The Wafflehead
1995 (#1)
I See The Underwater Moonlight
A Look At The 1980 Unknown Classic, Underwater Moonlight By The Soft Boys
by David Bennun
Robyn Hitchcock's career (for want of a better term) shows a man as squarely out of time as it's possible to be -- outside of a Bill & Ted movie. In the '90s, when everything up-to-and-including The Human League has already been revived (or it's rubbing its palms in anticipation), he might have done quite well for himself. But his band, The Soft Boys, made their first recordings in 1976. Plying your trade as a psychedelic visionary at the exact onset of Punk could be seen as an act of almost suicidal synchornicity. Never let it be said of Hitchcock that he blew with the breeze.
"We were all a bunch of very non-confrontational, uptight, middle-class kids," Hitchcock would later say of The Soft Boys. "When everyone else was throwing beer glasses at the stage and putting safety pins through their noses, all we wanted to do was eat cucumber sandwiches."
Not that Hitchcock's music bore any but the most superficial of resemblances to the overstretched dawdels of the late-'60s/early-'70s drug bores, who meandered like the woolly mastadons they were into the graveyards of Prog. Hitchcock was more Syd Barrett than Pink Floyd. Indeed, more Syd Barrett than anything -- albeit possessed of a lucidity that sadly escaped Barrett some time around 1968. His songs were always taut, tart, and tuneful, and rarely had the time to spin 'round and blink, let alone meander.
The Soft Boys weren't that far adrift from the punks. They grew (as did many Punk outifts) out of a Pub Rock-ing covers band with the raw Garage feel that usually had a little to do with hip mentors (The Stooges, The New York Dolls) and a lot to do with less-than-total instrumental proficiency. Without Hitchocck, that's all they ever would have been: another Cambridge pub band, too stuffy and fussed about musicianship to be punks, too uninspired to be anything else.
But Hitchcock was a gifted songwriter, pre-empting the '60s-tinged reinventions of both Britain and the U.S. during the '80s -- and surpassing most of them, at that. Peter Buck has gone on record as claiming that R.E.M. were more influenced by The Soft Boys than by The Byrds. By the time R.E.M. released "Radio Free Europe" in 1981, The Soft Boys were defunct.
It's one thing to be influential, another to stand the test of time. Often, "influential" is a word applied to bands too affectionately remembered to be described as "dated, dreary, and quickly superseded by those who improved upon their ideas." Fortunately for The Soft Boys, they made Underwater Moonlight, an album which could hardly date as it wasn't in the least bit of its time -- or any other. The "it could have been made any time in the last 30 years" argument simply doesn't apply. It's not fey enough to have come from 1965. It's too raw to have originated in 1968, too concise to have trundled out of 1973. It sounds too little like a brain haemorrhage recorded on a dictaphone for 1977; is nowhere near angsty, arty or overcoated enough for 1980 (when it was made); nor is it sloppy or laxy enough for the 1989-91 Jangle epidemic. It's very, very odd.
But then Hitchcock was fairly odd himself, in that reassuring, English, non-sequiturial way frequently mistakenly labelled "surreal". This kind of eccentricity, which so often seems to be practised by geography teachers and the like -- who fancy themselves as the missing member of the Monty Python team -- is usually worhty of derision and -- should these people attempt to make records -- violence. It's cruel, but necessary. According to one Hitchcock quote, his own father would seem to be one of these types: "He once wrote a book in which Stonehnge was stolen by the British version of the CIA. They removed it, and anyone who saw what they did was rounded up. And then Merlin the magician suddenly shows up as a stoned-out hippie." Clearly a classic of counterculture humour to rank with thousands of other identical but mercifully unpublished opuses. The reporter of the quote, one Bill Holdship, observes that Hitchcock pere's ideas "sound as if they'd be at home in one of Hitchcock's later songs." Maybe.
But certainly not on Underwater Moonlight, wherein Hitchcock displays wit, imagination, and something not far off genius in his songwriting.
Moonlight was the second of two proper Soft Boys LPs, and was recorded for £600. Again, Hitchcock's timing was perfectly wrong. By now, Punk's blast-on-a-budget was fading and Britain was soon to suffer from arterioscleroris of the charts -- a clogging-up of vital passageways with dreary, pompous, echo-laden nonsense created via the studio technique of spending large sums of money. The Soft Boys were on the cusp of a moment; unfortunatley, the moment was several years away -- by which time Hitchcock would be a contented American cult, draped in a cloak of Rickenbacker and schmoozing around with R.E.M.. So the record has a harsh, raggedy, rehearsal-studio feel. This is just one reason why it now sounds so good.
