Soft Machine - The soft machine stamped Canterbury

Russian anthropologist Vladimir Propp, having analyzed thousands of fairy tales, found that almost all of them shared a common morphology. Between heroes, antagonists and donors, the tale of Soft Machine doesn't stray far from the narrative patterns of those stories capable of keeping readers on the edge of their seats. Like any self-respecting fairy tale, the story of the "soft machine" begins in a completely unexpected way. From the split of the Wilde Flowers, the founding band of the Canterbury scene, come Caravan and the extremely short-lived Mister Head, who flee their hometown. It's a hot day in 1966, we're on the island of Majorca, and Robert Wyatt, Daevid Allen and Kevin Ayers are sunbathing on the beach, searching for the spark for their new band. It's right here that something unthinkable happens: according to Gilli Smyth, Allen's partner, millionaire Wes Brunson shows up, declaring to the group that "to serve God he must give away a lot of money to people who herald the new era." According to Daevid Allen, however, what simply happens is that "Kevin Ayers talks his ear off until he manages to convince him to fund a band." Whatever actually happened, it's thanks to this man's funding that the quartet decides to set off again for London, to Wyatt's mother's flat on Dalmore Street.

After a brief name change (Bishops Of Canterbury) and the addition of old comrade Mike Ratledge, the group then found its definitive name in the title of a novel by Allen's friend, William Burroughs. Echoing the writer's own words, the term alludes to the "human body under the constant siege of an immense army of parasites with many names but a single ravenous nature and a single intent: to eat." An extremely fitting name, considering the quartet's insatiable interests, among them pop music, minimalism, jazz and modern art. The soul of the group is guitarist Daevid Allen, an eccentric Australian a little older than his bandmates. He is not, however, the only foreigner in the lineup: in its first months of life, up until the end of 1966, Soft Machine in fact performed with a second, added guitarist, the American Larry Nowlin, before he mysteriously vanished into thin air. Audiences were at once baffled by and drawn to their all-out music, which spun jazz, psychedelia and beat into a single dada-rock spectacle. It's no coincidence that in 1967 the band even received a special mention from the College of 'Pataphysics, owing to its pronounced taste for the avant-garde and its participation in a theatrical staging of Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Enchained." Just how closely tied Soft Machine were to extra-musical art is also clear from the invitation to play for the piéce “Desire Caught By The Tail," produced by none other than Picasso.

The experience with Daevid Allen, however, lasted very little, just long enough to record a few demos. In February 1967 the four members of Soft Machine officially debuted with the 7-inch single "Love Makes Sweet Music/ Feelin' Reelin' Squeelin'", produced by Chas Chandler and Kim Fowley. The success was such that by April preparations began for their debut LP, under the supervision of Giorgio Gomelsky, but in fact the album would only see the light of day in 1972, under the title Faces And Places Vol. 7. For some strange reason, the record would later be reissued under different names, including Jet-Propelled Photographs and At The Beginning.

Beyond the confusion over the title, one thing is certain: these tracks, which were meant to be Soft Machine's first album, remain the only recorded testimony of the lineup made up of Daevid Allen (guitar, vocals), Kevin Ayers (bass, vocals), Mike Ratledge (keyboards) and Robert Wyatt (drums, vocals). In 1967, Daevid Allen, on tour with Soft Machine, was in fact unable to re-enter the United Kingdom, allegedly due to drug trafficking issues or an expired visa; his life would probably have taken a very different path if, because of this bureaucratic obstacle, he hadn't been forced to settle in Paris, where the press regarded him as something of an alternative hero. From here, his artistic career would take off into stratospheric territory with Gong, amid flying teapots, invisible radios and extraterrestrial friendships with "stoned gnomes" devoted to the most hedonistic of lives.

In this incarnation, Soft Machine were clearly still in the process of defining their own style and still showed the influence of their contemporaries, above all the Beatles. Another striking thing is the lyrics, much simpler and more direct than those they would write in years to come: most of the repertoire, in fact, is made up of fairly conventional love songs. The clearest example is "I Should've Known", which would later become "Why I Am So Short?/ So Boot If At All" on their official debut. The version found here is about a boy who should have realized his girlfriend was going to leave him, while the one on the debut album describes the life of a drunken drummer (Wyatt himself) in tragicomic detail.

