the making of underwater moonlight by the soft boys - featuring robyn hitchcock 

Intro: 

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim. 

The Soft Boys originally formed under the name Dennis and the Experts in Cambridge, England in 1976 by Robyn Hitchcock. Hitchcock had recruited Morris Windsor, Andy Metcalfe and Alan Davies, changing their name to The Soft Boys. They released an EP called Give It to the Soft Boys in 1977. Kimberly Rew replaced Alan Davies on guitar as they began working with Radar Records, releasing a single in 1978. After Radar dropped them, they self-released their first album, A Can of Bees,  in 1979. At this point, Matthew Seligman replaced Andy Metcalfe on bass as they began working on the material for their second full-length album. Underwater Moonlight was eventually released by the Armageddon label in 1980.

In this episode, for the 45th anniversary, Robyn Hitchcock reflects on how the album came together. This is the making of Underwater Moonlight. 

Robyn Hitchcock:  Hi, this is Robyn Hitchcock. This is Robyn Hitchcock's voice here, trawling back through Underwater Moonlight. It's the time I found my style. They were the first good songs I wrote. I don't think I wrote anything good on Can of Bees or before that. I wrote some reasonable lyrics and I made up some nice riffs, but I don't think of those early things as songs. They're sort of exercises in art rock, if you like, but with “Queen of Eyes,” “Kingdom of Love,” “I Wanna Destroy You,” “Insanely Jealous,” “Tonight.” They are all songs that I still play. That was me becoming a songwriter.

The first Soft Boys record, A Can of Bees, was a collection of songs that had been kicking around for a while that I wrote between 1976 and 1978, I guess. But they'd been recorded for a label to which we almost signed in 1978, but we didn't. So some of the songs I think were a bit tired 'cause we'd done them too many times. That record was self-released. It was called A Can of Bees, and it came out in April, I think, 1979. And then the band fractured and the old bass player left. And our harp player, fifth man also went so it was down to a three-piece, which was Morris Windsor on drums, Kimberly Rew on guitar and myself. And we were lucky enough to be able to recruit Matthew Seligman, who had actually been in the very first Soft Boys lineup before it was even called The Soft Boys. He played the very first show with us in the autumn of 1976. So you're going back 49 years here. We're all young animals with dark hair and good skin. And so three years later we still had pretty dark hair and pretty good skin and Matthew rejoined the band. So we were a four-piece. And the old bass player, Andy Metcalf, was a terrific bass player and in fact then played bass with me later in the Egyptians in the 80s, but he was much more esoteric. He could sort of play anything except straight ahead rock. Matthew was probably slightly more funk than he was. An interesting mix, his hero was, I think it's Andy Fraser, the bass player in Free. Free was a sort of metal, but slightly funk British, before those definitions really were in place, nobody quite knew what that music was. Anyway, Matthew's roots were in that. So Matthew, Morris, Kimberley, and I, it was a very, it was a snappy group. It had gotten quite sluggish and sort of turgid, sort of prog metal, I suppose. The Can of Bees Band, it could do far too many things, and it didn't have any one defining style. With Matthew, it was much more limited. We weren't gonna be doing barbershop quartets or folk metal. We weren't gonna be doing stuff in odd times signatures really. It was much more, much more like Earthbound pop, which kind of suited me because I was trying to write pop rock songs rather than just sort of pieces of elaborate music with words. I suppose what happened really was that I sort of took, I kind of took Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band out of the mix. I wasn't wedded to the kind of experimental approach anymore. And so I was writing songs like “Queen of Eyes” and “Kingdom of Love” and “I Wanna Destroy You.” And then the band went, you know, we didn't miss a beat. I think Andy and Jim left on a Saturday and the following week, Friday I had a recording session with Matthew. So it was very seamless, but the band actually changed quite radically. And around that time was when I was beginning to learn that every time you add or subtract a member of a band, the chemistry changes extremely. So that's what it was. So you've got, you know, Autumn ‘79 and the Soft Boys are rehearsing in a boathouse by the River Cam after which Cambridge is named. And I guess we're all in our mid twenties and there we are.

