Soft Play released their excellent new record Heavy Jelly this week but there might not have been another album without the unwitting intervention of Damon Albarn. The punk duo from Kent previously released three albums under their original name of Slaves before switching monikers in 2022, claiming that their old handle didn’t “represent who we are as people or what our music stands for any longer… We want to sincerely apologise to anyone we’ve offended.” But before that name-change, Isaac Holman and Laurie Vincent had drifted away from each other, working on solo projects and putting their own group on ice. It took an enquiry from Blur, Vincent recently told The New Cue, to bring them back together.
"Just before Christmas in 2022, before Blur announced they were headlining Wembley Stadium, they asked about our availability,” Vincent said. “We were inactive at that point. I was like, ‘Fucking hell, that is too good an opportunity to pass up’, so I discussed it with Isaac. ‘Maybe we should do this’. But I had a pretty strong contingent that if we started again, it had to be consistent with how we want to go forward. I knew from the years off we had taken that I wanted to change the name anyway so we had some really challenging conversations back and forth, and we couldn’t quite get it together.”
The gig opportunity went away, Laurie added, but then Blur added a second date. “We got asked the same question and I was like, right, ‘Let’s fucking sort this out’. Isaac has been pretty open about the fact he struggles with OCD and he couldn’t quite get his head around the idea of moving forward with a new name because there was so much attached to that, like our identity and everything that could go wrong. I basically gave him an ultimatum, ‘We don’t have to do it but if we do do it, I want a new name and that’s what I know’. I guess I bullied-slash-persuaded him. We came up with a new name and we released the statement. And then we didn’t get the gig anyway, but it felt like we’d done something really positive because we’d realised we wanted to do it again. That started everything rolling.”
Vincent hasn’t yet the opportunity to tell Albarn how instrumental he was in helping bring the band back together. “I bumped into him at Glasto but obviously, as you can imagine, he was swamped with people so we just had a hug and said hello and that was it. But I do want to have that chat with him one day,” he said.
Heavy Jelly is the pair’s heaviest record yet and a rapturously-received set at Download last month suggested that they had been embraced by the rock world more than ever before. Vincent said they were determined to stay true to who they were in the band’s new lease of life. “I’m embracing the fact that I went to Download when I was a kid, and then I went to Reading and I went to Glastonbury. It wasn’t that I was like, ‘Oh, there’s only one festival for me’. It was like, ‘if Refused are playing Download, I’m going to Download’ and embracing that,” he said.
“Where Isaac and I grew up in the noughties, there was a lot more tribalism. It was, ‘Are you a skater? Are you a chav? Are you a grunger?’ and you had to stick in those lanes for fear of being ostracised. When we left being Slaves, there were kids that were 12 that are now 19 and they’re gig goers. So we’ve got this huge, whole new audience bolstering our previous audience and their currency is being as individual as possible. They don’t care about being part of a tribe. Their tribe is individualism, so you’re not getting punished for being a rock band; you’re not getting punished for having influences that aren’t deemed cool because nothing is uncool anymore. I feel like the shackles are off and people are free to express themselves.”
Watch the video for Soft Play’s glorious 2023 comeback song Punk’s Dead, featuring a guest turn from Robbie Williams, below:
