When I saw the reunited Soft Boys for the first time, at South by Southwest in March, I was neither blown away nor disappointed–and then I wondered how that happened. When you’re seeing a legend, doesn’t it have to be one or the other?
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Yet despite rock ‘n’ roll’s seemingly endless capacity for making myths about itself, there aren’t too many about this phase in a band’s lifespan. Nobody seems to believe in any band as a sleeping King Arthur destined to wake in the time of his people’s greatest need, to snatch rock from the jaws of hostile market forces or insipid fads. For the most part, there’s still something vaguely embarrassing about a reunion tour, and many fans admit as much even as they’re shelling out for tickets.
That alone shouldn’t have been enough to condemn them to oblivion, but by the time I discovered them–in the mid-80s, a few albums into front man Robyn Hitchcock’s solo career, back when I was sure Peter Buck would never lead me astray–their undeserved obscurity was part of their charm. Like the Velvet Underground, they were beautiful losers whose “failure” was always put in quotes, adored by those who equated “underground” with “underdog.” You always want those bands to get a second chance–or at least you think you do.
The problem with second chances is that so few bands really take advantage of them: the Soft Boys have the potential, and maybe the motivation, but they’ll be at their best only if they can once again absorb their most gifted songwriter instead of standing tamely behind him. Perversely, it may be that a form of nostalgia is key for any band on the second go-round: a keen remembrance of the time when they were young, warm-blooded, and flexible, before legend froze them, that we might say of them, as Hitchcock puts it in “Underwater Moonlight,” “they climbed off their pedestals / And then they sang this song.”