Despite the good quality of the tapes, Allen stated several times that he wasn't very happy about the release of this collection of demos, as he wasn't satisfied with how his guitar came across on the album. There's no denying it sounds rather amateurish on "She's Gone" and "I'd Rather Be With You", but it's enjoyable by contrast on "Memories", a track dating back to the Wilde Flowers days that Allen would later include on his album "Banana Moon" (1971). What's more, the psychedelic fuzz-effect guitar he would go on to use on several Gong records is already immediately recognizable here. Many passages would also be reused as themes on the early Soft Machine albums — for instance the immortal "Moon In June", which appears here in embryonic form in the lyrics of "You Don't Remember" and "That's How Much I Need You Now", where an already talented Mike Ratledge stands out on piano.

Finally, we should also point out another old acquaintance: "Jet-Propelled Photograph", which Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers sing here together and which the blond bassist would later develop and rename "Shooting At The Moon" for his second solo album.

Throughout 1967, Soft Machine's success keeps growing and the band quickly becomes a cult act, thanks in part to Mark Boyle's spectacular light shows. They also play several times alongside Pink Floyd, winning over the crowds at the Ufo Club and at the famous 14 Hour Technicolor Dream festival, in front of something like ten thousand people. Unfortunately, little to nothing survives from these old shows, aside from the tapes that became Middle Earth Masters (2006), recorded shortly after Daevid Allen's departure. As mentioned earlier, on the return from a French tour the soft machine loses its Australian sprite, and the surviving trio flies off to the United States, where work begins on their official long-player debut. 

Soft Machine (1968) holds the seeds of something still taking shape: progressive rock and the Canterbury sound. Still tied to the beat groups of the moment, the album nonetheless sets itself apart through the eclecticism of its three members, who create a tumultuous overlapping of solos. Even with Allen absent, his freak spirit can still be felt, helped along by the freedom granted by producers Chas Chandler and Tom Wilson, who never interfere with the musicians' natural creative flow; on the contrary, according to Ayers, Wilson "spent his days on the phone with his girlfriend".

Left to their own devices, in just four days the soft machine put down on tape a series of songs recorded live in the studio, warts and all. Beyond the spontaneity of the compositions, another hallmark of the record is its use of the collage technique, stitching small sound fragments together into a suite: the album's liner notes perfectly describe the purpose of Soft Machine's music, namely to send the mind on a journey, as if it were some form of brain stimulation. This formidable soundtrack for whirling dervishes kicks off with the first three tracks — "Hope For Happiness", "Joy Of A Toy" and "Hope For Happiness (Reprise)" — where all of Ayers's joyful spirit is already on full display, while "Why Am I So Short?" and "A Certain Kind" showcase Wyatt's scat-singing style, as he delivers the lyrics in an almost detached way.

There's also room for pop-psychedelic numbers like "Save Yourself" and "Lullabye Letter", but elsewhere it's clear how far the Softs stray from Swinging London. While the dystopian "Why Are We Sleeping?", indebted to the philosophy of Georges Gurdjieff, turns out to be a hellish spoken-word piece driven by organ and bass, the hypnotic "We Did It Again" owes an indirect debt to the loops of Terry Riley. The track, despite containing just four words and a riff similar to that of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", was often stretched out live to over 60 minutes, as happened at a private party for Brigitte Bardot in St. Tropez, with Allen still in the lineup.

After recording their first album, Soft Machine set off on the historic American tour supporting Jimi Hendrix. Once the dates were over, the three went their separate ways. Ayers couldn't stand the stress of long travel and retreated to the Balearics. Ratledge went back to London to his wife Marsha Hunt and carried on with his musical studies. Wyatt, meanwhile, stayed on in California as Hendrix's guest, where he wrote several pieces, including the first sketch of "Moon In June" and the bluesy sketch "Slow Walkin' Talk" (with Hendrix on bass!), both of which can be heard on his compilation "'68" (2013). Besides hanging around the Ttg Studios, buzzing like a kid on a school trip, Wyatt also got the chance to meet Frank Zappa, from whom he received valuable advice that would later be put to use on Volume Two.

