Melody Maker - Unknown Pleasures - 20 Great Lost Albums Rediscovered - # 16 The Soft Boys - Underwater Moonlight

'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...' David Bennun

If there's one thing this series has helped me discover, ( there have actually been quite a few things), is that David Bennun is a fine, unassuming and informative writer. He nails the peculiarity of The Soft Boys in his second piece here,and they really were a very peculiar band. You are highly unlikely to find them in annals that document the movers and shakers of their time. Because they weren't. They had next to nothing in common with contemporaries like The Clash, Gang of Four or Joy Division except that they played guitars and wrote and played songs with verses and choruses.

As Bennun points out, in any other era they would probably have been fine. From the Nineties onwards there was always a niche for the eccentric and eclectic but from 1976 when they first recorded to 1980 when they split, after making Underwater Moonlight, a certain uniformity was de rigueur. Bands were either Punk, New Wave, Post Punk or edging towards Ska with Two Tone. Virtually any new British band of interest you might care to mention could be reasonably channelled into one of these pens, The Soft Boys remained from start to finish obstinate black sheep and in relative obscurity as a result.

'In this horrible world of age and decay. It's good to know someone is looking OK.'

Underwater Moonlight has musical precedents. It's not difficult to pick out the Byrds, early Floyd, Beatles, Bonzo and Beefheart ingedients in the mix. But this is anything but revivalism and it's far from lazy as much of the second rank music of the time was. This record could not have been made in 1967 and is certainly not a product of Love and Peace misty eyed wonder. It has an intense, tightly wound paranoia that surely draws on the edgy experience of commuting on the same train at the same time unfailingly for forty years and what that does to you. That Robyn Hitchcock, still relatively youthful, ( though he was pushing it in Punk terms at twenty seven) , had absorbed this essential weirdness just below the surface layer of conformity, is much to his credit. The lyrics and melodic gear changes make no concessions to expectation. The next song never sounds quite like the last. Or the next.

His artistic drives are rooted in surrealism and dadaism every bit as much as psychedelia. If this is a psychedelic album at all, it's psychedelia without drug paraphernalia. Stranger still.  I've always slightly resisted the charms of Hitchcock's records finding his lack of engagement irritating. A few years ago I saw him live and every interaction between songs was made in best Public School French. Amusing perhaps but you wish he'd stop after a while. You can take the English boarding school boy out of prep school but you cannot take the prep school out of the English boarding school boy. But listening through to the record last night in full on headphones this record suddenly came into focus and I liked it more than I've ever done before.

Hitchcock has of course found his place in the scheme of thing since. R.E.M's Peter Buck  played no small part in this, famously stating that The Soft Boys were the primary guiding influence on his playing style rather than The Byrds as was universally assumed. Hitchcock and Buck took to hanging around together and have pretty much done so ever since. The American college circuit declared him officially cool rather than the oddball refusenik he'd been dismissed as on home turf. He's had a perfectly respectable career and built a loyal following over the years.

His reputation still rests on this record more than any other. Some credit for this needs to go to Kimberley Rew later of Katrina & the Waves, as good a foil as he ever worked with. The rhythm section are note perfect. But the album of course is inconceivable without Hitchcock. He wrote the script, plays the lead, gives the other players their cues and gets the first curtain call to himself at the end of the performance. There are all kinds of books around nowadays called 1,000 Albums to Hear Before You Die, or the Perfect Record Collection or something of the sort. This record belongs there. Not at the top of the list perhaps but certainly somewhere in the pack.