The whole new wave punk thing, everybody had to kind of cut their hair and speed up. I mean, that sort of happened in 1977 really. A lot of people kind of bleached out their Beatles roots, you know, so groups like XTC and and Elvis Costello and the Attractions and Squeeze, I think of them all as basically Beatle bands, but they all started out sounding quite punky or at least kind of sped up and angsty, you know? And then once those days had worn off, their Beatles roots began to come out more. And the same went for us, I suppose. But we didn't do such a big job of disguising it as soon as Matthew was in there. Really I was trying to write, I was quite happily trying to write Beatles songs as I got better as a songwriter, you know, that still is what writing pop rock is about. You know, there was a group called The Records on Virgin who were inclined the same way and there’d been Big Star who had also been rather overlooked because what they, in the early 70s, what they were doing didn't fit with what everybody else was doing in the early 70s. You know, they were still trying to do jangly pop, you know, Big Star always reminded me of the Byrds really. And yeah, the Byrds were another big influence on us, the Beach Boys on Morris particularly. And we all loved the Beatles. Yeah I mean, it was Bob Dylan really, but I put myself through a Syd Barrett filter because he was English and I'd from the age of 15 or whatever I'd wanted to be a, I wanted to follow in Dylan's footsteps in some way, which eventually led me to Nashville, you know, but I was very struck by listening to Syd Barrett's solo records when I was just coming up for 19, and that I kind of marinated myself in that. But I would say my lyrics are, I like words. My dad was a word guy, he wrote books. We had something where we were always comfortable with in the family was words. My mother read books, my father wrote them, he wrote plays. You know, we weren't athletic. It was all about the verbals. So I was gonna be a word guy. My favorite lyricists were Syd Barrett, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Captain Beefheart, who I thought was fantastic with words, you know. That he was the one with his kind of dictatorial cult treatment of these young musicians, which was cruel and, you know, abusive. But he also managed to somehow create music that was as odd and original and discordant as the lyrics. The other people, Dylan and The Beatles and even Syd, their music was a bit straighter. But Beefheart and the Magic band, the music was as apparently fractured or fragmented or free range or liberating or however you want to put it as the words. But I really loved all those people lyrically. So I was not gonna leap overboard when Johnny Rotten sang “Anarchy in the UK” or you know, I'm friends with some of the Damned, but you know, that stuff didn't take me over (laughs). Or the Clash. I was, you know, sorry folks, I don't believe that music began in 1977. I've waved that flag very, very proudly and very high and, you know, got a bit of flack for it.

Pat Collier appeared in the autumn of 1977 when the Soft Boys, we did a show in like the South Bank Polytechnic in London. You could get gigs in Polytechnics fairly easily. You didn't seem to have to have an agent. You could just sort of go in there and impress the social secretary with a cassette and they'd book you. So we, at that stage, we were based in Cambridge and didn't have an agent at all or anything. So our first single hadn't come out. Anyway, this chap in kind of acid pink trousers, skinny fox faced man with, with a sort of shock of orange hair sidled up to me and just introduced himself as Pat Collier. And he said he had a studio in London. He had been in the Vibrators who were a sort of first wave punk band. And I think he just left the Vibrators. And then two years went past, and then somehow we had the Matthew Seligman Soft Boys up and running. We had been recording at Spacewood, but Spacewood seemed quite expensive. We could do it very cheaply at Pat's studio in London, which was at a 4-track studio, 4-track quarter-inch. So it wasn't high quality. You know, the tape width being narrow meant you weren't getting the same bang for your track as you would on a two-inch tape. Not that I understand how this stuff actually works, but Pat had this 4-track machine under the arches, just opposite Waterloo Station in  place a very grimy cryptos damp. It looked kind of Victorian, it was just off the Waterloo Road, but it seemed like it was from a, you know, an age before. And you just had to, there was a sort of big iron portal that was generally shut unless it was open. And if it was open, you could go into Alaska Studios and you'd be hit by this smell of fungus, wood glue, alcohol, tobacco, and nameless bathroom smells. And this was the, this kind of Mafu coalesced into the Alaska vapors. And if you kept your gear in Alaska, as I wound up doing after a few years, you kept your equipment in a cage in Alaska, you could then go off on tour somewhere. You might be in California and you'd open your guitar case and the scent of Alaska would spiral up into your nostrils. It was absolutely unmistakable. I had to fumigate my Rickenbacker at one point. Imagine Sherlock Holmes doing that. So Alaska was sort of cheap, scuzzy, gothic, but Pat was really good at mixing a band down onto two tracks on quarter-inch and then somehow bouncing the vocals down onto that. So like they did in the Beatles days, you know, when there were only ever four tracks. Bounce down and sub mix and whatever. Pat was a genius at that. And I don’t know whether if you had the same equipment now you'd be able to do the same thing. I mean, Pat engineered some of our later records. He engineered the Soft Boys reunion album in 2001, but the sound was markedly different by then. You know, we were digital and there wasn't the spill and all the rest of it. You know, Alaska, there was only one studio in Alaska at that point. So the guitars, bass, and drums would all have kind of bled into each other. You know, all the things that posh studios help you avoid. So we went in and the first thing we actually recorded was the first track on Underwater Moonlight, which was, “I Wanna Destroy You.” And I think we recorded three other demos that afternoon. Did it, you know, “Kingdom of Love” and maybe some other things. But the one we kept was, “I Wanna Destroy You.” And I remember writing him a check for 30 pounds. So “I Wanna Destroy You,” I guess, cost about whatever you know, about seven and a half pounds to make. And there it still is today. It was a good investment.

