The Canterbury scene is a somewhat deceptive name for a musical genre. Following its early roots in the mid-1960s, many of the artists known to be part of the scene did not create their music in Canterbury, and most of that music was not performed there. But there is definitely a common stylistic thread that goes through the music associated with the genre. The part whimsical, part serious concoction of rock, pop, jazz and classical music can be traced in each of the albums in this review, all released in 1970. The first of two articles discussing the Canterbury Scene is dedicated to a group closely associated with that term, and to solo albums by some of its members.
Soft Machine – Third
Soft Machine started the year 1970 as a quintet. In addition to its core members Mike Ratledge, Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper, horn players Elton Dean and Lyn Dobson joined to form a formidable jazz rock ensemble. Dobson, who played flute and tenor saxophone, was previously with Georgie Fame and Manfred Mann. He remembers the experience of playing with Soft Machine: “The stuff they were doing when I joined the band was extremely esoteric and incredibly complex. When I went to the first rehearsal, I couldn’t play any of it. I bluffed my way through it, then took the parts home and practiced for about a month.” As Robert Wyatt recalled, it was no longer clear whether Soft Machine were their label’s worst-selling rock group or its best-selling jazz act.
Dobson departed the group in March 1970, and the remaining quartet recorded the band’s third album in the spring of 1970. Released in June that year, the simply titled Third is considered one the group’s artistic peaks. At this point the band was stylistically aligned with the thriving British jazz scene as much as with the progressive rock genre. The double album included only four tracks, each occupying a full LP side. Time Out magazine had this to say when it reviewed the album in July 1970: “Third is a staggering musical achievement that transcends anything yet produced by a British rock group and is essential listening for anyone who wants to hear what a fusion of the best of modern jazz and rock can produce. In fact, it can’t really be discussed in terms of those categories at all since the Soft Machine have virtually created their own.”
Jim Talbot, who wrote the review, understood the uniqueness of the band in the British progressive music scene of that time: “The group’s music isn’t easy to listen to and probably makes a lot of people feel very uncomfortable. It defies categorization, using the electronic paraphernalia of modern pop as a medium for hour-long pieces that rival the works of the best twentieth century classical composers in scope and complexity. As much could be said of King Crimson and the Pink Floyd, but when you add the Soft Machine’s willingness to experiment with unusual time signatures, their use of brass, Mike Ratledge’s incredible organ solos and Robert Wyatt’s drumming, they are in a class of their own.”
Soft Machine had a busy year in 1970, with over 80 live performances in Europe and the UK. They had the honor of being offered a week of residency at the prestigious Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, and at Royal Albert Hall, being recorded as part of the Henry Wood Promenade Concert at the Proms. Melody Maker wrote in June 1970: “The Soft Machine are probably the only non-jazz group in Britain who could command a week in the hallowed precincts of Ronnie Scott’s Frith Street emporium in London.” Robert Wyatt commented on their unlikely performance at the Proms: “The whole business of surfacing for a couple of hours in that environment was to be heard by people who normally wouldn’t listen to us in our usual context — and it was unnatural. I can also see that it seems to have been important in terms of public reaction. For a start, the little old ladies round our way used to think that we were a load of nasty, dirty hairies, but now they all say ‘ Good morning, Robert’ very nicely.”
The band was often covered in the British music press in 1970, and all members were interviewed about their music. A few selected snippets:
Robert Wyatt talking about Hugh Hopper: “Hugh’s bass playing is the most interesting new thing for me. He’s doing things to the bass that I’ve always wanted people to do at this level. When he solos he might play high and fast, but he always keeps the kind of weight and authority that the bass should have. When he races up to the top he doesn’t leave a gap at the bottom.”
Robert Wyatt talking about his drum technique, playing snare-drum with the snares off: “I’ve been doing that and playing nearer the rim of the drum, to get a ringing sound. This changes the whole nature of the kit, and removes the cymbals from their usual relationship to the drums. It clears the overall sound and makes a lot more space, because the sound with cymbals and snare going with the other instruments can be very muddy.”
Mike Ratledge on playing odd time signatures: “I’ve been aware of them since I started writing, and I guess it was with Messiaen (the 20th Century classical composer) that I first came up against them, although of course they have been used throughout musical history in so-called primitive music as well as so-called classical music. But Messiaen was the first person I’d come across who’d obviously spent a lot of time getting into it.”
