a b Holdship, Bill (13 March 2001). "The Soft Boys: Underwater Moonlight". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on 2 October 2007 . Retrieved 15 February 2015. Son of Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys (ANTI-Records, February 2013) – "Sam's Gone Away"

I saw how that sound it had obviously influenced Syd Barrett. It obviously influenced Jim McGuinn. It obviously influenced George Harrison. It was just that kind of acid spangle noise. But I loved it anyway. I liked it before I even took LSD. So LSD just sort of “Oh, I see!” Maybe that’s where they got it from. So I really like that way of thinking and I like that kind of sound. But I don’t necessarily want to have to take a drug to channel it, to make it happen or to enjoy it. I sort of feel like music that you have to be high to enjoy, I’m not sure about. And I think if it’s good, it can get to you. Absolutely. Blood is pure as a mountain stream. I’m not a purist and I don’t lead that time of life, whatever the word for it is. I’m not a sober–chaste and sober–individual at all. But I think in terms of working, playing on stage, and writing and drawing, I just like to keep a clear head. LeValley:A Middle-Class Hero (2000) – Italian-English authorised interview book written by Luca Ferrari with CD-EP of outtakes included I call it the wire-between-the-ears sound. It’s like you hit a couple of notes, a couple of E notes and a couple of strings, and they just kind of jangle. They just go between your ears like a wire. LeValley: Very much by proxy. Another author that I was influenced by was Aldous Huxley, who, as you know, wrote The Doors of Perception, which I totally absorbed when I was about 14,15. And that whole thing of kind of seeing heaven in your trousers and all the rest of it. jJst that was a very key way of thinking. So the people I listened to, in a way, took all the drugs for me. I mean, particularly, well, all the greats, really: The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart. Lou Reed took different drugs, maybe, but pretty much all of them. Nobody I listened to had not got very high on a whole variety of drugs and most of them had quite a comedown afterwards. So to me, drugs, like alcohol, are really… you’re mortgaging tomorrow by having it today. So, my God, this is fantastic! And then you may go into a deep depression afterwards. Some people are more buoyant and they can survive repeated doses and repeated trips, and other people can’t. I was very cagey about taking LSD, so I didn’t even take it until 1971. I was an old man of 18, and I maybe took it six or seven times over the course of the 70s, not regularly at all. Luminous Groove (2008) – Boxed set of reissued albums, with many previously unreleased live performances, outtakes and rarities a b c d e f Colin Larkin, ed. (1992). The Guinness Who's Who of Indie and New Wave Music (Firsted.). Guinness Publishing. p.137. ISBN 0-85112-579-4.

Okay. Well, H.G. Wells wrote particularly around the end of the Victorian era, the beginning of the Edwardian so, like, 120 years ago. It’s in an era which would now almost be steampunk to us. Lots of brass knobs and handles and pipes and sort of wooden chests and levers and dials and all that kind of stuff. The first electricity in the very, very early telephones. But I don’t think there were even airplanes when he started. But he wrote a very vivid book about a time traveler, a man who is a Victorian, breathless Victorian gentleman, who invites some friends to supper and shows them this brass contraption he’s got in his front room covered with knobs and dials and levers, and he tells them about how he’s made journeys into the future and it being at the end of humanity and what comes beyond humanity. It’s fascinating. I mean, I read that when I was, like, ten or eleven. That went in very deep. And Ballard wrote a lot of just all sorts of possible situations, but they weren’t all kind of like other worlds or anything. There weren’t really any aliens in Ballard’s world. They were just more unusual processes of thought. Great. Okay, now there’s just me on the screen for some reason. I don’t know. Did you take a lot? LeValley: Okay. There we are. I can’t see. So it’s all perfect. Good. Did I send you a copy of the record or did somebody so you heard it? Jason LeValley of Psychedelic Scene:He went off into some strange sort of premature senility, but those sorts of people, you know, Peake, Ballard, Wells really went right into my hypothalamus, along with sort of similar artists, musicians like Captain Beefheart and Syd Barrett. And of course I love Dylan and the Beatles like millions of mainstream folks, but that was my particular brew of influences, I suppose. Mandatory just for a young groover to a young person to at least smoke pot and drop a little bit of acid, and then you might go into other things.

I don’t know, but I’m sure I’ve inherited a fair bit of that. But I went into music, I think, probably maybe unconsciously, so I wouldn’t compete with him because, although I do write and draw and paint, my main gig is as a musician. And Raymond never touched an instrument and was self-confessedly, tone deaf, so he couldn’t sing. So in no way was I competing with my father. Denise Sullivan (2012). "The Soft Boys – Music Biography, Credits and Discography: AllMusic". allmusic.com . Retrieved 17 August 2012. M-E-R-V-Y-N-P-E-A-K-E. Mervyn Peak wrote the Gormenghast Trilogy. You’ll have to look up how to spell that. But Gormenghast was a sort of fictitious English type castle in a forest somewhere that was very, very like a cross between a sort of boarding school and a royal family and sort of medieval Victorian place. But they had electricity and gas lamps and horses, and it’s not set in any particular time. That was his main. There were three books of Titus Alone and Gormenghast. It’s really hard to describe briefly, but again, they were quite popular in the sort of hippie era. So I got into Gormanghast when I was 17 or 18– into Mervyn Peake. He was also a really good illustrator, a brilliant… He made his living, actually, by teaching art and by illustrating other people’s work. He did some illustrations of Lewis Carroll. He had a sort of premature breakdown when he was only in his forties, I think, after having to go to Auschwitz and do some drawings. He was a very sensitive man and it didn’t really… Army life didn’t suit him, and going into a concentration camp suited him even less. And he kind of just did like Captain Beef heart.That was a much lower budget production. I think he didn’t really like having to deal with the big studios. And the big studios, they might still have been working on filming those days. Everything was just expensive. They’d fly you around first class and put you up in nice hotels, get you up at five in the morning so you could sit around in your trailer all day and then say two lines. It was very lush. I enjoyed the life. But Rachel Getting Married was much cheaper I think they funded that themselves. And it was a hit, which was great. One of his later kind of drama movies. He also did a lot of filming down in New Orleans after Katrina went through in Ward 9, I think it is. He’d go down just by himself and talk to people. He liked people. That was the thing with Jonathan. All Ready for the 25th? (Sartorial Records, 2012) – "There Ain't No Santa Claus on the Evenin' Stage" Groovy Decoy (1985) – A re-worked version of Groovy Decay, featuring demo versions of many of that album's songs) Succour: The Terrascope Benefit Album (Flydaddy Records, September 1996) – "She Was Sinister But She Was Happy" Well, my literary influences are kind of chronologically, I suppose. J. G. Ballard and H. G. Wells, who are both kind of classified as science fiction, but were something else, really. They were imaginative short stories that came from a knowledge of what science.. where human knowledge and technical knowhow and thinking was going. But they, I don’t know. It’s a bit like comedy, you know. Was Monty Python comedy? Was Louis Carroll a children’s author? And, you know, did J. G. Ballard write science fiction? But Ballard and H.G. Wells… H.G. Wells wrote the Time Machine, most famously. I don’t know. Have you read H.G. Wells stuff?

That wasn’t planned. So there was Gillian and David and then Brendan Benson, who got in touch with me before I even thought of moving out there. Emma had friends in Nashville. Grant Lee Phillips, do you know of him? Grant Lee moved over there about the same time we did. And Sean Nelson has moved there now. Yeah. Just enough people that were in my orbit to make sense for me to be there. And then I met some really terrific players. They were on my 2017 record and whatever else it was called– the most recent one– Shuffleman. LeValley: The Man Downstairs: Demos & Rarities (2020) – Outtakes and demos recorded in 2013 for the Man Upstairs sessions [24] [25] Bayard Catron (2001). "Pre-Soft-Boys Bands". glasshotel.net. Archived from the original on 19 July 2013 . Retrieved 18 August 2012.

Oh, well, that’s what Alduous Huxley took. It was a white powder, and I only took it maybe three or four times, but it was much gentler than LSD. It wasn’t cut with amphetamines, so it was a sort of gradual kind of high, I suppose. And it was great for listening to the incredible String band on and sort of, I don’t know, looking at drops of water or leaves. The natural world. There was a big emphasis on, “Oh, you’ve got to find the right kind of place”. The ritualistic element to taking psychedelics. You weren’t just supposed to kind of walk down Oxford Street and drop a tab and go into a pub or something. You were meant to go and be with some sympathetic people in some place where there wasn’t a sensory overload and you could gradually let things come to you. But even if you did that, you could get pretty freaked out afterwards. I never had a bad trip, but I wasn’t usually left feeling much better for it. And a couple of places I felt actually quite burned out. I remember my handwriting changed. What is SHUFFLEMANIA!? It’s surfing fate, trusting your intuition, and bullfighting with destiny. It’s embracing the random and dancing with it, even when it needs to clean its teeth. It’s probably the most consistent album I’ve made. It’s a party record, with a few solemn moments, as parties are wont to supply. Groove on, groovers! The only thing I did get from taking LSD was playing electric guitar. One evening I borrowed someone’s electric guitar and I realized that you could get that what I call the wire-between-the-ears sound, which you hear in things like “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd and “Eight Miles High”, the McGuinn twelve-string sound and a little bit in things like when The Beatles are being Byrds-y, things like “She Said She Said”. LeValley: