Men out of time

The return of Robyn Hitchcock and the Soft Boys

by Brett Milano

Cult-hero status is a funny thing: it doesn't make you as rich as mainstream success, but it has a longer shelf life. If Big Star had managed a hit single back in 1971, odds are they wouldn't have maintained more cachet than the similarly styled bands (Raspberries, Dwight Twilley) who did. If Pet Sounds had been the Beach Boys' best-selling album instead of their first relative flop, it might not still be getting rediscovered and reissued every few years. And if the Velvet Underground, Gram Parsons, and Mission of Burma all sound timeless, that's in part because they were never fully accepted in their own time.

The Soft Boys weren't trying to join those ranks in 1980 when they recorded Underwater Moonlight. Most likely they were just trying to have hit singles and get on MTV, like everybody else. And by any musical standard, that's exactly what should have happened. Listen to the album now (it's just been reissued by Matador for its 20th anniversary) and it won't sound especially challenging or exotic. It simply sounds like a collection of great songs.

Sure, the band were always a bit out of the ordinary. Frontman Robyn Hitchcock was just developing the skewed lyrical sense, the wry humor and the blurring of the sex/death axis, that would serve him well in his solo career. And sure, they were too well educated to pass as a punk band: Hitchcock gives that much away on "I Wanna Destroy You" by singing "A pox upon the media" when anybody else would have said "Fuck the newspapers." Then again, that's one reason this song, which sounds like "Anarchy in the UK" with Byrds harmonies and a conscience, has outlasted the million punk knockoffs from the same period. Having both the Replacements and Uncle Tupelo cover it on stage didn't hurt either.

At the very least, the Soft Boys cried out to be embraced by the same people who were then into Squeeze, XTC, and Elvis Costello: the closet romantics, closet deep-thinkers, closet Beatles/Dylan nuts and those who value a great song above all else. Who of course are the same people who've kept Hitchcock in business for the ensuing two decades.

Over most of those two decades, Hitchcock has sworn that his old band would never be getting back together -- though a pair of former Soft Boys, drummer Morris Windsor and bassist Andy Metcalfe, made up his long-time back-up group the Egyptians. The main holdout has been guitarist Kimberley Rew, who went onto greater, if shorter-lived, success with Katrina & the Waves. And Rew is ultimately the reason the Soft Boys didn't sound like any of Hitchcock's other bands. The creative (and maybe personal) tension between the two produced a snarly two-guitar sound, and Hitchcock's songs made the most of it. The alienation that the singer airs during Moonlight's standout track, "Insanely Jealous" ("I'm insanely jealous of the people that you see/And I'm insanely jealous of the people who aren't me"), is amplified and magnified by the guitar duel that follows.

Rew finally came back into the picture two years ago, when he played on Hitchcock's album Jewels for Sophia (Warner Bros.) and the accompanying tour -- and with Moonlight due for a 20th-anniversary reissue, a Soft Boys get-together was inevitable. The American leg isn't just a reunion tour, however: it's the first time they've toured this country at all, save for a handful of New York dates in 1980. (The band broke up soon after, and the follow-up album turned into Hitchcock's solo debut, Black Snake Diamond Role.) The currently touring line-up is the one that recorded Underwater Moonlight: Hitchcock, Rew, Matthew Seligman (rather than Metcalfe) on bass, and Windsor on drums.

"The band definitely still works," Hitchcock reports from his home in London. "It's been a long cycle for me -- when I came away from the Soft Boys, I decided I didn't want to have another guitarist and didn't want it to be too loud -- no more thrashing and hollering." That conviction got stronger in the '90s, when his albums got primarily acoustic and he told interviewers he was too old to rock-and-roll. "That was another station I passed through -- and partly out of principle, because I grew up in an era when nobody over 26 was playing electric guitars. So I thought that the sight of grizzled sausage fingers swirled around a Stratocaster was more than I could bear.

"Also, there was a point on the Globe of Frogs tour [in 1987] when I totally blew my voice out, playing with Peter Buck and the Egyptians. So by the mid '90s I was happy with just my acoustic; but I don't like to stay with any one thing for too long. It's just fun to get up and play sometimes; and we may as well do it now instead of waiting until we're all in our 50s." He hints that new material, even another album, may turn up down the line -- they've already recorded a cover of Paul McCartney's "Let Me Roll It" for a British charity disc.

Reached at his London home in a separate conversation, bassist Seligman doesn't try to hide his enthusiasm. "It's been brilliant. I don't think I realized at the time what great players they were, because I was so full of early-20s adrenaline. The other night at rehearsal, it sounded so amazing that I started blushing and had to look down at the floor. I forgot that I'm a musician and just felt like I was standing in a room with the Soft Boys." Credit some of Seligman's energy to his returning to music after a long break. After the Soft Boys, he went on to a high-profile session career, playing in Thomas Dolby's band and in David Bowie's during Live Aid; but he jacked it in to become a lawyer. "I started in music to play in bands and have this amazing rock-and-roll adventure; and I became like a gun for sale, packing my bass up like a rifle and going on to the next hit. It wasn't me, and it was better to quit than to become that."

Part of the Soft Boys' enduring legend is that nobody liked them during their existence, a notion that the members are glad to confirm. "The problem wasn't that we went over people's heads," Hitchcock says. "It's just that there were no heads to go over. I remember playing in Edinburgh for 10 people, all of whom were US Marines who were tripping on acid. They came back afterwards and said things like `Carter is a pussy, man; we should go bomb Iran.' We signed their posters `Love and peace, the Soft Boys.' " They did get enough college airplay to justify a trip to New York, where they played their only previous US dates in 1980. (A few tracks from that tour's stop at Maxwell's in Hoboken are now up for free download at the band's new site, www.underwatermoonlight.com.) "It was exciting to see New York, like being in a film without a soundtrack. I had to see a baseball game and buy a six-pack of Budweiser, just because I was in America."

Evaluating Underwater Moonlight, Hitchcock says, "It's not the best thing I've done, but it's as good as anything I've done. Those are probably the first good songs I ever wrote." As for the sex/death theme, "That had probably been around before, in whatever I was writing or drawing. But I think the main idea of Moonlight is about shock or embarrassment at what the male role is in sexual relationships. It seemed to me that if you were a man, that could make you a predator, or a creep, or a stalker or a smoothie. All those characters were how I envisaged myself, or how I envisaged men as sexual beings. I didn't think about being a hunter or gatherer or kindly protector -- for a whole variety of reasons, that wasn't how I saw myself or men in general."

One thing that will be different on the reunion tour is the band's appearance. "It's fascinating, there used to be so much hair about," Hitchcock recalls. "It's fortunate that there aren't any pictures of the early days of the Soft Boys, because I had long hair and a moustache -- and in those days, that was a double whammy, especially if you were from Cambridge. That may be why we didn't get past the new-wave police the way Squeeze and Elvis Costello did. It hadn't occurred to us that we should do that stripped-down look, the way Bowie and Roxy Music avoided facial hair."

Even after punk rock hit the UK? "No, punk only had an indirect effect on us. I do remember a couple of us going to see the Vibrators in London, and Morris gave me the first Damned album for my birthday. And I think our general reaction was, `Hmm, not sure of this, but maybe we better speed up. And maybe ditch playing our Cream covers.' "

Seligman had a different reaction when he saw some old band photos recently. "I just saw the sleeve art [for the CD] -- and don't take this the wrong way, but I see pictures of myself and it's this pretty young boy. Robyn still looks fabulous now, but I feel like Elvis at the end of his career. So I've just enrolled in a gym, and the way you see me on stage will be evidence of what two weeks at a gym can do."