Recording began at Alaska Studios, a decrepit dungeon under the arches opposite Waterloo Station, which registered the noise of the trains grinding overhead. Of the ideological chasm between the self-indulgent opulence of the first half of the 1970s and punk’s new DIY ethos, the sessions fell squarely into the latter. There was just a 4-track and instruments bled into one another, but Alaska had the sound the band wanted and it was cheap to record there (Hitchcock remembers writing a cheque for £30 after the first session). The studio smelt so badly of fungus, alcohol and cigarettes that Hitchcock later joked he had to fumigate his Telecaster. The sessions at the boathouse in Cambridge had helped turn the band into a well-oiled machine, enabling them to record most of the basic tracks live.

That first session gave the band a version of ‘I Wanna Destroy You’ good enough to keep. The song might have partly sprung from contemporary geopolitical tensions, but it was lit up in rainbow harmonies, staggered by force of necessity — as the other Boys understood what Hitchcock was singing, they joined in. Producer Pat Collier was adept at handling the results. ‘His wizardry at the 4-track tape machine enabled him to bounce two guitars, bass and drums down to stereo,’ Hitchcock explained, ‘and garnish that with three double-tracked voices: Kim’s, Morris’s and mine’. It sounded brand-new. Punks had been reiterating the past since their beginning, of course, drawing from a rich stock of 1950s rock 'n' roll, 1960s garage rock and 1960s-1970s proto-punk, but the spiky upstarts would have spat at the idea of 1960s multi-part harmonies and guitar jangle and chime. When David Fricke first saw The Soft Boys live in December 1978, they sounded like ‘nothing else in London that season’. ‘The band’s valiant jangle and glassy vocal harmonies blowing through the room with cleansing force’.

Sessions moved to Wimbledon, where an 8-track studio had been ill-fitted into a terraced house: tracking took place in the living room with a mixing desk in an upstairs bedroom; soundproofing consisted of mattresses duct-taped to the walls, and the cats which populated the house became the band’s first groupies. The scuzzy locale once again proved fertile ground, producing in February 1980 ‘Kingdom of Love’, ‘Positive Vibrations’, ‘Insanely Jealous’, ‘Tonight’, ‘Queen of Eyes’ and ‘Underwater Moonlight’.

Having bagged good reviews, the band flew to New York to play seven shows towards the end of the summer of 1980. ‘I remember playing the album for some friends at the time,’ Hitchcock said, ‘younger kids who had been in a punk band called the Users. I heard it through their ears — and it sounded lame… But when I heard it again with my own ears I knew it was great.’

Underwater Moonlight received some BBC airplay, but its influence spread via narrower channels deeper underground: kids pressing the vinyl enthusiastically into friends’ hands, and American college radio broadcasts. It would soon become a foundational text for 1980s neo-psychedelia and alternative rock, influencing everyone from The Replacements to R.E.M..

‘I pictured the Soft Boys as bloodless, spectral entities that could slide under locked doors, all but invisible yet capable of enormous influence.’ Hitchcock's original science-fiction vision of the group proved prescient. The album is now a widely acknowledged classic, and The Soft Boys have gained belated cult status, but their influence far outstrips their visibility in music history. With the release of Underwater Moonlight (45th Anniversary Remaster) in 2025, one hopes that will change. Because that Cambridge boathouse and those fungal and cat-laden studios were not only unlikely places for the Soft Boys’ music to germinate, but also significant junctions in the story of rock 'n' roll.