First Soft Boys gig.
Robyn erased the old band name (see below) and announced to the audience "We're the Soft Boys now." Robert Lamb had resigned on 16 November and this was the first gig with Alan "Wang-Bo" Davies on guitar.

The Punk Diary (p. 41)
Robyn Hitchcock announced to the crowd on-stage tonight in Cambridge "We're the Soft Boys." It's a new direction for the group that was only hours ago calling itself Dennis & The Experts. The new name comes from the title of a song that Robyn recently made up in rehearsal called "Give It To The Soft Boys." Rob Lamb left the group when he felt the band was getting to be too scrappy. The Soft Boys are Robyn Hitchcock on lead vocals and guitar, Maurice [sic] Windsor on drums, Andy Metcalf [sic] on bass and new guitarist Alan "Wangbo" Davies, who takes departing Rob's place. Why the name the Soft Boys? Robyn explains, "I'd had this concept of this thing called the Soft Boys, like a William Burroughs amalgam. Soft Machine and the Wild Boys. The implications were kind of homo-erotic and seedy, kind of crawling, bloodless, colorless things that crawled around like filleted human jellyfish around the corridors of power. Soft Boys controlled things but they had no spine. Basically insidious people and basically that's what we were."

(They played that night, billed as Dennis & The Experts, at Cambridge, Polytechnic.)
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Dennis and the Experts were booked that month for a university Christmas ball—recruiting Alan Davies on guitar, Robyn arrived at the venue, which being an educational institution had a blackboard, that night being used to list the evening's musical program. Erasing 'Dennis and the Experts', he chalked in 'The Soft Boys'. Thus were they born. Now began the group's truly formative year. All the distinctive musical ingredients were brewed—incisive lyrics, unexpected twists (at least few expected twists), the twin guitar attack. There was a vague feeling among the local musos that it wasn't 'proper' music—proper music at the time was more a swamp of 'tasteful' licks at the pinnacle of which, if swamps have pinnacles, was Steely Dan.

Kimberley R.