Mike Ratledge on playing the Lowrey organ: “I bought it when we hadn’t got the money for a Hammond, and I got to know what I could do with it. It’s worked out well because the majority of organists use Hammonds, so the Lowrey’s characteristics stand out a bit. I suppose that a large number of my stylistic idiosyncrasies are due to the inherent peculiarities of the Lowrey.”
Hugh Hopper on writing music: “When you make music it’s very strange, because once you’ve written it and worked it out it doesn’t have the same interest, it’s done. I used to find this particularly when I played semi-pro, when I played other people’s music. Take MacCartney’s ‘Yesterday’; when I heard that I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. When I actually learnt to play it, it was still a nice tune, but it didn’t have any magic. Trouble is, that happens as soon as you write a tune yourself. The best thing is to write it and then lock it away for a year.”
Melody Maker summarized the music of the band and their third album well: “The Softs are an exhilarating band, and listening to them can be like jumping off a cliff into a pool of freezing water. The new album is full of music of such fine, invigorating quality, and their crucial importance in the future of popular music cannot be denied.”
My favorite track on Third is Moon in June, the only song (if you can call a 19-minute piece of music a song) that somewhat resembles the style of the band’s previous two albums. This was the last piece that Robert Wyatt would write for the band or sing on, and the band’s last to include lyrics. it is close to be counted as a mini solo project for him while with the band. In the first part of the track he plays all instruments, with the band joining midway into it. Wyatt: “Moon in June sounds very structured, but really it was a whole load of unfinished songs where instead of finishing them I just bled them into each other. Literally, actually, all over the studio. What a mess. Although it is kind of pop songs strung together into a suite, it’s still very eventful, in the sense that it’s changing all the time.”
Violin solo by Roy Spall, who played with Robert Wyatt in his short-lived group The Amazing Band.
Elton Dean – alto saxophone (plays on the album but not on this tune)
Mike Ratledge – Hohner Pianet, Lowrey organ, piano
Hugh Hopper – bass guitar
Robert Wyatt – drums, vocals, Hammond organ, Mellotron, Hohner Pianet, piano, bass
Rab Spall – violin
Robert Wyatt – The End of an Ear
1970 was a year of many musical projects for Robert Wyatt. Apart from his work with Soft Machine, he played with Kevin Ayers and his band The Whole World (read on for more on their 1970 album). He said of that collaboration: “I realized that the things that I could achieve musically with Kevin would probably take far longer than with the Soft Machine. What really happened was that from a distance, I was able to re-appraise the Softs.”
Wyatt also participated in Keith Tippett’s wildly ambitious large ensemble Centipede on their live performance of Septober Energy. The travelling caravan of fifty musicians was one of the drummer’s favorite activities that year. He reminisces: “It was a real breakthrough. There were a lot of people in London who were doing experimental things and mixing all different stuff, but as a kind of cottage industry. Keith Tippett just did it large. And it was wonderful. What a happy band of people we were.”
Wyatt’s most notable project outside of Soft Machine in 1970 was his first solo album ‘The End of an Ear’. He said of the motivation to release that album: “I suddenly realized that I was in my mid-twenties and I had got a job. Everything was very tidy, much too predictable. I just felt like a bit of musical promiscuity. It’s not supposed to be some kind of great alternative to the Soft Machine. I just thought it would be nice to have an album like that by somebody.”
Recorded in August of 1970, the album is a mix of experimental music, free jazz and no-lyric vocalizations, which he described as, “not songs, more as an alternative to playing instruments”. An acquired taste for many, it provides an insight into Robert Wyatt’s musical mindset at the time. In November of 1970, a month ahead of the album’s release, Wyatt told Sounds magazine: “We just went in blank and played and doodled around to see what came out. It’s nearly an hour long, and probably the only real tune on it is a Gil Evans thing called ‘Las Vegas Tango’.”
During the recording of the album, in an interview with Melody Maker, Wyatt had interesting ideas about the material he would record: “Maybe we’ll get into doing our own versions of Soft Machine numbers — that would be nice, getting another angle on them with a flowing string bass line instead of the fuzz bass-guitar.” Some of the musicians he picked to help him record the music where familiar to Soft Machine: present and past members Elton Dean on sax and Mark Charig on Cornet. In addition, he invited bassist Neville Whitehead from Keith Tippett’s group and Dave Sinclair from Caravan on organ.
