn't fit in with anything that was happening, and I don't think we ever got over that problem of trying to explain what we were. Underwater Moonlight died when it first came out, in commercial terms. It died first and lived second, if you will."
Like a lot of bands who were inspired by the DIY aspect of Punk in the midst of an economic recession, The Soft Boys were trying to accomplish an ambitious recording with virtually no budget. They set up shop in producer Pat Collier's
bare-bones Alaska studio and attempted to create a masterpiece using a 4-track recorder and a 16-channel board. "The way we constructed it was by first making a stereo backing-track of the band and then overdubbing the vocals. It was nearly a live recording," explains Collier, who by his own admission has spent his life producing guitar records, including seminal recordings of The Wonder Stuff and The Jesus And Mary Chain. "I didn't see it particularly as establishing me as a
producer," he adds, "but I actively pursued The Soft Boys. Looking back over all of the bands that I've worked with, they've got to be in the top five, and it's pretty gratifying that Underwater Moonlight is still knocking around after all these years."
"The emphasis was on the guitars rather than on the rhythm section, which was kind of the opposite of what the state of the art was in 1980," Hitchcock offers of Collier's approach. "Neither the sound nor the songs had that much to do with the year that they were recorded in terms of style, but because of that Underwater Moonlight, quite unintentionally, has a timeless sound."
"That's the reason we're talking about it now," adds Rew. "In retrospect, thank god for that. I'd rather have that sitting on the shelf now, and I'd think that regardless of whether anyone ever noticed it or not. The fact that people did notice the record later on is a really nice bonus."
Peter Buck of R.E.M. certainly noticed, and has often cited the disc as an influence on the budding band from Athens. "I thought most of the New Wave stuff was really boring," he admits, "but Underwater Moonlight was a very intelligent record with a lot of depth; there weren't a lot of those in 1980." Buck also notes that, "The Soft Boys were taking some of the influences that I really liked and they were mutating them. They were inspirational in that sense."
"I don't think that we influenced Peter Buck," Hitchcock humbly contradicts, "I think we just listened to the same people that he did." When presented with the facts, however, Hitchcock reluctantly concedes, "Maybe we encouraged him and some young guys who worked in record shops to go a certain way musically that had not been on the cards for about ten years."
That musical way was informed by Windsor's love of The Beach Boys, Rew's dedication to The Kinks, and Hitchcock's combined admiration of Lennon, Syd Barrett, Hendrix, and Dylan. Look around and you'll still find the undercurrent of musical references on Underwater Moonlight seeping into today's guitar-centered Pop outfits.
"Their loves are my loves," says Rhett Miller of Old 97's before reciting a nearly identical list of influences. But Miller is quick to point out that The Soft Boys brought something to the table with Underwater Moonlight that was more than the sum of its parts. "They didn't seem like they fit in with anything. Were they Punk Rock? They sounded kind of Punk Rock on 'I Wanna Destroy You', but then Robyn is spouting this free-form poetry. It's hard to reconcile those two. There's this intelligent, forward-thinking, lunatic poet fronting a Punk Rock band that's also very much like an Art Rock band. Nobody has ever really made a record that sounded like Underwater Moonlight, lyrically or musically. The Soft Boys inspired me to write lyrics that work on a lot of different levels or defy immediate understanding."
In terms of lyrics, Underwater Moonlight, like much of Hitchcock's work in and out of The Soft Boys, is rich in characters and odd observations told with a humorous, cryptic slant. The aforementioned "Old Pervert", for example, has at its core a protagonist who drinks disinfectant and argues his behavior by stating "cleanliness of the soul is more important, don't you think?". Elsewhere, the paranoia of "Insanely Jealous" finds its spokesman proclaiming, "The damage that we do is just so powerfully strong they call it 'love'". And while "Positive Vibrations" has all the trappings of the "flower power" '60s that you'd imagine from its title (yes, that's a sitar solo), it was Hitchcock's subtle way of commenting on just how deeply negative things were at the time. Irony not being the basic building-block of Rock songs that it became a decade later, it took Elvis Costello's wonderful but not nearly as clever "(What's So Funny 'bout) Peace, Love And Understanding?" to deliver the same message in those days.
"When Punk came, songs got short again, hair got a bit shorter, beards went, and everything was a bit fresher and more awake," notes Hitchcock, "But there was something that was, sort of, willfully aggressive and thuggish about Punk, which I didn't really subscribe to. We had our own, kind of, machismo and nihilism, but it was probably a bit more elitist. As
the press never tired of pointing out, we came from Cambridge." But certainly there was enough aggression in tracks like "I Wanna Destroy You" and "Kingdom Of Love" for The Soft Boys to sort of slide in sideways and capitalize on the Punk movement, wasn't there?
"I don't think we really saw it in terms of, 'In order to be successful, you have to this and that,'" explains Rew. "A lot of bands do that and they are successful. But Robyn is a genuine, original character, and I don't think there would have been any point in trying to persuade him to bend the way he was projecting himself."
"I think the edge and the anxiety of the Punk stuff rubbed off on us," Hitchcock admits, "but a combination of Progressive Rock and Punk was a pretty unthinkable thought!"
Which is, in a way, what The Soft Boys were perhaps unintentionally about: the concept of taking the energy, anger, and honesty of Punk and melding it with the idea of a concise Pop song that aspired to art. If the world wasn't ready for it then, time eventually caught up with The Soft Boys. As the band head off on their first-ever tour of The United States to commemorate the record's re-release, Rew is happy to see Underwater Moonlight is appreciated now if not then, but he maintains an objective perspective. "Obviously, when you're in a young band, it becomes all-consuming. It's not an all-consuming thing now, because everybody's had a life in those twenty years. But having said that, in some ways it feels like we recorded the album, took a couple of weeks off, and now we're going back out on the road for a month."
For Hitchcock and Rew, the re-release and the tour are a celebration if not a vindication of a brilliantly conceived album. "We're not really going out saying, 'We told you so!' or anything like that. We're just, sort of, glad to see that the record is still appreciated." And it is. There's no shortage of contemporary bands or critics willing to wax poetic about Underwater Moonlight, and that silently satisfies the band. "I'm pleased in my own, sort of, quiet, middle-class, English way," says Hitchcock. "You know, we all look at the floor and say, 'It's nothing, really. Go on, cut off the other arm.' But inside I think I'm pretty pleased. I daresay this is probably exactly what I wanted."
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