With Underwater Moonlight The Soft Boys launch the jangle pop era of the 80's

The Soft Boys : Kingdom of Love

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On June 28, 1980 The Soft Boys released Underwater Moonlight, the band's second album. Led by art school dropout Robyn Hitchcock and featuring guitarist Kimberly Rew, The Soft Boys provided the rock world with a bridge from the John Lennon/Syd Barrett/Byrds sounds of the 60's  to the jangle pop of R.E.M./Replacements/The Smiths and so many other bands. 

What no band could imitate is Hitchcock's bizarre sense of humor. On "Kingdom of Love", he compares infatuation to insects crawling under his skin:

You've been laying eggs under my skin 

Now they're hatching out under my chin 

Now there's tiny insects showing through 

And all them tiny insects look like you 

When the band broke up Hitchcock began releasing solo material that appealed to college radio DJ's like myself while Rew went off to form Katrina and the Waves. A 2001 release of Underwater Moonlight contains 36 songs on two discs, including a cover of Roxy Music's "Over You". 

Most Popular Posts of 2019

You never know what post is going to connect with readers or why. The Top Ten posts were mostly about esoteric albums like A Can of Bees by The Soft Boys.

Top 5 Most Popular Posts

1. The Soft Boys A Can of Bees.

"As we learned to play electric music, we festooned it with harmonies and booby-trapped it with odd time signatures." - Robyn Hitchcock

2. The Raincoats self-titled.

The band lived as squatters, paying no rent and living on air and the occasional meal and bath.

 “It was a homemade, chaotic sound,” bassist and vocalist Gina Burch says. “The way we lived seeped in.”

3. Pil: Metal Box

How the boxes themselves turned out was awkward in the extreme...They were hard to prise apart, and it was impossible to get the records out. It was appropriate, though , because what you were about to listen to could've been construed as distinctly unpleasant--it was made for those consumers who were prepared to put in a bit of effort. - John Lydon

4. The Misfits : "Night of the Living Dead"

The punk band printed up 2000 copies to be sold at the door to their shows. In contrast, t-shirts sales featuring Misfit ghouls have sold well over a million by now. Even my daughter is wearing one today.

5. Godley and Creme : Freeze Frame

The idea was driven by a new piece of equipment called a harmoniser. It's used in studios all the time these days as a corrective device to get performances in tune, but this early version came with a keyboard. You could put a sound through a harmoniser and if you wanted an instrument or voice to hit a certain note that it hadn't, you could play that note on the keyboard. So we got to thinking, 'Let's forget about singing for the moment. What happens if I vocalize these words in a monotone - do an entire song on one note - and get Lol to play my vocal on the harmoniser keyboard?' That was the experiment. It worked pretty well. Predated Cher's digital gurglings by a few years. -Kevin Godley

Next 5:

The Shoes Present Tense
The Brains "Money Changes Everything"
The Pop Group Y
Marianne Faithfull Broken English
The Jam Setting Sons.



Least Popular:

For several weeks during the summer something strange happened in which I lost 95%-98% of the views I would regularly get. So the quality of the albums is not the blame here.

1. Dire Straits Communique
2. Japan Life in Tokyo
3. Swell Maps
4. Joni Mitchell Mingus
5. Sniff n The Tears " Drivers Seat"

Her Mouth is Stuffed With Flies

The Soft Boys : Human Music

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On April 24, 1979 The Soft Boys released their debut album, A Can of Bees. Led by the irresistible and quirky Robyn Hitchcock and featuring future Katrina and the Waves hitmaker Kimberley Rew, this album may pale in comparison to the follow-up,  Underwater Moonlight, but it does have its moments. "Human Music" is a jangly love song with three part harmonies that could have come from any Robyn Hitchcock album in the last 40 years . It's so pretty you might overlook the bizarre lyrics:

Darkness is the shore of light, 
the truth is framed with lies 
And a girl can smile so sweetly 
though her mouth is stuffed with flies

Robyn Hitchcock wrote about the Soft Boys in 1979 for The Quietus:

Morris (Windsor, drums) and Andy (Metcalfe, bass) inclined to The Beach Boys and Steely Dan; Andy, Kimberley and I were big into Fairport, Richard Thompson, and The Albion Band; while I was magnetized by Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart, but we all loved the Beatles, which marked us out, irrevocably, from the permitted heroes of punk. As we learned to play electric music, we festooned it with harmonies and booby-trapped it with odd time signatures.

Hitchcock goes on to write the album that was ignored by everyone but a few record store clerks in the United States ( Like future R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck).

The Can of Bees tour was a demoralizing experience: long silences in the van punctuated by Kimberley sighing, "Looks like rain."

Butcher, It's Meaty

The Soft Boys : ( I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp

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On May 26, 1978 Radar Recoprds released the second single from The Soft Boys,  "( I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp" b/w "Fatman's Son", both written and sung by Robyn Hitchcock. Hitchcock is one of rock's most eccentric songwriters, blending his own sensibilities with those of John Lennon, Syd Barrett, The Beach Boys and The Byrds. The single stiffed and Radar dropped the band which also consisted of Kimberley Rew, later of Katrina and the Waves. Would this be the last we'd hear from fair Robyn? Don't bet on it!

I Fix My Fish

The Soft Boys : Wading Through a Ventilator

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On November 27, 1976 Robyn Hitchcock introduced his band, The Soft Boys", on a stage in Cambridge. 

His explanation for the new name: "I'd had this concept of this thing called the Soft Boys, like a William Burroughs amalgam. Soft Machine  and the Wild Boys. The implications were kind of homo-erotic and seedy, kind of crawling, bloodless, colorless things that crawled around like filleted human jellyfish around the corridors of power. Soft Boys controlled things but they had no spine. Basically insidious people and basically that's what we were."