Wyatt talked at length about the freedom the musicians had in the studio: “With this band I’m trying to get some space back into my music. Arrangements, freedom, and all those different procedures can make satisfying music, which is very hard to define, but the actual effect is a certain kind of density. I admire the sense of space you get from ‘ Miles Smiles’ or the Miroslav Vitous album; the density of rock bands can be very crude and unrewarding. So many things are happening in the quartet; I’m constantly playing things that I’ve always wanted to play but never been able to, and that’s a result of the more fluid situation.”
The album was released in December of 1970 and it includes the track To Carla, Marsha and Caroline (For Making Everything Beautifuller). If you are wondering who is this track dedicated to, here goes:
‘Carla’ is Carla Bley, pianist, composer and band leader. The two would collaborate five years later on the album The Hapless Child.
‘Marsha’ is American singer, actress and model Marsha Hunt. She had rehearsed with Soft Machine early in the band’s career and married Mike Ratledge.
‘Caroline’ is artist and activist Caroline Coon. Two years later she would be the subject of Matching Mole’s song O Caroline.
Caroline Coon talked about Wyatt’s excellent selection of women dedicatees: “Robert invited me to Ronnie Scott’s to hear Carla Bley. He wanted me to hear her not only because she was a performer but because she was a composer, too. That was Carla Bley’s significance, apart from the fact that she was stunningly beautiful – but maybe that also. Marsha Hunt was stunningly beautiful, too. If he did put the three of us together, it was because he liked women with beauty and brains!”
Credits on the album:
Robert Wyatt – drums, piano, organ, keyboards, harmonica
Neville Whitehead – bass
Mark Charig – cornet
Elton Dean – alto saxophone, saxello
Mark Ellidge – piano
Cyrille Ayers – assorted percussion
Dave Sinclair – organ
Kevin Ayers and The Whole World – Shooting at the Moon
The last album in this review remains within the Soft Machine family, this one by a previous member of the band. Kevin Ayers left Soft Machine after the US tour that followed the release of their debut album. At the end of 1969 he released his own debut, Joy of a Toy, a great start to quite a prolific career in the 1970s. The album’s producer Peter Jenner talked to Zigzag magazine at the end of 1969 about Ayers’ plans: “Originally, he thought he’d make enough from the record not to have to go on the road. Now he’s in the process of getting a band together. It would be worked out by the middle of January, and his next LP will probably be the result of having his own band.”
Ayers assembled around him a group of excellent musicians who went on tour with him under the name The Whole World. The group included composer and keyboard player David Bedford, sax player Lol Coxhill, drummer Mike Fincher and a young Mike Oldfield on bass and guitar. The band gelled on the road and had plenty of opportunities to play the material before entering the studio, and Kevin Ayers was writing new songs all the time. The diversity of the band members and their leanings toward the ambitious side of popular music generated a great combination of carefree, whimsical songs with challenging arrangements, sometime boarding on the avant-garde. David Bedford remembers: “Too often there’s a nice song idea and just in the middle of the song it all goes mad and you get weird sounds all through it so it wasn’t the type of stuff that would have worked as a single – going off into weird arrangements.”
Robert Wyatt joined the group on their 1970 tour of European dates alongside Pink Floyd, Joan Baez and Eric Clapton’s Derek and the Dominos. They also performed at the Hyde Park Free Concert in London, an erratic show that Wyatt remembers fondly: “I love it but it’s mad, my drumming is completely bonkers. Just smashing through everything. We’re doing a bossa nova and I’m doing the whole thing like a Jon Hiseman solo. They just keep bobbing along, don’t take any notice. ‘Oh, the drummer’s off…’”.
In April 1970 Kevin Ayers and The Whole World went into the studio to record the album Shooting at the Moon, released in October 1970 on the Harvest label. Here is a fine example of what Bedford is talking about, Rheinhardt & Geraldine/Colores Para Dolores, a song that could have been a single, but watch what’s happening at the 2:18 mark.
Kevin Ayers – guitar, bass, vocals
David Bedford – organ, piano, accordion, marimbaphone, guitar
Lol Coxhill – saxophone, zoblophone
Mike Oldfield – bass, guitar and vocal
Mick Fincher – drums, percussion, bottles & ashtrays
Sources:
Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt, by Marcus O’Dair
Soft Machine – Third, 2007 CD release booklet
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