Robyn Hitchcock’s audible love for the verboten music of the 1960s made The Soft Boys an uneasy fit amidst the post-punk landscape. Yet the band’s second album is magnificent alchemy of the new age and the old, a bridge between the peculiarly English psychedelia of Syd Barrett and the CBGBs rattle of Richard Hell And The Voidoids perhaps. Far too weird to be considered power pop, Underwater Moonlight sees Hitchcock’s brain throwing up surrealistic distortions of life in early 80s Britain that reveal a songwriting mind doing much more than just aping his acid-fried fellow Cambridge boy hero. A unique and unheralded classic.

– Chris Catchpole