“I Wanna Destroy You” 

“I Wanna Destroy You.” I remember putting it together and singing it with the band, and Morris and Kimberly came in on that, (sings harmony part) “ah ah ah”, you know, the staggered harmony. I think as each of them made out what I was singing, they came in with it, but then it stayed. So it became, part of, it's the trademark of that song was the, just the way their voices came in. And there was a lot of paranoia around internally and externally. I was pretty paranoid for all sorts of reasons, but I think things were swinging back as they always seemed to be towards the right wing. So Margaret Thatcher had just been elected and Reagan, no, Reagan was elected in 1980. So it's a pre-Reagan song, but I know that Russians invaded Afghanistan in early 1980. There was just a kind of unpleasantly militant sort of, rather, right like there is today from, you know, the government, the whole, the MAGA people and all the rest of it. I mean, nothing like as bad in those days, the politicians were professional politicians. They weren't mobsters, but it was still, you know, it was still money getting the upper hand. So I suppose that's what was politically going on when I wrote it. But, you know, I could have been writing about wanting to destroy myself. I'm sure I tried hard enough.

“Kingdom of Love”

“Kingdom of Love,” it began to crystallize into a song in my head. And once the Matthew band was going, then there it was. I like, I typed it out. Kimberly had those lyrics from my typewriter. I remember typing it out. They changed a bit. And Matthew has an amazing bass line in that he's (sings bass line) “do do do do do do do do do do,” which many bass players have learned since.

“The Kingdom of Love” was, an expression used by a man who used to wander around in Cambridge called Harold, who was a, essentially a kind of homeless mendicant, but he made his own clothes and he wandered around in these robes. He was kind of, he was a bit of a self styled priest in a way. He'd always, he'd go around, he'd kind of ask for money, but he would also then like a kind of medieval, I think mendicant is the word or he would give blessings, you know, he'd bless you or he'd bless the baby or, you know, he'd bless the dog or whoever he ran across. And he was often sort of saying little kind of prayers and he even sang sometimes. But one of his big things was, “In the sacred, bless the father in the sacred light of life, in the spiritual kingdom of love.” But he wasn't talking about Christianity, I don't think. There was no Jesus. Jesus never appeared. There was some kind of religion at the core of Harold. He was odd. And I think sometimes he might just go into sort of rage. He might have had PTSD, I think he'd been in World War II, but he lived out in the field in his own polythene shack. I've got more about him coming up in my next book. But “the Kingdom of Love,” that was a Harold expression.

Well, it's more, I suppose about how people, about what the effect that people have on each other that becomes a kind of demonic possession. And the idea of the eggs hatching out and looking like the person that you are involved with. I mean that literally happens if the couple get together and have a baby, you know, but that babies may come out one or two at a time in a very different way from that, you know, insect eggs would come out of your skin. I think I had, I must have had a dream where that came from. But there were loads of insect eggs under my skin. And sometimes you can get like pores opening up in your skin and you can put grains of rice in them. I think I did that when my feet got very dry once. So I've always been fascinated by things fitting into other things. Often quite grotesquely, but I just can't take my eyes off it. But I think it, yeah, it's definitely to do with one person's demonic possession of another.

“Positive Vibrations” 

It was early January, 1980. Yeah, the Russians had just invaded Afghanistan and our old dog died. My partner took her, the old dog to the vets to be put down. It was January, it was dismal, I was probably hungover as usual. And I just thought I'd just reverse how I actually felt. So rather than, “Oh God, everything is going to shit, it's just getting worse and worse. And one day, you know, Satan will send Donald Trump to destroy America and with it, the world or whatever,” all the things that seem quite obvious. I just reversed it. And so I got (sings) “positive vibrations, unite all nations.”

I could try and do something like that now as, once again, the world seems to be firmly pointed at hell. You know, you just flip it round. And it suited Kimberly, who it's Kimberly-type song really, so his harmony did well. And then when we came to recording it, we had an eight track. Pat had upgraded us to an eight track studio. So we had the guitars on separate tracks, and the bass had a track and he was doing his vocal bounces. But, you know, and then a friend of ours, Andy King, played sitar and he played once with me at a folk club. And we'd done a version of, an Indian style version of the Velvet Underground “Sister Ray,” which was great fun. Cause that's very good for kind of jamming on one chord, you know, the drone. And yeah so we got Andy to come in and play in and Pat taped it perfectly as is his wont, as was his wont. And it was just a nice kind of touch, you know, sixties, good vibes, all that stuff.

(Sings outro) “Vi-brations.” Maurice, Kim and I all loved that kind of thing. And also knowing it would upset rock writers. You know, “My God, these people are being retro again, bastards.”

