From Robyn on Patreon in 2025
The Soft Boys unconsummated courtship by Radar Records in 1978 was nobody’s fault, just an example of the two parties having very different hopes of what the outcome would be. As our harp player and vocalist Jim Melton put it, “They wasted our time and we wasted their money.” Radar (which was essentially Warner Brothers in indie drag) paid for our many recording sessions with various producers and diminishing returns: one thing we all agreed on was that no attempt to record us managed to capture the feel of how we sounded live.

What did we sound like live? A kind of folk-metal-prog, if you want to try to categorise us. We were trying to synthesise something out of various ingredients, but we didn’t know what we were aiming for or how to do it. In the absence of a manifesto, we tried not to take ourselves too seriously, but to encompass anything we fancied from barbershop vocal quartets to heavy rock. Fed up with trying to figure us out, the music press dismissed us as clever jokers. Oh well…

Here are two songs from the aborted Radar album recorded in July 1978 at Rockfield Studios. You can hear some of the frustration in my vocals, peppered as they also are with obligatory New Wave rage. It was maddening that most of the songs on the album wound up up being old ones that we’d recorded before: I was always keen to get my latest compositions down on tape. Still, the band sounds feisty. Kimberley Rew had joined us only that year, which gave the music a hard rock edge and a kind of demented confidence.

A fair amount of this album has survived on cassette. Here’s the first two songs, more to follow…