Sounds
June 17, 1978
Looking Back On Dennis And The Experts
Michael Branton Asks the Soft Boys "Where Are The Prawns?"
by Michael Branton
The Soft Boys is not the title of a gay film. Nor is it the name of a group of musicians dedicated to playing sticky-sweet, "mellow" music.
What The Soft Boys are is a band of four-and-a-half (read on for thrilling explanation) Cambridge-based lads whose musical offerings tend to be delivered like a brick through your television set. The Soft Boys, you see, play hard-edged music.
Whence the name? As bassist/keyboards player Andy Metcalfe explains: "In the first few rehearsals, Robyn wrote a song with the then-guitarist called 'Give It To The Soft Boys'. At the time the band was called Dennis And The Experts, but when this other guitarist left, we decided to change the name. And as we already had this song, we decided to become The Soft Boys."
But what in the lyrics so inspired the change?
"You'll have to ask Robyn about the lyrics, because he writes them all. And so all the inner meanings are in his head somewhere."
He looks at my pen as if it might double as a scalpel. Robyn Hitchcock, the band's lead vocalist/songwriter/guitarist, isn't within shouting distance, so this question, along with one or two others, remains momentarily unanswered. But let's wind the Timex back a few days, when The Soft Boys opened a show at The Roundhouse, a fete which also featured those erratic young monsters, The Pop Group, as well as the more fluid Magazine.
Onstage -- his face gleaming with silver paint like a polished chrome appliance -- Robyn leads the band though twelve songs of laudable intensity, pausing midway only to remove his wide-brimmed hat and veil. Your journalist takes careful notes, scrawling phrases between beer-stains like, "Driving beat...strong lyric phrasing...vocal harmonies are almost parodies of '60s Pop...seemingly-unstructured guitar work...Overall comments: nice effort, bad mix."
Two days later I surface from the Hammersmith Underground Station and flag a taxi. "Church Street? Right you are, sir. To Olympic Studios, I guess? I'm taking young people there all the time these days."
Studio C: through the view-window, Andy sits at the organ in the far corner of the room, laying down an overdub on some recent recording. Surrounded by mic stands, guitars, speaker cabinets, a piano, and miles of long black cord; "One, two, three, four..."
The Soft Boys recently signed with Radar Records and their first single for the company, "(I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp" and "Fatman's Son" is in the shops now.
Morris M. Windsor, drummer, explains their current recording project. "This session was to record a followup single, but in fact we got a bit carried away. So it hasn't worked out that way at all, because we've done about three times as much as we'd intended doing. I mean, a single will come out of this, but there'll be a lot of spare stuff hanging around."
"We're not sure what our next single will be," says Robyn, "because actually we only have nine backing tracks recorded. And you have to listen to the finished product to know what's good. We specialise in doing good B-sides -- but we'd like to change that trend."
Despite a nagging sore throat, Robyn votes to record the vocals to one of the Picks-to-Click, "Where Are The Prawns?". So it's a jaunt across the road to the local pub with Andy, Morris, guitarist Kimberley Rew and the half-Soft Boy, harmonica player Jim Melton, who gets that peculiar designation from being offstage tuning guitars and so on, more than actually performing.
We commandeer a table, order some pints, and I casually ask them just where the prawns are. Morris laughs. "We don't know, really. Most of Robyn's songs are obsessed with seafood and household utensils. We've got another one coming out called 'The Return Of The Sacred Crab'." (Also, it turns out, Robyn publishes under Two Crabs Music.)
"It's not that they're about seafood, really," Andy pipes in. "It's just that the imagery he uses is sometimes that of seafood. Not all the time -- it's just that he likes to say things sideways."
Says Kimberley, "He's a difficult guy to get to know. Anything that he says to you is meaningful, it just might sound meaningless. Sometimes he can't say what he wants to say."
Metcalfe has been arranging Robyn's work since they got together in 1976. "The last band I was in before this one was a, kind of, Swing band -- we'll leave that alone. But then it died and I came up to Cambridge and met Morris and Robyn and this other guitarist. And we spent about two months playing before that disintegrated... So we stopped gigging and had a couple of months' rehearsal. And then we did our first gig on February 3rd last year at a college function. And we did our first gig in London on March 13th, which was a total, dismal failure because we were all so nervous we were rigid."
At this point Robyn strolls up, his voice hoarse ("It's just falling out all the time, like old plaster"), so the rest of the band decide to make use of the studio and leave en masse. We start talking on the way back from refilling our mugs.
Casting fate to the winds, I ask him to explain his seafood obsession. He gladly obliges with a ten-minute tirade encompassing fundamental biology, dinosaurs, radiation, worms growing feet, Darwin's Theory of Evolution and the possibility of cosmic rays-as-god-The-Maker.
I really wish I had the money to buy him a beer.
"I write from verse to verse and from line to line," he says. "I don't write like a Pop song or a classical ballad that follows on -- I haven't got that much concentration, so I use whatever word comes to mind next and hopefully it fits in with the mood.
"I started out as a folksinger, playing acoustic guitar. When you're doing solo things like that, you talk to the auidence more, which I miss a bit. I used to paint my face up and go busking. I'd sing any old song that came into my head, things like 'I really like bananas, 'cause they have no bones.' Or, 'The Queen Has A Yellow Dog'."
Robyn talks about the band's latest single. "An anglepoise lamp is a lamp that you can bend -- it goes in the desks of businessmen and people who stub their cigarettes out and people who have sheaves of paper. The whole intention of the song, I suppose, is the idea of changing sexual roles. The first verse is that the man is gonna be a woman.
"A lot of people I know wear dungarees and cut their hair short and, sort of, want to dispense with their vaginas. Or at least dig so far into them they could put a flashlight in there and have that poking out instead.
"The last verse is the guy with absolute disgust -- you know, the viewer/songwriter -- who decided he might as well be an office appliance. Because all he sees around him is unpleasant prospects like a bunch of weedy people wishing to change sex. If you like, it's basically a protest song -- so you can have the blurb, '"Anglepoise" A Protest, Hitchcock Says!'
"But I don't sit there and think, 'My Gosh, I have this great subject, I have to write a song about it.' Nor do I sit by the window smoking a cigar and waiting for inspiration to come floating by. What any given song is really about is not that obvious, not to me or anybody else."
With a five-year contract (with the usual options) with Radar Records as support, fans will have ample opportunity to discover just what Robyn Hitchcock is really saying. In this age of ornamental ennui, becoming an anglepoise lamp seems a reasonable goal. Give it to The Soft Boys.
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