From Aquarium Drunkard:

When it comes to the greatest twin-guitar teams from the late 70s/early 80s, you’ve got three options: the buzzsaw glory of Verlaine and Lloyd in Television; the mathematical jangle of Glenn Mercer and Bill Million in the Feelies; or the Beefheart-meets-Byrds-meets-Barrett majesty of Robyn Hitchcock and Kimberley Rew in The Soft Boys. The latter duo’s intoxicating interplay is on full display during this 1980 gig, as Hitchcock and Co. blaze through tracks from their then-brand-new masterpiece, Underwater Moonlight, along with other stellar selections.

During the band’s original lifespan, The Soft Boys were derided by the post-punk-drunk British media as 1960s throwbacks, but time has proven them timeless. Their records remain an absolute pleasure, combining Hitchcock’s strangely bewitching lyrics with a sparklingly psychedelic, acid-drenched guitar sound. The band may have drawn on the music of the 1960s, but they were far from mellow hippies – dig the ferocious “I Wanna Destroy You” here, or the jacked up “I Watch The Cars,” played at such a velocity to give any Ramones-worshiping punk pause, or “Black Snake Diamond Rock,” which out-Beefhearts the Captain himself. Even the Byrdsian beauty, “Queen of Eyes,” is given an extremely caffeinated reading. Word of warning: there’s a persistent buzz on this recording, mainly apparent in between songs. You’ll get over it, though – that flaw aside, it’s a fantastic listen, a trip to the Kingdom of Love you definitely want to take.

From Albums That Should Exist:

I recently said that I haven't posted enough music from Robyn Hitchcock's first band, the Soft Boys. I posted a 1978 concert album then, and now here's one from 1980. There aren't many Soft Boys live recordings that sound excellent. This one hadn't, but I made some edits to make it a great listen.
This concert comes from near the tail end of the existence of the Soft Boys, not counting occasional later reunions. Crucially, it happened about six months after the release of the classic album "Underwater Moonlight," so it naturally has a bunch of songs from that. But it even has some songs that presumably would have been on the band's next album, had they stayed together long enough to make another album ("City of Shame," "I Watch the Cars," and "The Lizard," plus, arguably, "Black Snake Diamond Rock").

More and more, I'm realizing that a lot of recordings, especially bootlegs, have the problem of the lead vocals being too low in the mix. I can use the "one weird trick" of boosting the vocals to make everything sound a lot better . That's what I did here, using the audio editing program UVR5. This entire concert happened to have been filmed. The film has never been released, but you can find it on YouTube. Probably, that's why this recording sounds much better than virtually all other Soft Boys live bootlegs, which usually come from audience tapings.

Oh, and one other key factor is that, before I posted this, I passed it on to my music friend MZ. He did his usual thing, fixing the EQ and such, to make it sound that much better. Thanks again, MZ.

One other problem this recording had was that there was a strange buzz at times. Oddly, it mostly happened between songs. I'm guessing maybe it was an electric guitar that was making a noise whenever it wasn't being played. I was able to use noise reduction to greatly reduce that, and MZ's fixes helped too. Note that, as usual, I only used noise reduction for the stuff between the songs, not the actual music. There's still some buzzing here and there, but it's not nearly as bad as before.

There was one other significant problem with this recording: the very tail end of the Pink Floyd cover song "Astronomy Domine" was missing, as well as maybe a minute and a half of the start of the next song, "Underwater Moonlight." So I used versions from another concert bootleg (Hope and Anchor, London, Britain, 3-28-1980), to patch in those missing parts.

This bootleg probably didn't get around much until now due to both the buzz problem and the low vocals problem. Now that those have been fixed, it can take its place as one of the best Soft Boys live recordings, either officially released or not.

The band was really rocking here, with barely any pause between songs. Note that they played the song "Only the Stones Remain" twice.

The concert is 53 minutes long.