"Robyn’s not really a man to simply go along to rehearsal and just practice his old songs," says Kimberley Rew of his Soft Boys cohort Robyn Hitchcock. "So when we got together last year to commemorate the reissue of Underwater Moonlight, the kind of legendary album, we were rehearsing new songs concurrently. By the time we actually did the tour, we had rehearsed about half a new record." The stellar new Nextdoorland

(on Matador Records) was thus born out of rehearsals of songs written way back in 1980, many of which hadn’t been played at all in the twenty years intervening, as the Soft Boys had disbanded when those songs met with a large commercial yawn. And yet the new record sounds completely fresh, a great showcase for Hitchcock’s pitch-perfect pop songwriting. Indeed, you’d be tempted to say the Soft Boys are Hitchcock’s best backing band since his early ’90s Egyptians, except that the Egyptians were the best band he’d had since the Soft Boys themselves.

Rew had a pretty good band of his own during the Soft Boys’ two-decade hiatus. The royalty checks for "Walking on Sunshine," his enormous 1985 hit with Katrina and the Waves, are probably fatter than the sum total he’ll ever receive for Underwater Moonlight, and yet Rew’s irony-drenched aside about the latter record being "kind of legendary" is clearly spoken out of pride. Not everybody’s unsuccessful early work is cited reverently by acts like R.E.M. and the Replacements as a crucial influence, and few can boast a twenty-year-old album in their discography that hasn’t dated a bit in the interim. "We all like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, and, well, I’m not putting myself on that level," says Rew, "but, you know, I don’t think we’re really doing anything that isn’t potentially classic. We’re not doing anything that isn’t potentially very listenable."

Listenable or not, it’s a tough task to follow-up a record as well-regarded as Underwater Moonlight, but Rew insists that the twenty additional years under the band members’ belts actually made matters simpler. For instance, the impulse to layer on the guitar lines to enrich the band’s sound has given way to a more mature approach, and the thick Byrdsian jangle of "Queen of Eyes" from the last record has been replaced with the leaner, more open sound of Nextdoorland’s fine "Mr. Kennedy."

"There wasn’t really an awful lot of overdubbing going on [with] the album," comments Rew, "though I wondered if there would be. But when the time came to work things out, we found that, really, we’d said what we needed to say, ’cause that’s what we needed to say at the time. No point in elaborating it." Nevertheless, the Soft Boys’ signature two-guitar sound is still at the fore of the band’s approach to the songs. "Robyn arrives pretty much in the room with a song," explains Rew, "that includes a guitar part. And my mission, if you will, is to do the right thing, given that first guitar part. I play what isn’t really there, and that could vary from playing nothing at all to playing exactly the same thing, to playing the exact opposite. That’s really what we’re trying to do. It’s not so much about [how] one guy does a bit, then another guy does a bit. It’s kind of about getting a twin thing going on. Possibly not even knowing who’s doing what."

One thing that can be said for certain, however, is that Hitchcock is behind the band’s oddball lyrics. "I don’t have the kind of mental depth to draw on that Robyn does," Rew admits. "He does have a sort of mental acuity, a robustness that never goes away." Your guess is as good as anybody’s as to the meaning of the rousing chorus to "My Mind Is Connected…:" "It’s only a poisonous plant, and it’s calling your name!" But Rew insists, "I really don’t think of it as weird. The music is not really weird in itself. It’s more that there is a mainstream, where people discuss a fairly small range of things, which Robyn doesn’t do. His references are more wide-ranging. I think it’s much more that the rest of rock and roll has become very conservative. The mission of the rock mainstream is to sort of reproduce the familiar, and while we’re very classic, I think we’re not really that kind of band."