“I Got the Hots” 

Well, that's from earlier in the year, so I would've written that in probably May or June. I think it was warming up. It was quite a nice summer. So I do remember that it's a rough mix because I felt the Spacewood rough mixes were actually better than the final mixes. We were short of money, I think. I just thought, “Let’s bang this out.” But actually my vocal is really out of tune. (sings) “And there she was,” God, awful. But it kind of fitted in with new wave vocals of the day, you know? 

I was reading a fair bit of J.G. Ballard at the time, the imaginative writer who is often categorized as science fiction. But I would, I don’t what he was really, but there's a reference in there to “looking out on a crystal world.” Yeah I'd been reading The Crystal World, so I think I was picturing things in a Ian way. He wrote a lot of very evocative, he wrote a very evocative book called The Drought about our world where it just doesn't rain for a few years and water becomes the precious currency and all that. Everything is a sort of desert. So I was sort of picturing that, seeing the world through Ballardian eyes. And again, everybody plays really well on that. “Hots” is quite a happy song. I think it's reptilian and lustful in a good way. It's not, there's no bitterness in it.

I was inhabiting the loosh side of me, you know, in as much as I could be that at whatever I was 26, 27 years old. So it might suit me better now, I don't know. But it was relaxed. I suppose it was very different from the early Soft Boys or the first Soft Boys album, which was much more kind of aggressive and which again, the whole New Wave/Punk thing encouraged, you know, you were encouraged to be aggressive and angry and sneery about whatever it was he wanted to sneer about. But you weren't, it seemed to me that it wasn't a celebratory kind of mood that Punk and New Wave was trying to generate. It was an angry one. That's how I kind of, that's the door through which I entered it. And you know, it was superb. It's just catching this, the latest incarnation of the band, Matthew’s in there perfectly. The guitars are very well recorded and I overdubbed that propeller guitar at the end, one of my better efforts, but I was very pleased with that.

“Insanely Jealous” 

“Insanely Jealous,” I made that up on a green bass guitar that I had in my little room. And bass, you know, they've only got four strings, bass guitars, so it gives you a completely different way of making things up. And I'm playing the bass on it, but that green bass is quite weedy, so. All you really get is the bit at the beginning from, you can hear from me going, (sings bass line) “dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.”

It's another demonic possession song really, it's to do with an obsession. It's to do with an obsession I had about somebody, and they are, they're probably the central muse of the whole record. Arguably all of the songs could be sung, could be about them or about my feelings about them. You know, it's very solipsistic. I'm not really describing them, I'm just describing the effect they had on me. So, you know, an old girlfriend, who had just begun to re-inhabit my consciousness, if not my daily life. So she figures large in that. But there's some more J.G. Ballard as well as “the jewel encrusted hand” from the, I think it's The Crystal World where the people start to deliquesce, things start to, there's this crocodile that started to just turn into jewels in some basin off some tributary of the Amazon. There's some kind of chemical imbalance in the soil or the air, or I don’t know what's causing it, that causes things to, everything to crystallize, you know, trees, but then also animals. And I think people, again, I think it's slightly Ballard's riff on Heart of Darkness, somebody going up the river and getting to a strange place. So again, that song is a bit steeped in Ballard and the lovers by the boat. But the boat is kind of dry, high and dry, cracked and dry. It's a similar landscape. So I mean, it was a warm summer, I think ‘79 in Britain. So again, it's the same climate as “Hots,” but a very different mood.

I don’t know if I ever did find a voice. My voice changes because I was very aware of coming from a kind of posh background and in Britain in the punk era, everything had to kind of marinate itself in a more working class, (mimics working class accent) “sounding more like that,” you know, “history like.” And so I developed some quite ugly vocal sort of squeaks and croaks and moans. I'm still trying to get them out of my voice and find what my real voice is. But I don’t know if I have one, someone described me as the Peter Sellers of Rock once, which I take as a compliment, really. Because I can sound eerily like Syd Barrett or John Lennon or you know, I could do Jim Morrison if I've been, if my voice is tired, I can do a reasonable Johnny Cash and, you know, I can sing quite a few different Dylan eras. And in fact it's quite, you know, it's easier for me to make up a song in somebody else's style or using their voice than it is for me to be me or certainly was. So I don’t know if I ever did discover my voice. You never see people, people are never compared to me like, “Oh wow, this guy sounds like Robyn Hitchcock.” You know, they'll say, “Like, Robyn Hitchcock, this guy sounds like Syd Barrett,” or whatever, you know? And unfortunately, that's the way I position myself in the business. I'm at a tangent to things, so I think I've written a lot of songs that just do not reach people for a whole variety of reasons. But then I don't think I could have stood being famous, you know, I think it would've, my psyche was too fragile to cope with that kind of attention. And I've had friends who have been famous. And I don’t know if it's made them any happier, they've got financial security, but they don't seem necessarily happy in themselves.

