I could quite easily waste all year banging on about classic albums which were only posthumously awarded their due. In fact, my ‘desert island’ album selection would mostly be filled by records which brought little but disappointment and heartache through under-achievement for their respective authors at the time of release.
I’m thinking colossal records like Big Star’s ‘#1 Record’, Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’, Gene Clark’s ‘No Other’ and Adrian Borland’s ‘5:00AM’ here, but another one I’d definitely include in this hallowed group would be Cambridge’s finest THE SOFT BOYS’ magnificent ‘Underwater Moonlight’. Originally released on the Armageddon label in the autumn of 1980, it was the apple of SB’s leader Robyn Hitchcock’s eye, but it disappeared off into the commercial void until rising US underground stars like REM, The Replacements and Husker Du began singing its’ praises five years later.
The album had attained true ‘underground classic’ status by the time Matador Records gave it the inevitable ‘expanded re-issue’ treatment in 2001, but while US label Yep Roc’s 2010 edition trims it back to its’ original ten tracks, what ten tracks they are!
Recorded and produced for less than a grand (!) by the ever-resourceful Pat Collier (The House of Love, The Sound, The Wonder Stuff), ‘Underwater Moonlight’ is a quintessentially English Psych-Pop treasure, fizzing with Post-Punk energy and shot through with Robyn Hitchcock’s deliciously warped imagination. Hitchcock’s chief influences are there for all to spot on tracks like the coruscating Beefheart-ian screes of ‘Old Pervert’ and the gorgeous Byrds-ian spangle of ‘Queen of Eyes’, but even here the Soft Boys’ stunning blend of surreality, energy and love of first-rate Power Pop simply dazzles.
Things kick off magically with ‘I Wanna Destroy You”s effervescent gob of media-baiting phlegm and the ante is raised further by the thrilling, sitar-enhanced ‘Positive Vibrations’ and the glorious cascade of guitars seeping from the sexually-predatory ‘Kingdom of Love’. The spiky R’n’B of ‘I Got the Hots’ seems orthodox enough on the surface, but the bizarre lyrical invective (“said the dentures to the peach/ said the tide of filth to the bleach”) is anything but. It’s not half as intense as either ‘Tonight’ or the dangerously psychotic ‘Insanely Jealous’, however. Both are eerie and unsettling and make like the blueprint for ‘stalker’ songs years before such things were officially recognised.
Years later, ‘Underwater Moonlight’s madcap brilliance seemed to have come from a whole different galaxy from the records (The Fall’s ‘Grotesque’, Bauhaus’ ‘In the Flat Field’ and Adam & the Ants’ ‘Dirk Wears White Sox’) making waves in the Independent Charts at the time. It also seemed to have come from nowhere, but Yep Roc’s re-issue of its’ predecessor, 1979’s debut ‘A Can of Bees’ demonstrates the band had been busy perfecting their off-kilter genius in the eye of the new wave hurricane.
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Elvis Costello’s label Radar put out The Soft Boys’ legendary ‘I Want to Be an Angle poise Lamp’ in 1978, but had dropped the band shortly after. Consequently, ‘A Can of Bees’ finally appeared on Robyn Hitchcock’s own Two Crabs label. It’s not quite as seismic as its’ successor and its’ angles are a little more oblique, but it’s a great record nonetheless.
“I told you baby I was the only one/ then I left myself and now you’re the lonely one,” sings Hitchcock on the mutant R’n’B of opening track ‘Give it to the Soft Boys’, immediately planting the band’s flag high on a surrealistic pop peak worthy of Cambridge forbear Syd Barrett. Elsewhere, the mischievous ‘Leppo & The Jooves’ and the brilliantly macabre ‘Sandra’s Having Her Brain Out’ (“it’s like tonsils, they’re more trouble than they’re worth”) are both utterly essential and the jangly ‘Human Music’ is another of those slices of chiming loveliness Robyn still likes to cut from his arcane pop cake when the spirit moves him.
It doesn’t always cut the mustard. Not for nothing does Hitchcock mutter “if this doesn’t get rid of you, nothing will” before the maniacal ‘Wading through a Ventilator’, but hey, damn the torpedoes. At its’ best ‘A Can of Bees’ and in its’ entirety ‘Underwater Moonlight’ are more than worthy of their legendary reputation. We should indeed give it to the Soft Boys once again.
Buy The Soft Boys albums from Yep Roc and get a download code to a stack of bonus tracks from the band
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