Soft Boys :: Underwater Moonlight
After the release of their 1979 debut classic “A Can Of Bees,” Cambridge, England-based post-punk legends The Soft Boys quickly followed up with their highly harmonious and iconically influential sophomore album “Underwater Moonlight,” shortly before disbanding the following year. After the album’s commercial collusion with the sonic success of their contemporaries like Buzzcocks, The Cure, and the upcoming The Smiths, to name a few, left them a marketing “liability” to the suits upstairs. Eventually fading into history, leaving behind tonal trances of their intimate identity and epic influence on the generation of musicians that would soon follow, members Robyn Hitchcock, Kimberley Rew, Morris Windsor, and the late great Matthew Seligman set out to capture one last fantastic flame before burning out underneath the malevolent moon where their melodic magic had started just a few years prior. Recorded in the summer of 1979 at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge by staff, as well as in Alaska, and at James Morgan studios between January and June of 1980 on 4-track as well as 8-track for a whopping £600, “Underwater Moonlight” takes listeners, both new and old, to destinations decorated in diamonds and blissed-out art rock rage. Featuring a subliminal selection of songs such as the album’s brilliant opener“I Wanna Destroy You,”“Queen Of Eyes,"“Tonight,” and the title track, the music balances on the liberating lines where punk prowls on the body heat of the new wave sound like a calm, calculated cheetah in an African atmosphere.
“The Soft Boys were never a Punk band; we weren’t even New Wave or Power Pop - labels didn’t stick to us, which made us difficult to market. In the world of greengrocery, our nearest equivalent would be the mushroom: not exactly fruit, not really a vegetable, but edible nonetheless if you like the taste and texture. Posthumously, we became known as an Art-Rock band, like those two influential-but-undefinable combos The Velvet Underground and Roxy Music. However, during our reunion from 2001 to 2003, we were probably more of a jam band than anything: a definition that had not been there to hang on us the first time around. By the time this century rolled into place, Kimberley Rew and I had settled into a much more relaxed guitar relationship than the manic dueling of our early days. It became more about trading musical shapes and phrases - firing electric handwriting out into the room and weaving it into a canopy of sonic textures: like stained glass that you could listen to. We’d both proved ourselves, we both knew we could play, and we let ourselves enjoy it. Meanwhile, back in 1978…”
The Soft Boys instead took their intimate influence and fundamental fascination with 1960s psychedelia, becoming trailblazers of neo-psychedelia energy that would emerge from the multi-faceted eras of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It’s fascinating to see just how this particular collection of songs has morphed and changed over its forty-five years of existence. From a non-existent entry into the world to its incredible impact on bands around the world, to make matters worse for the band’s potential publicity, there was a printer’s strike in the UK in the summer when the album was released, ultimately leading to virtually zero coverage of the record. So where do the Soft Boys stand now on the tonal timeline of underground rock history? It seems that they would stand as impeccable individuals in the weird world of underground rock as their dynamic discovery grows closer and closer with each new listen, and flip from one side of the vinyl to the other.
