Pick up a New Musical Express or Melody Maker from two decades ago, and the concert listings and ads will be filled with forgotten bands; Martian Dance, Ricky Cool and the Railtos, the Flatbackers. The Soft Boys, neither crowd-pleasers nor critics' darlings, who never played to a crowd of more than three hundred during their six-year career, might have been expected to join them in obscurity. But long after they'd broken up, their records (especially their last album, Underwater Moonlight) were inspiring such bands as R.E.M., the Replacements, and Yo La Tengo. And lead singer Robyn Hitchcock's solo career – more than twenty albums to date – has kept his fans searching out the work of his earlier group.

Art-school refugee Hitchcock founded the Soft Boys one night in Cambridge by renaming Dennis and the Experts mid-show. "It's a very silly name," he says. "I regretted it as soon as I made it up." The Experts at this point were bassist Andy Metcalfe, drummer Morris Windsor, and guitarist Alan "Wangbo Trotter" Davies, who'd replaced founder Rob Lamb when he abandoned the group to Hitchcock. After the Give It To The Soft Boys EP was released, Davies was replaced in turn by Kimberley Rew of the Waves. (After the Soft Boys' demise, Rew rejoined his old band. As Katrina and the Waves, they had several hits in the 1980s – they're best known for "Walking On Sunshine".)

Their worst enemy in the press called them "a cerebral Monkees", a harsher insult in punk's heyday than it is now. Others hoped they were the vanguard of a psychedelic revival that never came. "I don't think we ever tried to revive anything, or recreate anything," says Hitchcock. The Soft Boys may have been steeped in '60s psychedelia, but they were as likely to cover Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up" or Wrighton and Thornton's 1858 "The Postman's Knock" as Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine". And of course there were Hitchcock's own songs – the shrieking assault of "Give It To The Soft Boys", faux folk like "The Duke Of Squeeze", and the jaunty appeal to "Have a Heart, Betty (I'm Not Fireproof)", all jumbled into the same pile.

Chaos churned around the Soft Boys. They pretended they'd done songs like "I Don't See Why You Can't Finish Your Orange" and "Friday on Toast" when they hadn't. They recorded an album that wasn't released and released an album they weren't paid for. Their fans had to be prevented from bringing a haddock into a show.

Their craft, though, they took seriously. Hitchcock "already knew how to play when punk came along and so did the band, so it wasn't relevant to us. Hence our lack of success."

They regularly spent half the week rehearsing in a Cambridge home. When an elderly neighbor complained about the noise Hitchcock wrote "Vyrna Knowl Is A Headbanger" about her, then changed all the words so he wouldn't be sued, changing her name to "Vyrna Knowl" not seeming sufficient. ("Vyrna"'s Siamese twin "Wading Through A Ventilator" turned up on Rykodisc's compilation The Soft Boys 1976–1981). Andy Metcalfe worked out the intricate four- and five- part vocal harmonies – they're most in evidence on Live At The Portland Arms, if you can find it.

Metcalfe finally tired of being smothered by howling guitars and left to join Telephone Bill and the Smooth Operators. (Gerry Hale, the Operators' violinist, plays on "Insanely Jealous"). He was replaced by Matthew Seligman, who'd been in every band in Cambridge, including the early Dennis and the Experts.

"After Andy left I was getting much more concerned with songs," explains Hitchcock. "There was coherence of approach because Kimberley was more interested in the pop side (and so was Matthew) – towards things like 'Queen of Eyes'. But there was a legacy of doing funny stuff in funny time signatures. So the short list for Underwater Moonlight was weird because there was material like 'Alien', 'Old Pervert' (which did make it on there.)" ('Alien' is included on the ... And How It Got There disk of Matador's Underwater Moonlight reissue.)

"You have to think about dramatics. It's good to have a song which maybe would last five minutes and have crests and waves rather than cucumber, saucepan, traffic signal, gods, worms - we're back here and nothing has happened. That's the weakness of bombardment. You do have to come up and go down."

When the band was ready to record Moonlight in 1980, they couldn't afford the expensive production that was in fashion. This was a group that slept in one room when they were on tour, heads next to feet "because that's what boys do", says Seligman. The album was recorded for £600 (a bit over $2000 in US Y2K dollars).

"The first tracks were recorded in the 4-track at Pat Collier's rehearsal studio which was built into a railway arch and is right opposite Waterloo Station," says Seligman. "It was something like £150 to do 'I Wanna Destroy You' and 'Queen Of Eyes' and maybe 'Strange' and 'Vegetable Man'." ("Destroy" and a different recording of "Queen" made the album; "Strange" and "Vegetable Man" appear in the outtakes section of the Matador re-issue.) "Then we got a budget from Armageddon Records and decided to finish it off at an 8-track studio built in James Morgan's living room in a house in Earlsfield ... I remember we re-recorded 'Queen Of Eyes' there. Generally we recorded a song in about a day because it didn't take long and all the instruments like guitars, bass and drums would tend to go down at the same time with vocals going on afterwards. The record is therefore not a lot different from how we sounded live at the time as we didn't tend to do many overdubs of extra parts. Obviously the sitar and violin and the people talking backwards were overdubs, but not much else ... and it was that cheap because it was that simple."

The Soft Boys toured to support the album, even coming to the US for the first time, but nothing came of it. Six months after the album came out they played their last gig.

Says Hitchcock: "We never had very big audiences, and so that night the audience was an Australian guy, who came up afterwards and said 'That was short.' I said 'yeah, did you enjoy it?' and he said 'Well no, not particularly, but it wasn't very long.' And that summed up the Soft Boys' career, really."