The Soft Boys - I Want to Be an Anglepoise Lamp - Non-Album Tracks (1978)

A couple of days ago, I posted the first of four albums of stray tracks by the Soft Boys, Robyn Hitchcock's band in the late 1970s until 1981. This is the second.

The first one mostly covered 1977, while this covers just 1978, with a couple of songs from 1979. There will be no 1979 stray tracks album, since the group released two albums that year.

The songs on this album are dominated by something known as the "Radar session." Those were recordings done for the Soft Boys' first album. (It's called that because their record company at the time was Radar.) Ultimately, the company decided against releasing an album, and only put out the "I Want to Be an Anglepoise Lamp" single instead. Some of the songs got released eventually, here and there, and some did not. There are other songs done for that session that I felt simply weren't up to snuff, so I didn't include them, not even as bonus tracks.

In addition, I included a few other songs. The Soft Boys did two important concerts that yesterday that were recorded with excellent sound quality, one at the Lady Mitchell Hall in Cambridge, Britain, and the other at the Portland Arms, also in Cambridge. If you like the Soft Boys, you should definitely track down both shows. The Portland Arms one is unusual in that the band not only plays acoustically, but mostly does songs acappella! Plus, most of the songs are covers of obscure tunes from decades earlier.

Anyway, I included a couple of originals from the Lady Mitchell Hall show that don't appear anywhere else, and one from the Portland Arms show. I also included two songs that are outtakes from a 1979 recording session, since there otherwise isn't any stray tracks from 1979.

01 [I Want to Be an] Anglepoise Lamp (Soft Boys)
02 Fatman's Son (Soft Boys)
03 Where Are the Prawns (Soft Boys)
04 Salamander (Soft Boys)
05 Give Me a Spanner, Ralph (Soft Boys)
06 Which of Us Is Me (Soft Boys)
07 Psychedelic Love (Soft Boys)
08 Mystery Train (Soft Boys)
09 Skool Dinner Blues (Soft Boys)
10 I Like Bananas [Because They Have No Bones] (Soft Boys)
11 A Most Peculiar Voice (Soft Boys)
12 The Duke of Squeeze (Soft Boys)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15853131/TSoftBys_1978_IWntBeAnglepoiseLmp_atse.zip.html

The cover is just the cover of the "Anglepoise Lamp" single. But I didn't like the mostly gray background color, so I changed it to blue.