I think that's the band at its best. The fact that Morris decided to simply play the hi-hat and the bass drum. He never touches the snare, I don't think, or the toms. It's all completely done on that. So it's kind of held back and Kimberly comes in ferociously as his wont but judiciously. And then Matthew comes in, in the second verse with a (sings bass line) “bum bum bum bum” with a bass drum again, he's very measured. And then when Kimberly kind of goes berserk in the solo, Matthew takes off and then he's doing the (sings bass line) “boom boom.” He had these very melodic lines, but he didn't think of himself as a singer or a songwriter, but he could come up with fantastic bass lines and they were excellent. And we had Jerry Hale, who was from a local Cambridge band, Telephone Bill and the Smooth Operators. And Jerry played fiddle, sort of droney fiddle on, I think he plays on that one and he plays on “Underwater Moonlight.” There's a bit of, a little bit of a drone there, you know? Yeah, there was definitely a Velvet Underground influence on that one.

“Tonight” 

I wrote “Tonight” later in the year. I must have written that in November. I think the leaves were coming off the trees. It doesn't have any of that summary feel. Yeah, I think a friend of ours came along into the studio and so Pat taped like a minute of conversation. And you hear those voices at the beginning, I don’t know why, but he also then did the phasing on the drums at the end, which was great. Another sixties touch. When the vocals are playing out, I think maybe the whole track is phased. Certainly the drums are so that was Pat. Pat was quite hands-on, it was great.

I think again, you know, it's me obsessing, it's me singing about someone that I'm actually not going to see. I'm not gonna get anywhere near them. I'm not gonna be part of their life. And so in the song I'm trying to permeate everything in order to get to them. I am trying to be like the air they breathe or the food they eat or whatever. I want to surround them cause I can't actually touch them. So I want to become almost their world, you know, because I suppose that's what that person seemed to have become to me. So I, another one I'd file under demonic possession.

You know, songs are very seldom entirely about one scenario or one person rather, like dreams. I think you stockpile feelings and characters, and then they all go into a hybrid, you know, a condensed three minute hybrid of whatever it is that's on your mind. And so, yeah, I think a lot of it comes from my mistrust of my own sexuality and my own motives. You know, I think, you know, to me, I think of sex as something that's essentially transgressive, which means I'm basically, you know, an uptight Victorian prude or whatever, and that's the culture I come from. You know, it's not a warm celebration of two people feeling good about each other. There's something at the root of it that's kind of violent and squalid, I think. That said, I’ve never been involved in violence or endorsed physical violence in any way. I'm sure I've been guilty of my own mental violence to myself and others. And I think all that stuff was, I was working it out, or not even working it out, venting it, if you like, in Underwater Moonlight and in the records that I continued to make after that, they're all some kind of draining of the psyche really. But I think it was particularly, my psyche needed a loss of draining at that point. So I was writing a lot of songs.

“You’ll Have to Go Sideways” 

The very first session was in Cambridge and it was at Spacewood Studios and it was, “I Got the Hots for You.” We had actually rehearsed, “I Got the Hots for You” with the old band, but I remember doing that with them. But then I had a new song, “He's a Reptile,” which I was just working on, and “He's a Reptile” was absolutely perfect for Matthew. It wouldn't have worked with the other guys. So we did, “He's a Reptile” and “I Got the Hots,” but for some reason we didn't put “He's a Reptile” on Underwater Moonlight. I don’t know why, but it would've fitted very well. And “You'll Have to Go Sideways.” Yeah now that was actually from the Twilight Zone, I think that's only Morris, Kimberley and me. And I just had this kind of spiraling guitar line, which I think is in a funny time signature. And Kimberly and I just played it over and over with the drums for three minutes and then stopped. I think Matthew had joined the band, but he hadn't actually made it up yet to Cambridge or something for that session. So whatever it was, it was the three of us. And then Kimberly came up with a bass part and a synthesizer part. The only time he's ever done anything like that, and he made it kind of constantly ascending underneath the guitar riff, the sort of corkscrew guitar riff that became, “You'll Have to Go Sideways” and it's not a song at all, but it fitted quite well on the record. I think it cleanses the palette a bit.

“Old Pervert” 

“Old Pervert.” “Old Pervert,” that's the kind of, musically is a bit of a flashback to the old group. It's the sort of Beefheart-y track. It's the sort of co-composition, really. My words and everybody's music.

I think it's me looking at myself, I'm imagining I'm one of those Cambridge people like Harold, you know, like Harold the mendicant, the robed Harold, I think he used to gargle disinfectant. So the character in that is sort of me imagining myself as a kind of just some creepy old guy hanging around under a bridge really. But I think it's also, to some extent, how I saw myself. I saw myself as already kind of helpless and washed up, and that I was no longer able to get to the person I wanted to get to. So I hope I haven't actually turned into that person. I couldn't sing that now because I am old and I guess, as I'm British, I'm probably a pervert as well, you know?

