Underwater Moonlight...And How It Got There

by

The Soft Boys

Edit

This is a brilliant album.

If you don't have it yet (and most of you won't - hardly anyone ever did), you should buy two copies; one for yourself and one for your best friend. See, this is not just any old album that you can invite people to simply take home for a weekend. Oh no!

So what does it sound like?

Underwater Moonlight sounds like nothing on earth so much as Monty Python, backed by the Byrds or (in the Soft Boys' tougher moments) the Kinks. If that isn't enough to suck you in, just listen to the first four tracks. Simply, my life was never the same again after hearing I Wanna Destroy You for the first time. This is punk, but not punk: it's noisy but arty, deadly serious in its content but utterly hilarious in its delivery, and it has vocal harmonies from outer space. It's fabulous.

Then there's Kingdom of Love. It starts off quiet and ends in a joyful rapture, with a brilliant snaking guitar lead that coils and uncoils itself as Robyn Hitchcock surrenders himself to the most confusing of human emotions: "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." Python's Terry Gilliam would have made a great cartoon sequence out of it.

Positive Vibrations was written on the day Robyn's dog died. Thatcher and Reagan had just been elected and Robyn wanted to shoo all that awfulness away, so he sat down and wrote this little hippie anthem at a time when everyone hated hippies. It features possibly the only excusable sitar solo in rock history, is the fastest song on the album, and is catchier than typhoid.

I Got the Hots, by way of contrast, is a creeping sleazoid crawl. I won't bother to describe it further; just quote the following: "Said the dentures to the peach/said the tide of filth to the bleach/said the spike to the tomato/said the curry to the corpse/I got the hots for you." And that's just the first verse.

Insanely Jealous is more lyrical flights of fancy over a heartbeat bass and a quivering violin. It builds into a demented rage of guitars with Robyn babbling about being jealous of everything from the people that you love to the fingers in your glove. He sounds like he means it too, which is the scary bit.

Tonight is a romantic trip to a harmonic heaven about which no more needs to be said.

You'll Have To Go Sideways is an instrumental number, an oddity for a band for whom lyrics play such a big role. But it's another highlight on an album stuffed with gems, compelling and unsettling in that, for once, it leaves everything unsaid. It's mysterious and beautiful.

Have I mentioned Kimberley Rew yet? Kimberley plays lead guitar like, as Hitchcock once described, "Hendrix in sulphuric acid ... or Hendrix ON sulphuric acid". You can hear that style most clearly on Old Pervert, a Beefheartian nightmare of fiends and ghouls. Kimberley went on to Katrina and the Waves, for whom he wrote Walking on Sunshine.

Next to Tonight, Queen of Eyes is the prettiest number on the album, two minutes of gorgeous retro pop. It really does sound like the early Byrds, and like Kingdom of Love might have been a hit if not for Robyn describing the object of his affections "with her carapace shell and her black-lace thighs".

And then there's the title track: a psychedelic masterpiece of weirdness about two statues who go out for a night on the town together. Although better heard on the out of print 1976-1981 Ryko compilation (which features a hilarious Hitchcock monologue at its centre), this is the quintessential Soft Boys, the stuff those who've only heard the name, and wondered what they sound like, will be expecting.

Like I said, this is a brilliant album. Buy two.