Date confirmed in Kimberley Rew's Soft Boys scrapbook

Setlist provided by Kimberley Rew and Lee Cave-Berry.

Newspaper listing from 'Record Mirror' dated February 25, 1978

I had found another band I was determined to put on in Winchester. My unreliable Beetle needed repairing and I was recommended to seek out a young man called Paul, who lived in the city and was a VW expert. While he worked, he listened to a demo tape by a band whose singer he knew: The Soft Boys.
The wonderfully crazy music which wafted from the Beetle’s tape player entranced me, as did the words. The chorus of one of the songs went,
Where are the prawns?
Down by the sea,
while another one started,
Feel like asking a tree for an autograph,
Feel like making love to a photograph,
Photographs don’t smell,
Waaaaaaaaauuurrrgh.
The backings tended to sound like a mutant version of The Byrds. And this came from Winchester? Well, not exactly. The band, Paul told me, was based in Cambridge but their leader, Robyn Hitchcock, had been at Winchester College. His father, Raymond, had written the cult novel “Percy”, for which Ray Davies of the Kinks wrote the music when it was turned into a film. Could Paul put me in touch? Certainly. Would they be up for a gig? Probably. This was good news, because in the music papers, a “press buzz” was rapidly building up around The Soft Boys.
The venue was the problem, because the fee the band required meant that the Riverside was out of the question. However, there was a reasonably-sized hall attached to the Art School in the city centre, and I came to an agreement with the Social Secretary there: We would pay them to hire the hall and they could also have all the bar profits. As this was a win-win situation for them, I thought it was more than fair, but I did, through inexperience, do some silly things. Security was insufficient. Having never been there before, I didn’t realise that the Art School was a place where people always expected to walk in for free, and got nasty if they couldn’t. The admission price, incidentally, was 60p in advance and 70p on the door. Another error was to book a Camel covers band, led by my prog-rock loving pupil Greg Watkins, to be the support band. This was not what Soft Boys fans wanted to hear and people talked loudly all the way through their set, creating a bit of a bad atmosphere. There were also sound problems, and after the show, the Social Secretary accused me of profiteering. In actual fact, we had made a loss, but profit wasn’t and never has been my motivation in putting on gigs, which in the circumstances is just as well. I was offended and we had a row. This caused immense complications because we had already advertised a return visit by the FLB, to take place at the Art School. This now had to be relocated back to the Riverside and all the publicity re-done.
Worst of all, I then made a terrible pig’s ear of attempting to interview Robyn Hitchcock for the Chronicle. We met in the Eclipse pub, by the cathedral, where he consumed five pints of Guinness in an hour and talked complete nonsense. The trouble was that it wasn’t stupid nonsense but highly intellectual nonsense, several miles over my head. I felt severely intimidated and was unable to gather a single usable quote. It’s a measure of my love for his music that I have seventeen Hitchcock albums, despite the fact that every attempt I have made to have dealings with him has been disastrous.
(An extract from VOLUME by Oliver Gray)