The new version of Underwater Moonlight that we've released on Tiny Ghost has the version of “Old Pervert” that was on the very first edition of Underwater Moonlight that came out in the summer of 1980, and this was recorded on 4-track in Alaska. Matthew Seligman was very fond of the demo that we did at Spacewood in 1979 and so he put that, he inserted that into the master and somehow that just carried on. All the re-release is the one that came out on Rykodisc and the one that came out on Matador and the one that came out on Yep Roc. All of those ones that came out in the 80’s and 90’s and 00’s or whatever have the demo of “Old Pervert” on them, which is much more ramshackle. But the one on the new record actually is the one that was intended, the finished product. The lyrics are finished and the music at the end is much more ensemble. Matthew and I are playing the same riff underneath Kimberly's solo. Just a more worked out piece.

It was a, you know, thunderous piece of music. It wasn't necessarily my favorite song to do, but it has its place on the record because like “You'll Have to Go Sideways” and I suppose like “Insanely Jealous.” It's not pop rock. So there's some good pop rock on Underwater Moonlight. Its strength as an album is, it's not what Kimberly would call, “10 power pop gems,” you know, it's actually 6 power pop gems and some other variations on the theme. So the album has got a fair amount of variety in itself.

“Queen of Eyes” 

“Queen of Eyes,” I wrote in like September, August, September. It was still sunny and it just had a nice, I don’t know, it really came into its own when Pat Collier, I just remember hearing his, the version we recorded might even have just been the demo actually, at Spacewood. But it just had this fantastic jangle and it was just Kimberly and I playing two Fender guitars, no 12-strings involved or anything like that. And it has a couple of odd chords in it that when people cover it, they always get wrong. But it, they're actually, again, it's one of those ones that I'm constantly having to teach other people how to play. But it's lasted very well.

It's a good piece of work. I think Kimberly's doing the harmony. It's a lovely piece of ensemble playing again, and it's a relatively happy song. Yeah, it's a good mood. I used her as a muse, you know, I wanted to write songs. I was gonna have to hang my feelings on somebody or something. And I'm a solipsist, I write about what I know and what I feel. I'm a Lennon rather than a McCartney. It's all variations on my world. I don't make imaginative leaps into other people's lives cause I wouldn't really know what I was talking about. So, being as one of my exes put it, self-bound, they're all in my world. And no, I think the “Queen of Eyes” is probably the same person as in the “Kingdom of Love” and also in “Tonight,” and also in “Insanely Jealous” and less so in some of the other songs. She's not around at all in “Old Pervert,” but she's in a hefty whack of those songs.

It's incredibly short. It has there are versions with another verse in it, but actually I think I just took the other verse out in the end. And it's in its purest form, I think it's less than two minutes. It would've made a really great kind of single in the 1960s, you know. The grooves could have been very deep and wide apart on a 45. Be great on a 45. I went into a coffee shop a couple of years ago and it was playing and I thought, “I know this, is this the Beatles?” And then I realized it was us.

“Underwater Moonlight” 

“Underwater Moonlight.” I remember going into a coffee shop and saying, “Ah, the next Soft Boys album's gonna be called Underwater Moonlight.” And then people went, “Oh, yeah. Do you want sugar with that?” or whatever. And then I went home and I picked up the green bass and I, I made it up really, that was on the green bass. And I had a conversation with another Cambridge harmonica player called Rob Appleton, who'd also been in Telephone Bill and the Smooth Operators. And he suggested a part of the plot line. Again, it's a sort of, I think of it as a J.G. Ballard, I picture it as a J.G. Ballard story, you know. Although it's not exactly like one of his, but just the statues coming alive in the moonlight, climbing off their plinths and then walking out to sea. And then they take the place of two humans who've been drowned in an unfortunate encounter with a giant squid. How the statues who would've been solid stone would've managed to row back in a small boat, I don't know, but it's a song.

