Mojo
1994
"Paranoia, Urban Scurvy, Death, Eggs, Reptiles, And Coiled Salami..."
The Soft Boys
The Soft Boys 1976-81
Rykodisc
by David Cavanagh
If one of the guitars could sort of play something along the lines of Antennae Jimmy Semens' part on "Dali's Car", and maybe the other one could get into some sleazy Blues scales that sound vagely reptilian; and if the rhythm section could make it quite moody but pretty solid; then surely we could put in a middle bit where the guitars sound like duelling alarm clocks, followed by a bar of 4/4 and one of 3/4, then repeat that, and ease nicely into a fairly angelic vocal bit not unlike the first album by Pink Floyd.
The world: "Hey, Soft Boys, doesn't this sound a little half-baked?"
The Soft Boys: "No, no. It's totally baked."
The song exists and it's right here. "Hear My Brane" has most of the great Soft Boy standbys: a slight tendency to exaggerate when talking about girls, a precise use of language ("Yes, indeed", "Quite so"), sudden flashes of anxiety ("She doesn't bring me any food!"), and a cheery inability to pin anything down. One verse goes: "Maybe you'll remember, maybe you'll forget/It doesn't matter very much, it hasn't happened yet". It swivels and rocks in a way that English groups aren't meant to. The year? 1977.
As singer-guitarist Robyn Hitchcock says in the sleevenotes here, The Soft Boys were a reaction to absolutely everything. As such, they didn't get much of a reaction. Shortly after they formed, Punk exploded. The Soft Boys were singing about lobsters and writing lines like: "I thrilled my frog". They put the "amp" into amphibious. They could play too well. They liked to sing in complicated three-part harmonies as and when they spotted an opportunity. And in Hitchcock they had none of the stable songwriting elements conducive to media acceptance, youth culuture blockvoting, or even making a crust. The irony was, his vision was arguably more nihilistc -- and far-reachingly so -- than almost anyone's.
Hitchcock's singing voice was, and still is, uncannily like Syd Barrett's. But it's a huge bound from "So You Think You're In Love" back to The Soft Boys of 1977. Long before his dangerous sense of humour -- which extended to changing the name of the band to The Soft Boys (from Dennis And The Experts) in the middle of a gig without telling the others -- had been spoken for by the likes of Peter Buck and Michael Stipe, he wrote songs with a quite unique eye; some of them peopled by Milliganesque characters like Leppo and the Jooves, some of them probably over-interested in the functions of household implements, most of them bringing a gleefully untethered use of English to his pet topics of post-tertiary education paranoia, seafood, urban scurvy, eggs, death, reptiles and, in one unforgettable image, coiled salami. Inside the language, cab-driver colloquialisms tussled with Peake-ian ghoulishness, and Test Match Special propriety did battle with the hazy gaze of solo Syd.
The Soft Boys were more pessimistic than whimsical. The oh-yeahs and the she's-my-babys were all part of an A-Z of the macabre that you certainly never got with The Monochrome Set. Love was something The Soft Boys only ever encountered in cover versions. Sex was soemthing hanging on a hook in a butcher's window. Maybe they thought showing naked emotions would have been really uncool. Maybe they felt that, as interesting as a new girlfriend is, she's not nearly as interesting as a Hoover that yodels.
Their name was droll, but scarcely apposite. "The Face Of Death", from a June '77 session from their first EP that represents The Soft Boys at full stretch, is as overloaded as Elvis Costello's "Lipstick Vogue". The exhilarating "Wading Through A Ventilator", from the same session, can only be compared to "Seven And Seven Is" by Love. And the creapy streak in Hitchcock's songwriting inspired the others: Kimberley Rew, a blistering guitarist with the malleability of a stuntman; Andy Metcalfe on bass (replaced after the 1979 debut album, A Can Of Bees, by Matthew Seligman); and Morris Windsor on drums. They were up for whatever Hitchcock threw at them -- heavily syncopated, Black-Hearted Folk on "Salamander", Byrds-y prettiness on "Queen Of Eyes", stunning harmonies on their 1978 Radar single, "(I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp".
Most of the stuff collected here is either long-lost or previously unreleased. Now and again three tracks will appar from one of their albums -- the frantic, asymmetrical A Can Of Bees, the more obviously groovy Underwater Moonlight (1980), the posthumous Invisible Hits (1983) (a roundup of material scrapped five years earlier). But much of the story took place outside the studio: the three tracks recorded in Hitchcock's living room in March '77; the six tracks recorded live at Cambridge's Lady Mitchell Hall in late '78; the two acoustic songs from the Portland Arms in Cambridge, that same year. As others doo-wop their way manfully through the old Elvis tear-coaxer, "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", Hitchcock embarks on a hilarious, inspired talkover, punctiliously syntactical but gradually getting more and more flustered until he reaches almost "Cheese Sketch" irritability.
Two years later they were making their most straightforward music yet. They had tried different production techniques in the interim -- highlighting guitars, making the guitars louder, putting the emphasis on the guitars -- and on "Kingdom Of Love" they finally achieved a classic, drilled sound, as true as a Duane Eddy riff or The Velvets' "Foggy Notion". Typically, Hitchcock put in a verse about finding eggs hatching under his chin.
Hitchcock's solo career keeps this band's spirit alive, since The Egyptians are essentially The Soft Boys without Rew. You'll never hear anything as deranged as "Do The Chisel" (although, equally, you'll never hear anything as useless as "Skool Dinner Blues"). Of late, The Soft Boys have re-formed to tour this album, and swelled to an imperious six-piece at The Astoria the other week. Not the least stirring sight was Andy Metcalfe, a man who looks like an off-duty policeman, screwing up his face to get the precise descant harmony on one particular 15-year-old chorus. The words he was singing were "Where are the prawns?".
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