The Soft Boys - Give It to the Soft Boys - Non-Album Tracks (1976-1977)

Robyn Hitchcock is a very prolific songwriter, and he's probably recorded or played in concert almost as many songs as the ones that got on his official albums. I've already posted a couple of recent things from him, but now I want to go back to the start of his career and begin systematically collecting all of his quality stray tracks.

That means going back to the Soft Boys, the band he led from 1976 to 1981. The way I look at it, the Soft Boys had three official albums (not counting their 2002 reunion album): "A Can of Bees," "Invisible Hits," and "Underwater Moonlight." It's confusing, because "Invisible Hits" sounds like some sort of greatest hits collection, when it's just another studio album. "Underwater Moonlight" is the best album of Hitchcock's long career, in my opinion, as well as one of the greatest albums of all time. If you haven't heard it yet, give it a listen!

Anyway, the Soft Boys were an obscure band at the time, out of step with the New Wave music trends at the time, because they were obviously heavily influenced by 1960s music, which was seen as uncool. Thus, they had trouble with record companies, with cancelled singles and failed album sessions, and such, due to them not sounding commercial enough. As a result, a lot of their songs didn't get released at the time, though most of his has come out on archival releases in piecemeal fashion in the years since. There are so many stray tracks that I've made no less than four albums for them.

Here's the first one. It covers their early days, with the first song from 1976 and the rest from 1977. In their first full year of 1977, all they officially released was a three song EP (though three songs were added to it when it was later rereleased with a new name).

Their first official album wouldn't come out until "A Can of Bees" in early 1979. But this is effectively their first album, since it's 38 minutes of good material. There were a couple of songs from bootlegs that I left out, because I felt they weren't up to snuff.

01 The Unpleasant Stain (Soft Boys)
02 Wey Wey Hep Uh Hole [First Version] (Soft Boys)
03 Its Not Just the Size of a Walnut (Soft Boys)
04 Ugly Nora (Soft Boys)
05 Look into Your Mirror (Soft Boys)
06 Rock and Roll Radio Queen (Soft Boys)
07 Wading through a Ventilator (Soft Boys)
08 The Face of Death (Soft Boys)
09 Hear My Brane (Soft Boys)
10 The Yodelling Hoover (Soft Boys)
11 Give It to the Soft Boys (Soft Boys)
12 Vyrna Knowl Is a Headbanger (Soft Boys)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16404260/TSOFTBYS1977GveItthSftBoys_atse.zip.html

I chose the album title "Give It to the Soft Boys," because that was the title of their one official release from 1977. But I didn't like the cover for that. I used a painting by Hitchcock that later got used for the cover art for the Soft Boys retrospective "1976 - 1981." I like Hitchcock's artwork a lot, as it has the exact same surrealistic style as most of his music, so I'm going to use his art for his stray track album covers as much as I can.