Hitchcock describes his songwriting as "dreaming in public", and indeed his songs often have the illogical quality of oblique dreams in which even the most devout Freudian would be pushed to find meaning. But Underwater Moonlight seems riddled with significance. The songs may try to escape it, but it hunts them out. Although everything is suggested rather, you sense the residue of emotional and psychosexual nightmares which mean just a tad too much -- the kind of dreams that waken you with a start and leave you wondering just what kind of sick individual you are to have that going through your mind. The same kind of sick individual as everybody else, of course. But try telling yourself that at 4:30 a.m. when this little scenario has just skipped into your reverie: "You've been laying eggs under my skin/Now they're hatching out under my chin/Now there's tiny insects shwoing through/All those tiny insects look like you". The song is called "Kingdom Of Love", which gives you some idea of Hitchcock's view of romance.
Underwater Moonlight is full of foetid obsessions masquerading as love songs -- perhaps "masquerading" is the wrong word, as love can be the most foetid of obsessions. But you get the idea that young Robyn was not perfectly fulfilled in his interpersonal relationships. "All I want to do is be your creature" he avows in the same song, which must be something only the best-balanced of us have never wanted to say to a wished-for significant other. Or is it just me? Anyway, as a catchphrase it has an equally arresting effect if used at random on passersby.
The album opens with a very uncharacteristic Hitchcock number, "I Wanna Destroy You", which could be taken as a nod to Punk -- or at least a slight inclination of the head -- but probably wasn't. It's more an exercise in harmonic screaming: a howl of hate augmented by howls of counterpoint. Plus it's full of couplets that even the astute punks would never have dreamt up. "A pox upon the media and everyting you read", Hitchcock growls. "They tell you your opinions and they're very good indeed". Alone among the punks, Lydon might have understood, being the only one with any conception of sarcasm. "And when I have destroyed you I'll come picking at your bones/And you won't have a single atom left to call your own". Now that's a pretty good threat, as threats go.
"Positive Vibrations" is another oddity, inasmuch as its not in fact that odd. It's as upbeat as its title, and suffers from the obvious political sentiments that might hamstring "I Wanna Destroy You" if it weren't such a good song. "Positive Vibrations" isn't such a good song, although it's brisk and pretty, with some textbook Raga-ripoff guitar. But don't give up, because it's around now that things really get interesting.
"I Got The Hots" is lustful. I mean lustful. It drips. It sweats. It reeeks of secretions. And the fact that it is written in gobbledegook (Hitchcock's first language) makes it no less filthy. It rides on the back of a slow, insistent, and lascivious guitar line, breaking off to survey the scene from above, circling and returning. It's like being seduced by a vulture. It's not nice. But what fucking use is nice, anyway? And how they managed to get the guitars to sound like that on £600 is a continuing mystery. Those guitars are everywhere.
The album's centerpiece is the best thing Hitchcock ever did. "Insanely Jealous" follows the wriggling path from resentment to psychosis with such a grisly accuracy that even the humour in it serves only to tighten the cord. The track is nothing but a low, loping pulse across which is pierced or scratched breakout-like intermittent gunfire before the whole thing finally goes ballistic. The menace in it such that it's impossible to guess whether it stems from an ardent lover or a deranged stalker -- bearing that in mind, in his own head, the latter sees himself as the former. It's the sort of song that makes you feel uneasy to realise how well you understand it.
The same theme is repeated on "Tonight", which follows an explicitly voyeuristic, insinuating presence: "I'm not just here for anyone's sake...I'll be with you wherever you are tonight". "Tonight" is ominous, but clear-cut. It's almost as good as "Insanely Jealous", but lacks that knife-edge ambiguity. Ther person who's "Insanely jealous of the people that you see/Insanely jealous of the people that aren't me" sounds too close for comfort, as does the song's bleak view of love affairs: "I don't know why the people want to meet when they know that they'll breed like rabbits in the end ... All I hear when they embrace is just the kiss of skulls".
Skipping over the surplus instrumental, "You'll Have To Go Sideways" (waste of a great title), we find yet further abnormal goings on in "Old Pervert" -- Underwater Moonlight being as direct in its titles as it is abstruse in its lyrics. This off-kilter aural icepick has the rare distinction of being a comic song that is actually funny -- something that took Hitchcock a while to master. Of course, you might argue that there's nothing humourous about an old pervert enticing children home to inspect the contents of his fridge. But you'd be a tight-lipped sanctimonious dolt with no appreciation of the distinction between art and reality if you did. Up to you, really.
"Queen Of Eyes" is two minutes of bejewelled joy, easily the equal of any '60s West Coast snippet or '80s northern imitation. The closing title track may well be an ode to the tidal pull of lunar madness, or it may simply be a delightful pile of gibberish. It doesn't pay to worry too much about these things. All you need to know is that it places the full stop on an under-regarded psychedelic -- and psychotic -- classic.
Hitchcock went on to a solo career some moments of which rank with Moonlight for skewed brilliance: Black Snake Diamond Role comes highly recommended. These days he is regarded as a cult musical comedian, a little harsh for a man who made one of the great British Rock albums of the last 15 years. But then, he probably doesn't mind in the least.
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