- Music
- 13 Feb 03
It says much for the Soft Boys’ original material that this inauspicious start would prove to be the low point in their set; from then on, one pop gem followed another like pearls on a string.
Long after the divinely-voiced Annette Buckley finished her support set, we waited – and waited – for The Soft Boys. The situation was not hugely helped by the choice of music played to relieve the interval tedium; Lou Reed’s Transformer has always been a favourite, but having heard the album in its entirety in the pub before the gig, my companions and I did not enjoy it quite so much as ‘Satellite Of Love’ flew past again.
It was then that the Soft Boys finally strolled on stage. There were no apologies;indeed, Robyn Hitchcock goaded us further by playing ‘Satellite Of Love’ yet again, seemingly believing the song to be so good, one should continue to regard it with wonder on its fourth orbit in little over an hour.
It says much for the Soft Boys’ original material that this inauspicious start would prove to be the low point in their set; from then on, one pop gem followed another like pearls on a string. It is true that Robyn Hitchcock’s song introductions bordered on the wearisome – even his spiel about the inverted tram system he imagined might underlay the streets of Cork was barely amusing - but the songs themselves remain a joy. Notable favourites were ‘Insanely Jealous’, ‘Japanese Captain’ and ‘I Wanna Destroy You’.
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Morris Windsor laid down his classic rock beats with a nonchalance born of long years of experience, while Matthew Seligman – otherwise a lawyer – played bass with a studied panache (I especially liked the bits where he toyed with his instrument’s tuning in mid-song). Hitchcock and the wonderfully named Kimberly Rew, however, were the stars of the show, their duelling guitars a revelation, particularly on the jams that raised already excellent songs like ‘Mr Kennedy’ to new levels of grandeur.
Messrs Hitchcock, Rew, Seligman and Windsor may never have reaped the commercial success they once so clearly deserved – a fact not helped by the twenty-year sabbatical between the albums Underwater Moonlight and last year’s Nextdoorland – but their music has stood the test of time with its dignity intact. The Soft Boys? They’re hard men.