I mean, you know, it's about transfiguration really through death. I mean, the sea is a pretty primal muse. I've got quite a few songs with the ocean or the sea in them, and a lot of them involve death or rebirth or renewal. You know, the sea is our primal mother. If we destroy and pollute life on this planet, irretrievably. If there's a nuclear winter, if God knows what malfeasance humankind, wrecks on this planet because of our, the design floor in our species, which allows the worst people to reach the most powerful positions. The healing I imagine would come from the sea because it would take an awful lot to actually pollute and eradicate what's going on kind of eight miles down. You know, I'd like to imagine that whatever we do, or even if we, the planet floods because we've melted all the ice, that it will be the sea that kind of restores it to some kind of equilibrium. So I think “Underwater Moonlight,” yeah, the people die and the statues replace them and that could go on and on. But you know, it's basically, it's regeneration. And as someone pointed out, “underwater moonlight” is about the palest form of light you could have, it's the moon, the moon through water. So it's not a strong piercing beam. You know, “underwater moonlight” is something that's essentially quite gentle and mysterious. And the moon, like the ocean, has always been there as far as we are concerned, as far as life on earth is concerned. Long before humans, you know, it was there for dinosaurs and trilobites and mare's tail and funny single celled organisms. We have always had the moon and the water and their very primal forces. Our emotions are often linked with the moon, the menstrual cycle, the tides, you know, and it's not surprising that humans are so emotional because the weather is so emotional. You know, we have all the, our climate, even before it began to change, has always been very volatile and nothing is quite as moody as the sea. You know, the sea can caress you or slap you down, break your back, drown you, bore you up, welcome you or drive you off. The sea is just, you know, it's like a kind of feral parent and it's from the sea that apparently we come, you know, unless you are a creationist (laughs). When God created the dinosaur bones on the seventh day, God created prehistory. I don’t know, I just, that stupidity of our species is staggering, given how ingenious we are as well. I mean, it's a bit like the ocean. You just don’t know what you're gonna get. “Here's homo sapiens, what is this one capable of?” I've always been quite embarrassed to be a human. I've never been proud of it. I don't think people are innately evil, but I think that unfortunately they're corruptible and the one rotten apple spoils the barrel is the perfect statement, you know, regarding us. Anyways, yeah, “Underwater Moonlight,” it's birth and renewal, you know, and it's a perfect last track, I think.

And it has some great performances. It's got, I remember Matthew going in and overdubbing his propeller bass, and it's the first time I'd ever seen anyone repair a bass. I didn't know you could do that. And he just, before the last chorus, he goes, (sings bass line) “do do do do,” it drops right down. You know, Kim and Morris bringing in those harmonies, (sings high harmony) “moonlight.” And they would always do that kind of unbidden. They never discussed it between them, they just do it. Kimberly's great guitar solo on that. I think. I'm actually not playing the green bass. I'm playing a Telecaster through a tremolo and I think Jerry Hale's playing some fiddle on that as well. Yeah, live, I would often do a kind of rap over that, you know, or probably not exactly rapping, but I speak, you know, that I, declaim I think is a better way of putting it probably. It's got a bit of, in my mind, it's got a bit of Jim Morrison in it. I can feel my inner Jim activating there and you know, their song “Moonlight Drive,” which I think is another kind of “something nasty is gonna happen in the water” song. You know, it's the perfect last track.

I remember Matthew and I thinking, because Kim and Morris don't say much, they just play. And so Matthew and I were the mouthpieces and we would walk around together a lot and Matthew saying, “Well, the world may end, but we've made this record.” And I agreed with him. And I thought, I just thought to say, I thought, “I may go to hell, but this is good. We've done this, you know, it was worth it.” And I think we were very pleased with it. It wasn't gonna fit in with what was happening at the time. I remember playing it to some young punky people and they just didn't get it. You know, they couldn't hear it. It wasn't making the right kind of noises for them, you know? It was already of, it was seen as a very retro piece, and the fact that we had vaguely long hair and I wore Paisley shirts and, you know, some of us had like striped t-shirts or something, like the early days of the Loving Spoonful or the Jefferson Airplane or something. We looked like some people from, we weren't mod. I mean, if we dressed up a bit more, we might have had more impact. But nobody was very flamboyant and I regret we didn't make more of our looks cause we were a good looking group. But nothing had happened at the time. You know, we made one visit to New York in the autumn of 1980 and well John Lennon was still alive and played two shows in Maxwell's and Danceteria and eighties club Tier Three. My Father's Place on Long Island. I don’t know, we did about seven gigs or something in 10 days. It was amazing. Not many people saw us and there are very creaky bootlegs of the Maxwell’s shows, I think. But, and that was it, we sort of went back to Britain and it dissolved. And I was just dying to make my own record. You know, I wanted to make my get Black Snake Diamond Röle out. And Kimberly was brewing “Walking on Sunshine” and “Going Down to Liverpool.” We didn't do his songs in the Soft Boys, and I don't think it would've really worked. I can't imagine, you know, doing “Walking on Sunshine” and Matthew was in about five different bands at once. So he was quite ambitious, you know, he was very fond of the Soft Boys, but he also, he had a gig in the Thompson Twins if he wanted it. And he took that and then he wound up playing with Thomas Dolby and played with Bowie at Live Aid. So that was Matthew’s zenith. You know, Kimberly’s zenith was writing “Walking on Sunshine,” of which he and his wonderful wife Lee are living. And you know, it's fantastic. Kim is, Kim is set. Morris still kind of does jobs for his family in Gloucester. Morris is very much a family man. He's still with Sheila, his, it was his girlfriend back in the late seventies, and they got married and had kids and, you know, they’re very, very family people. So they've, Kim and Morris are in good places, and sadly Matthew was hit by the virus. But yeah, at the time, you know, we thought it was good, but I didn't think it was gonna, I had no illusions that it was gonna go out and conquer the world. We had a following, but it felt like it wasn't gonna go very far. And then words started to come through in like ‘84 that people over here were playing my records on what was called college radio stations. And a band called The Replacements sent me two LPs and asked if I'd like to produce their demos. And I didn't have a record player, so I sent them to Morris Windsor who said, “I don’t know if it's quite your cup of tea.” No, I just remember my, my partner at the time saying, “Oh, I don’t know if you should be trying to produce them, Robyn, you drink so much” (laughs). Then when I found out over here, I came over here and I discovered what the Replacements M.O. was, you know, it would've been fine. I think they got Alex Chilton in to produce their demos, but so they did, and then I heard this band, R.E.M. were dropping our name and not many people did in those days. So I was surprised, but I, you know, there was noise was coming out from the states that people had been listening to us and I knew we'd sold some records and I didn't know where they'd gone and they'd actually been shipped out to Atlanta. And there was an independent label that we were on Armageddon who put out Underwater Moonlight and my first solo album, they must have shipped them all over there. So people were listening to them in record stores. And a lot of people I subsequently worked with, like in fact, Peter Buck and Bill Rieflin and Scott McCaughey and others all discovered my records or Soft Boys records because they were selling them in stores. So the music did its own work and the fact that nobody had, there was no press on us, you know? And we hadn't had much airplay that nobody really knew who or what the Soft Boys had been or who, or what I was. And so when I started touring over here in 1985, I had a nicely kindled audience. You know, I had the basis for a cult really. And I've basically had that ever since. You know, I've toured every year in the States for the past 40 years. I live here, for ill or good, and that's what happened to me. You know, America discovered me and I'm very grateful.

