Also playing that night: The Brakes

Nashville ad and live photo from page 3 of Kimberley Rew's Soft Boys scrapbook. Live photo noted as being at the Nashville and is assumed to be this show.
Image used with permission.

Why It's Safer To Lack Discipline Than Imagination - New Musical Express, March 18th 1978
The Soft Boys, The Brakes
Nashville

by Paul Rambali

As the dust settles, two discernable trends emerge.
On the one hand, neat, energetic displays of ready-wrapped sound.
On the other, outward experimentation that often seems to rely for effect on how close it comes to the noise of fingernails dragging slowly across a blackboard.
The Brakes stick with the ready-wrapped, The Soft Boys risk audience alienation. Neither side wins.
The Brakes, for all their whip-it-up antics and approachable Rock raunch, go down merely politely. The Soft Boys, to their surprise, do likewise.
Through a policy of alternate headline billing during residences, The Brakes go on first.
They've already been saddled with a North East London's answer to Tom Petty tag, and did little to argue with it on this particular occasion.
In fact, the actively enforce the comparison by winding up with a clean, soundalike American Girl.
Mainly they employ standard devices for standard effect. They rock along nicely, their material is uniformly well organised, they are competent, solid, and the general gusto level of their performance is probably reliable.
To this they ally a firm grasp of sub-American rockaboogie, a snappy vocalist whose line in crows haranguing proved laughably futile, and offer a fairly safe return for record company investment, which is said to be imminent.
They are, above all, symmetrical.
But then so is a cube, and I don't get very excited about cubes these days either.
As for The Soft Boys, they have no symmetry whatsoever, just a mess of abtuse angles and richly disjointed references.
Their corporate appearance suggests four people plucked at random from the streets of Cambridge.
A crazed little Angus Young disciple on lead guitar and grimaces, for instance, shares the stage with a defiantly passionless and abrasive black statue of a singer.
They begin by chanting an absurd rhyme and staring blankly at the back of the hall.
A good tactic -- it means they don't have to watch the crowd squirm uncomfortably and glance at their friends for clues on expected reaction.
Any band that forces the members of the auidence into making up their own mind gets my sympathy, and The Soft Boys do this with a vengeance.
They sail through a brace of originals, all defiantly elliptical in construction.
Soft Boys' songs take most of the regular ingredients, throw them in a hat, then paste them back together seemingly at random over what could well be re-charged Magic Band rhythms.
They sound like XTC, but not as comical.
However, after an excellent re-reading of "Cold Turkey", and after my ears had adjusted to their awkward sound spectrum, the structural faults began to appear.
Firstly, whoever writes their songs needs a good editor. The lyric imagery was too cluttered and confused for its own good.
Saying your baby walks down the street like a bathroom suite, for example, may be true in some private and perverse way, but it means nothing to me, nor to anybody else who hasn't met the female in question.
Similarly with the music. The welter of unusual stylistic quirks that makes up The Soft Boys is again too thick and confused, resulting in claustrophobia by the end of their set.
What The Soft Boys need is discipline. What The Brakes need is imagination. The Soft Boys already have that, which is a good thing because it's a lot harder to come by.