Walk Like An Egyptian
by Don Share

Songs with titles like "(I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp", "He's A Reptile", and "Where Are the Prawns?" are odd enough now, but imagine the impression they made in late-1970s England, when the options were humorless Prog-Rock haze or angry Punk Rock noise. Harmony-laden singles with edible-crustacean, creeping-amphibian and office-furnishing lyrical content did not attract much commercial attention when The Soft Boys hatched them. Middle class, smart, and hailing from Cambridge -- home of Oxford University and Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd -- Robyn Hitchcock and his band seemed hopelessly out of step.

The group's restless, feckless 1979 album, A Can Of Bees, did little to advance leader Hitchcock's vision of fusing Abbey Road with Trout Mask Replica. The following year, with nothing to lose, Hitchcock, with fellow guitarist Kimberley Rew, drummer Morris Windsor, and bassist Matthew Seligman, delved even deeper into the mystic with Underwater Moonlight. (Not surprisingly, the band was kaput by '81.) Underrated in its time, this remarkable (and remarkably strange) album about relationships and raw yearning still shines on, and it has at last been given the definitive treatment: a two-disc set that adds outtakes and a bonus disc of rehearsals -- even though the original ten tracks are still all you need to know.

The set kicks off ferociously with the self-explanatory "I Wanna Destroy You" ("And when I have destroyed you/I'll come picking at your bone/And you won't have a single atom/Left to call your own!") and leads into the even more creepily funny and immaculately harmonized "Kingdom Of Love": "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."

It's all intrigingly irresistible -- from the mischievous "I Got The Hots", in which Hitchcock pants and groans his way through a litany of unappeased appetite ("Said the curry to the corpse/I got the hots for you"), to "Old Pervert", about hanging out under a bridge and wanting to "show you what's in my fridge". The title track, about two lovers going down to the sea to drown, is a surprisingly gentle and poignant closer -- like waking, after a fitful night of all-too-Freudian dreams, into the silvery, surreal luminosity of a cozy dawn.

Hitchcock bolsters his dark lyrics with swimmingly sinuous guitar work -- and he has a perfect foil in Rew, whose shining Pop sensibility would later serve him well in Katrina And The Waves ("Walking On Sunshine") -- while Seligman's chunkily naive bass work and Windsor's determined pummeling round things out perfectly. Hitchcock has, of course, gone on to a lively and peculiar solo career -- and The Soft Boys have reformed and are set to tour as this is being written.

Yes, the outtakes and rehearsals are for devoted fans. But be forewarned that you may well become one yourself when you hear this. After all, everybody should have a dark corner in their collection for some Underwater Moonlight.