Nashville Rooms
Details
- Date
- September 15, 1978
- Venue
- Nashville Rooms London, England (West Kensington)
- Billed As
- The Soft Boys
- Gig Type
- Concert
Notes
Also playing that night: Gaffa
Ad and review from page 8 of Kimberley Rew's Soft Boys scrapbook
Written setlist image courtesy of Lee Cave-Berry and Kimberley. Thank you! Written on the setlist is "Amber Green Red Purple Blue" - something to do with the stage lighting perhaps?
Images used with permission.
Newspaper listing from 'Record Mirror' dated September 16, 1978
Ad and review from page 8 of Kimberley Rew's Soft Boys scrapbook
Written setlist image courtesy of Lee Cave-Berry and Kimberley. Thank you! Written on the setlist is "Amber Green Red Purple Blue" - something to do with the stage lighting perhaps?
Images used with permission.
Newspaper listing from 'Record Mirror' dated September 16, 1978
Set List
- Do the Chisel
- Give it to the Soft Boys Robyn Hitchcock, Robert Lamb
- Let Me Put It Next to You
- The Rat's Prayer
- Cold Turkey Plastic Ono Band
- Hear My Brane Hitchcock, Windsor, Davies, Metcalfe
- Blues in the Dark
- Mystery Train Junior Parker
- Sandra's Having Her Brain Out
- The Pigworker
- Fatman's Son
- Wey Wey Hep Uh Hole
- The Return of the Sacred Crab
- Human Music
- Have a Heart, Betty (I'm Not Fireproof)
- The Face of Death
- Leppo and the Jooves
- Wading Through a Ventilator
Reviews
Soft Boys
London, Nashville
Another next year's thing.... And now 1979 looms. Signed to Radar with an LP imminent, The Soft Boys are somewhere between wishing they were babies and wishing they were dead. They are ashamed of their minds!
They performed "Cold Turkey" with much composed rage and no passion, which significantly planted them firmly in the middle of 1969 in more ways than one.
They are in the process of regression, an unusual form of adventure. Once discreetly challenging and eccentric, they now smother the challenge, emphsise the eccentricity and in moving backwards, move towards the audience. Not only next year's thing but potential biggies.
The ambiguity and indeterminacy of their early days has fallen away. Someone murmured perhaps they've begun to take themselves seriously. Someone else complained they weren't loud enough. But their set was strong and direct, their songs brief and active.
Their musing is a very forceful blanket sound; raging dual electric guitars, inscrutable pumping bass, stoic drumming with occasional strange spirited harmonica. It skims along with delirium and swagger, counterbalanced with the awkward whimsy of the lyrics. The vocal delivery and mannerisms are of an Ayers-Barrett wide-eyed singing-in-the-bath dead pan.
The touchy rhythmic twists and tantalising changes in direction and level complete the compelling, insistent sound that's within the context of a flat psychedelia.
It's layered and intricate, but simple sounding. Odd and highly strung, and very approachable. Would you believe Lothar and the Hand People, They Byrds, The Monkees and nowadays more Canned Heat than Captain Beefheart.
The carefully warped imagination and teasing vigour of The Soft Boys will see them hip and popular. The funny thing is, they're now a straight revivalist group. Everything about them, the overall sound, the tinges of madness, this introductory Cage-ish tape collage, the poker-face nonsense, is of a long time gone.
I left early, because such heavy frivolity is best in small doses and my mind was numb.
Paul Morley
N.M.E. 23rd September, 1978
London, Nashville
Another next year's thing.... And now 1979 looms. Signed to Radar with an LP imminent, The Soft Boys are somewhere between wishing they were babies and wishing they were dead. They are ashamed of their minds!
They performed "Cold Turkey" with much composed rage and no passion, which significantly planted them firmly in the middle of 1969 in more ways than one.
They are in the process of regression, an unusual form of adventure. Once discreetly challenging and eccentric, they now smother the challenge, emphsise the eccentricity and in moving backwards, move towards the audience. Not only next year's thing but potential biggies.
The ambiguity and indeterminacy of their early days has fallen away. Someone murmured perhaps they've begun to take themselves seriously. Someone else complained they weren't loud enough. But their set was strong and direct, their songs brief and active.
Their musing is a very forceful blanket sound; raging dual electric guitars, inscrutable pumping bass, stoic drumming with occasional strange spirited harmonica. It skims along with delirium and swagger, counterbalanced with the awkward whimsy of the lyrics. The vocal delivery and mannerisms are of an Ayers-Barrett wide-eyed singing-in-the-bath dead pan.
The touchy rhythmic twists and tantalising changes in direction and level complete the compelling, insistent sound that's within the context of a flat psychedelia.
It's layered and intricate, but simple sounding. Odd and highly strung, and very approachable. Would you believe Lothar and the Hand People, They Byrds, The Monkees and nowadays more Canned Heat than Captain Beefheart.
The carefully warped imagination and teasing vigour of The Soft Boys will see them hip and popular. The funny thing is, they're now a straight revivalist group. Everything about them, the overall sound, the tinges of madness, this introductory Cage-ish tape collage, the poker-face nonsense, is of a long time gone.
I left early, because such heavy frivolity is best in small doses and my mind was numb.
Paul Morley
N.M.E. 23rd September, 1978