Soft Play: “It’s taken a long time for us to come to peace with who we are”
At the end of 2019, Soft Play, then known as Slaves, quietly dissolved without anyone realising it, including themselves. Unbeknown to the public, the duo, comprised of Isaac Holman and Laurie Vincent, had slowly drifted from being inseparably joined at the hip to simply colleagues who barely interacted off-stage. For a while, it seemed they’d never come back, and if they ever were to do so, their friendship needed rebuilding first.
While many bands treat their career as work, Soft Play needs the distinctive and amusing bond between Holman and Vincent to exist for them to thrive. Their first two albums, 2015’s Are You Satisfied and 2016’s Take Control, featured their trademark humour. Notably, this was a missing ingredient from 2018’s Acts of Fear and Love, but has thankfully made a welcome return on their comeback, Heavy Jelly.
It took until the end of 2022 for it to start to look feasible that Soft Play would return. Even after the pair officially changed their name from Slaves, the future remained uncertain. Before any musical matters, they needed to heal their relationship, and if they managed to climb over that challenging hurdle, they could make another record.
Both members of Soft Play have endured highly traumatic events and issues outside of the band during their hiatus. Tragically, in 2020, Vincent’s partner and the mother to his first two children passed away following a battle with cancer. While he continued to release music as Larry Pink The Human, grieving and being the best father possible naturally took precedence over everything else.
Meanwhile, Holman had been struggling with OCD for a significant period, including during their last tour, but had not been open with Vincent about his issues. Eventually, the situation escalated to such a degree that he moved back home with his parents and began working as a landscape gardener. Making music was the last thing on his mind before finding his voice again with his solo project, Baby Dave, which was crucial to a Soft Play reunion.
Even two years ago, during an exclusive conversation about Baby Dave with Far Out, Holman admitted of the band’s status, “We’re parked for now. I can’t really say, but yeah, we’re not doing anything right now. We’ve both got other shit we want to do.”
Now, only two years later, Soft Play have another album at the ready and recently triumphed on The Other Stage at Glastonbury Festival, a career-affirming moment made even sweeter by the adversity they’ve faced on the way. For Holman, the performance was also an opportunity to make his late friend, Bailey, proud. “It was emotional; I used to go to that festival with my mate Bailey, who is mentioned in ‘Everything and Nothing’, who passed away, and my mates were holding up a flag with him on it, which I was looking at in the crowd. I’ve never felt that emotion on stage before,” Holman reflects from the heart.
The aforementioned ‘Everything and Nothing’ is the stand-out track of Heavy Jelly and Soft Play’s career to date. While the inspired use of a mandolin shows their progression musically, it’s an emotionally charged song that took three years to complete as Holman dealt with life without Bailey.
“I started writing the words in lockdown and hit a brick wall with it. I felt, ‘I don’t even fucking know what to say’; it was too emotional, so I parked it. Three years later, Laurie whips out his mandolin, and I had somewhere to go with that song,” Holman explains.
While ‘Everything and Nothing’ is Soft Play at their most earnest and sincere, Heavy Jelly is filled with humour, as the title suggests. In contrast, Acts of Fear and Love was, by their admission, nine songs thrown together, and the lack of laughs on display spoke volumes about what their friendship had become.
Vincent frankly reflects: “I see that time as quite dark. We lost the humour in our personal lives, but we also lost the humour in the band because we became a bit ashamed of it. We lost our way. At that time, everything was so fucking serious. All we ever got asked about was our political stance, and all these other punk bands were much better at it than we were. It didn’t feel like we had any purpose being funny because that wasn’t popular, and it’s taken a long time for us to come to peace with who we are and realise that the humour in our music is why people loved us in the first place.”
In addition to feeling like their band was no longer culturally relevant, significantly, Vincent and Holman are depicted in separate rooms on the album cover. While it was entirely incidental, Vincent believes the image is a “pretty poignant” reflection of their relationship then.
Holman concedes that they weren’t “working to their full potential” and “scraping the barrel” with their third album. Although Vincent believes “there are good ideas in there,” he adds, “none of them were fully formed” due to carelessly rushing the LP.
Soft Play also had one eye on their peers, who had started headlining major festivals and selling out arenas. Although they still toured in significantly sized rooms, they craved more. “Even though you’ve sold loads of tickets, there’s always someone to compare with on social media. We definitely let a lot of comparison in, whereas now I realise we’re our own thing, and there’s no one really to compare to us,” Vincent confidently says.
Another reason Vincent believes they “plateaued” and stagnated regarding ticket sales is the elephant in the room—their former band name. In December 2022, they officially changed from Slaves to Soft Play. Before this point, as two white men from Tunbridge Wells, they had been criticised for many years but refused to back down and stood their ground. Eventually, they realised it wasn’t a battle they believed in fighting.
“It felt dirty; everyone had preconceptions about us, and we had something hanging over our heads before we even got a chance to walk through the door,” Vincent says of their old moniker. “We had taken the decision to defend it out of a place of fear of what might happen if we changed it, and we backed ourselves into a corner that we never wanted to be in.”
While they knew deep down that being called Slaves was more hassle than it was worth, the idea of relenting seemed unthinkable. However, once they’d had time away, Vincent and Holman realised the notion of being labelled sell-outs or hypocrites was nothing to fear.
On their comeback track, ‘Punk’s Dead’, they responded emphatically to the criticism slung their way on social media for turning their back on their old alias. To further poke fun at the critics of their punk credentials and stay true to their renewed no fucks given ethos, Soft Play recruited Robbie Williams to perform backing vocals on the track.
The song was released towards the end of 2023 while they were still recording Heavy Jelly. A year before, they tentatively began talks to reunite when a potential opportunity arose to support Blur at Wembley Stadium, which forced them to discuss their name and the possibility of a return.
However, it was pivotal for the duo that there was a distance between their comeback and the name change, with Vincent stating, “It almost had to be a standalone event, and then we sort of had to work out what to do from there.”
While the Wembley Stadium show didn’t materialise, Vincent believes it may have taken a “few years” without that unexpected shove from Blur, and a giant first step in their journey in making Heavy Jelly.
The pair may have never formally announced the split, but Vincent admits, “I definitely said out loud, ‘I’m not fucking doing that again.'” However, once they began hanging out as friends again and reminiscing about the old times, it unlocked a seed in both of their brains that “one day it would have to get revisited.”
He also thinks they wouldn’t be here today with Heavy Jelly if they made another record in a similar vein to Acts of Fear and Love, stating, “We would have just killed the band organically anyway, which would have sucked.” Instead, they’ve earned a second chance and are not prepared to take it for granted this time.
Not only have they fixed their relationship, but they’ve also tirelessly worked on themselves, with Holman starting therapy at Vincent’s request. While he may have once been reluctant to take his bandmates’ advice, the singer keenly listened and now says, “I don’t think we would have got to this point if both of us weren’t doing it, to be honest. It’s been a really important part of the story.”
Now, rather than keeping these thoughts locked in his brain and putting on a front, Holman is comfortable sharing his fears with his bandmate. Just a few days before our conversation, he confided in Vincent on a train journey that he “feels more self-conscious than ever at the moment,” whereas before, he “would have pretended that I wasn’t self-conscious and just felt it inside.”
Although this private discussion on public transport is small in the grand scheme of things, it demonstrates how far their friendship has come and the tightness of their bond in 2024. It’s taken years of turmoil to reach this point, and many tears were shed along the way, but now Soft Play have firmly got their smiles back.
Heavy Jelly is out now via BMG.