It has become the best known album that I've been involved with. It's not under my name, it's under the name of the Soft Boys, and we really only had one album in us, as a collective. We did do a reunion 20 years later, which was nice, but I don't think the songs I supplied were as strong. And I think we could have edited it better. And I think we, it was more like me and a backing group by then because the others weren't professional musicians anymore. I'd been traveling around playing shows for 15, 16 years and Matthew had dropped out of music. And Kim, it had been a while since Katrina and the Waves had toured, Morris toured with me last in 93. So they were all kind of good to play, but it was, it seemed very much like I was holding it together, whereas before it felt more like I was part of a group. Yeah, I was the dominant figure. But and we did some Soft Boys reunion shows, which was good because Matthew tragically p passed away at the beginning of COVID. He was one of the first victims of COVID. I think he'd actually gone to visit his brother who had COVID in hospital and his brother died shortly after or before, you know, and Matthew just had this terrible full on illness that there was no antidote for. And you know, he was sending out emails quite cheerfully for a while. And then he was just in intensive care and then they turned it off cause he wasn't gonna get any, I don’t know exactly what happened, but they, he was done, you know. And that was all in the first month of the pandemic, which was really, you know, that was it really for the Soft Boys as the Soft Boys. So I'm glad we did the reunion in 2001, whatever, 2002 cause it did mean that, that that band got to go out and play Chicago and San Francisco and every, you know, places we never got to in our lifetime. And we did reasonably good shows, I think. So, you know, I'm really glad it's lasted as long as it has. And you know, it's great that Emma has taken the trouble. My wife, Emma Swift, who runs Tiny Ghost, that she's taken the trouble to get this thing out. And we've been through a lot of trouble in digging up the old masters, finding the original take of “Old Pervert,” getting it remastered and getting new artwork done and getting it pressed on the best possible, you know, the best possible pressing part, Paramount, which belongs to Dave. Well, I think Gillian, David Rawlings runs it anyway. And it's all, you know, the artwork's been done by Jeremy Fetzer, who's local and actually also playing guitar on my next record, Jeremy does a lot of our artwork. John Baldwin from Infrasonic in Nashville remastered it, so it's all kind of relaunched here in Nashville, which is great. And I'm very proud of, it's a lovely record and it sounds younger and snappier with every passing day.

Well, it's 45 years since Underwater Moonlight came out and it seems it. It seems like a bloody long time ago. Yeah I'm proud of the record, I love what we did. Its shortcomings have become its strengths and I know, I hope it carries on. I hope it's here in another 45 years. If anything is. I won't be. The other guys won't be, but maybe the record will. It’s a good piece.

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about The Soft Boys. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase Underwater Moonlight, including the 45th anniversary edition. Instrumental music is the song “Someday I’ll Go Surfing” by Diners. Thanks for listening. 

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