N.M.E.
January 20, 1979
The Swap A Brain Gang
Soft Boys
London Nashville
by Paul Morley
Another next-year's-thing...and now 1979 looms. Signed to Radar with an LP imminent, The Soft Boys are somewhere between wishing they were babies and wishing they were dead. They are ashamed of their minds!
They performed "Cold Turkey" with much composed rage and no passion, which significantly planted them firmly in the middle of 1969 in more ways than one.
They are in the process of regression, an unusual form of adventure. Once discreetly challenging and eccentric, they now smother the challenge, emphasise the eccentricity and in moving backwards, move towards an audience. Not only a next-year's-thing, but potential biggies.
The ambiguity and indeterminacy of their early days has fallen away. Someone murmured perhaps they've begun to take themselves seriously. Someone else complained they weren't loud enough. But their set was strong and direct, their songs brief and active.
Their music is a very forceful blanket sound: raging dual electric guitars, inscrutable pumping bass, toxic drumming with occasional strange, spirited harmonica. It skims along with delirium and swagger, counterbalanced with the awkward whimsy of the lyrics. The vocal delivery and mannerisms are of an Ayers-Barrett wide-eyed singing-in-the-bath deadpan.
The touchy rhythmic twists and tantalising changes in direction and level complete the compelling, insistent sound that's within the context of a flat Psychedelia.
It's layered and intricate, but simple-sounding. Odd and highly strung, and very approachable. Would you believe Lothar And The Hand People, The Byrds, The Monkees, and nowadays more Canned Heat than Captain Beefheart?
The carefully warped imagination and teasing vigour of The Soft Boys will see them hip and popular. The funny thing is, they're now a straight revivalist group. Everything about them -- the overall sound, the fringes of madness, the introductory Cage-ish tape collage, the poker-face nonsense -- is of a time long gone.
I left early, because such heavy frivolity is best in small doses and my mind was numb.
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