2000 Great Songs #1195: Innocent Boy

Another jangly Byrds homage from The Soft Boys--who, frankly, are plagiarizing themselves a bit, with "Innocent Boy" sounding an awful lot like their previously-referenced "Queen Of Eyes." Still, redundancy notwithstanding, it's a track I've always loved. Partially because it's so damn catchy, of course, that "you must be an extremely innocent boy" refrain echoing in my head since first hearing it some four decades ago. 

But the song also benefits from its relative rarity. The outtake from the Underwater Moonlight sessions (perhaps dropped because of the "Queen of Eyes" similarity?) first showed up on the long-out-of-print 1981 vinyl-only Soft Boys collection Two Halves For The Price Of One, a batch of rare live & studio tracks issued around the time the band broke up & Robyn Hitchcock went solo. It doesn't stream, and the song has never been released officially on CD (an inexplicable oversight on the Soft Boys' otherwise exhaustive two-disc career-overview 1976-81), though I did snag it on a Robyn Hitchcock bootleg compilation called Invisible History. So I really have to work to find it when I'm in the mood, making it feel that much more special for the added effort.

Cover by Ruth's Refrigerator: