All this and Soft Play, too… (On Self Editing)

I’ve been asked to illustrate a point about ‘self-editing,’ in terms of agoraphobia. The answer is that I can’t. Not directly, anyway. The problem with agoraphobia, as I mention in part iii of this post is that one’s past becomes diminished and confused. Reliability is off the cards. As a result of circumstances, I am an entirely unreliable narrator of my own life.

The best I can do is illustrate a moment of doubt; a moment where I had to question my sanity. It’s a small and inconsequential thing but caused some genuine confusion and distress.

I love Soft Play. Hell, no, I adore Soft Play. I was a bit late to the party, granted – watching… wait… no.

They were ‘Slaves’ back then. They were on Sunday Brunch and some mad bloke was doing Elizabethan dancing around them. It was a spectacle to behold. I bought everything I could get hold of. ‘Acts of Fear and Love’ become my favourite album of that year. ‘Cheer Up London’ was my most played track of the year – according to Prime. ‘Cut and Run’ came a close second – and I’m even writing this piece while listening to ‘Heavy Jelly.’

So, yeah, I’m a fan. It gall’s me that, thanks to my position, I’m 99% unlikely to ever see them live. They play in my front room, if they felt so inclined, but yeah. A bona fide fan.

Anyway, the name change didn’t bother me. Whatever they put out either as Soft Play, Slaves, Larry Pink the Human or Baby Dave, is fine by me. They could change their name to something completely abhorrent (‘Gary Glitter’s Anal Drippage’ just came to mind as a poor taste band name and now I’m going to have to bleach my brain) but, if it was Laurie and Isaac doing what they do, I’d be there.

But.

Here’s the thing.

The name change caused me some distress. Not because of the name change itself, like I said, I don’t really care about that. What threw me was that on Prime Music, Amazon, Spotify, etc., albums that had been credited to Slaves suddenly became credited to Soft Play.

As someone who’s recollection of the past is problematic and as someone who wrote a thesis describing the horrors of accelerated self-editing, thanks to agoraphobia, bipolar disorder and dyslexia, suddenly having an important part of my life changed by an external force caused me to question my memory;. Had I been a fan of Soft Play all this time and not realised it? Had my dyslexia caused me to read ‘Soft Play’ as ‘Slaves’ for the last five years or so? Why was an important part of the last five years being edited without my knowledge?

Given the state of my memory, I’m fairly precious about the things I remember. I’m precious about having managed to order them into something coherent. To have my memory changed by an external factor felt like a violation; a genuine moment of existential angst – which sounds pretty extreme, granted, but there you go. Mental health does what it does. I can’t explain it any differently.

I understand and applaud the name change. Slaves, as a name, was problematic and it’s terrific that they saw the problem and made that decision. But to retroactively erase the old name and replace it?

I dunno.

Leaving the releases as was would have shown that growth. Retroactively changing them is denying that a mistake/poor decision/whatever was ever made. I really loved the fact that Soft Play owned that decision and made a public statement to say why the name change occurred. But should you erase the past when people could learn from that change?

In the general scheme of things, of course, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want my money back, boys, for the tee-shirts. I don’t think you should have run it by me first and Punk ain’t dead cause of you.

It’s just, the post-name change revisionism rattled me. I understand it from a marketing perspective. New fans looking for old music might not know to look for Slaves rather than Soft Play. Again, from a personal point of view, I found the changing of the old name on prior releases unnerving.

I’m over it.

Sort of.

I still bloody love them, though. It’s good to see something so positive come from one of the many places I grew up in. It was even nicer to see some of their videos featuring locations that I grew up in.

I bloody love Soft PLay.