In fact, by the time Soft Machine comes out, the band has already broken up. The split seems final: the trio is scattered across two continents and three different states. The label, however, is anything but on board with this; the debut is held in high regard, not just artistically but commercially too, given its unexpected entry into the US top 40. There's therefore considerable pressure to record a follow-up, and so Wyatt and Ratledge regroup in Canterbury, bringing in their friend and roadie Hugh Hopper as a replacement for the now self-exiled Ayers. The choice couldn't help but have consequences: the childlike, dandy-ish spirit of the former bassist, clearly audible throughout his solo albums, gives way to a more serious-minded Hugh Hopper, who brings with him a passion for modal jazz and more purposeful music. Where Ayers looked to beat and psychedelia, with a cheerful, carefree approach, Hopper reflects a far more intellectual view of music. Hopper also introduces a different kind of bass amplification, fuzz, which would become one of his trademarks — a distortion later widely adopted by Mike Ratledge for his Lowrey organ as well.

Losing Ayers has another effect too, leaving Wyatt as the sole vocalist: for this very reason, the album sees a marked expansion in the use of his voice as an instrument — every bit as important as his drumming — and his vocal wails provide the songs with an extra layer of structure. While some parts of this album still contain the ingredients of the debut's psychedelic jams, the overall sound is nonetheless more disciplined. Wyatt's influence remains strong in the pataphysical lyrics, with a marked taste for the absurd and nonsense. Hopper also carves out a good share of the songwriting, and — knowing his far more serious compositions in the years to come — is surprisingly responsible for many short, playful tunes. Ratledge, for his part, takes charge of the more complex tracks and is the sole author of the record's two longest compositions.

Volume Two (1969) packs in no fewer than seventeen songs, running just over half an hour; even so, it can be listened to as a single composition, split into at least two parts, since each side of the record has its own title. The first half is titled "Melodie Rivmic" and is credited to Hopper and Wyatt; the second, "Esther's Nose Job", leans more towards jazz and is almost entirely composed by Ratledge.

As with the first album, there are no pauses between songs, and each piece helps shape a single whole, allowing Volume Two to be enjoyed as one great suite, in which the frivolity of some tracks blends with the more experimental parts of others, always with a healthy dose of fun, as can also be gathered from the curious titles on the tracklist. In short, the only thing that seems unoriginal about Soft Machine are the names of their albums.

The eccentricity runs at full throttle right from the first two short compositions, turning into the childlike playfulness of "Pataphysical Introduction (Part I)" and "A Concise British Alphabet (Part I)", while the first track truly worth noting is "Hibou, Anemone And Bear", 6 minutes of dada-rock infatuation, with piano, organ, drums and bass locking together nicely. The music then shifts drastically, with some tracks lasting barely a handful of seconds, like fragments of a chaotic continuum weaving together the whole of side A; thus, in free form, "A Concise British Alphabet (Part II)" and "Hulloder" sound like some strange marriage between Canterbury rock and psychedelic pop, while "Dada Was Here" stands out for its Spanish-language lyrics, in memory of the summers Wyatt spent with his family in Majorca, giving rise to some quite catchy harmonies and pauses.

After the languid mystery of "Thank You Pierrot Lunaire", on "Have You Ever Bean Green?" Soft Machine pay tribute to Hendrix and his band, who had let them open on the US tour, giving them considerable media exposure as a result. Another high point comes with "As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still", where once again Wyatt's voice is used as an instrument in its own right, while the acoustic lullaby of "Dedicated To You But You Weren't Listening" is counterbalanced by "Esther's Nose Job", a direct forerunner of Third, a suite split into five jazz sections featuring guest Brian Hopper (Hugh's brother) on sax. The point of no return has now been reached.

On A Dilemma: the jazz-rock turn, Wyatt and Hopper's departure (1970-1973)

In 1969 Soft Machine were called in to provide support for a multimedia piece titled Spaced, directed by Peter Dockley at London's Roundhouse. After that performance, the tapes were forgotten for decades until they were rediscovered and finally released by Cuneiform in 1996. Even though the sound quality isn't the best — given that the musical portion was recorded in a warehouse! — it's an essential archival release for understanding the band's future development and, especially, Hugh Hopper's solo work. According to the liner notes, written by the bassist himself, the original tape ran a full 90 minutes, but in between there were long stretches of stage silence that could easily be cut. The commercially released version therefore runs just over an hour on the clock, marked by instrumental jazz punctuated by noisy outbursts. In the end the show was never transferred to Broadway, as had originally been intended, but a BBC programme did air a brief excerpt to promote it, using Pink Floyd as the musical backing, of all things.

Having shelved this experience too, Soft Machine return to the studio. While the first two albums had been driven by Ayers and Wyatt, the double album Third (1970) sees the absolute dominance of keyboardist Ratledge, whose organ becomes the trademark sound of this third record. With hindsight, one could say that Third was the first warning sign of the misunderstandings and disagreements over the future musical direction Soft Machine would have to take: confirming this is the photo inside the cover, which shows the band members divided and lost in thought.

While in the first part of their career all the musicians had collaborated on composing the songs, creating very cohesive records with the recurring leit-motiv of a wild, delirious Dadaism, on Third Wyatt, Ratledge and Hopper formally go their separate ways. In practice, they prefer to keep their personalities and ideas distinct, having come to see them as increasingly hard to reconcile.

All four tracks are solo pieces; two by Ratledge, one by Wyatt and one by Hopper. Each takes maximum freedom and turns out a suite of around 20 minutes. It may sound strange given these premises, but the soft machine thus records its masterpiece, the most mature, complex and elaborate album of its extraordinary career. The shift is towards a jazz-rock sound inspired by Miles Davis's new records ("In A Silent Way", "Bitches Brew"). For this reason, the classic triangular line-up is expanded with Elton Dean on alto sax, Lyn Dobson on soprano sax, Nick Evans on trombone, Rab Spall on violin and Jimmy Hastings (Caravan) on flute and bass clarinet. Some of these figures - as we shall see - will play a leading role in the future of Soft Machine.

It feels like a century has passed compared to the debut, which still owed a great deal to beat music; here the maturity is truly at its peak, even if something of the early days' naïveté is lost along the way. The band's subsequent history, though, is marked by Ratledge's personality, which starts to overshadow Wyatt's ideas, setting in motion a process that will inevitably lead to the drummer's split from Soft Machine. Indeed, one could say that the true spiritual continuation of Soft Machine is not Fourth, but rather the two Matching Mole albums. Wyatt's role on Third is in fact reduced to that of a mere drummer, except on "Moon In June", his last contribution, where he is left free to express himself as he sees fit. He would later admit: "I was much more interested than they were in absurdity as a liberating element".

This unease would lead Wyatt to make his first solo album that same year, "The End Of An Ear". Robert would also appear on Fourth (1971), but it's clear from the start that his role is no longer that of the bare-chested drummer able to enchant the crowds, but simply that of a hired hand.

The opener "Facelift", written by bassist Hugh Hopper, is the product of clever tape manipulation, splicing together parts of live recordings from the Fairfield Hall in Croydon (4 January 1970) and the Mothers Club in Birmingham (11 January 1970). Ratledge's savage fuzz then tears the melody apart amid wild experimental explosions, in an unsettling atmosphere, shaken by a catchy jazz motif that suddenly emerges. There are great moments, including Jimmy Hastings's flute solo, bouncing straight out of Caravan's songs, balanced by the heavy bark of Elton Dean's sax and Hugh Hopper's funky bass. "Slightly All The Time", on the other hand, is a far more intricate piece, a jazz theme subject to constant rhythmic shifts and dominated by horns, which compositionally is a kind of medley of the old "Noisette" and "Backwards", already part of the band's live repertoire. The mood is that of a cold night in a big city. Dark and elegant, even more so after the twelfth minute, where the tempo slows down and becomes more dreamlike and surreal, culminating in Dean's soloing saxello cry.

Across the five sections of "Out-Bloody-Rageous", Ratledge then shows off his love for loops and the minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, building up pathos very gradually: it's a track that deceives the listener at first, only to then evolve out of nowhere into a flowing free-jazz improvisation, with an extraordinary organ solo at its centre, capable of delivering a myriad of moods that could trigger Stendhal syndrome.

Opening the second side of the record is "Moon In June", a shining example of Wort-Ton-Drama, a total work of art. It's a unique hybrid of jazz, avant-garde, psychedelia, Dadaism and a melancholy mood that is never absent whenever Wyatt's voice is present ("the saddest voice in the world", according to the English press). What sets "Moon In June" apart from the other tracks is precisely the brilliant personality of its author, who here plays drums and keyboards alone. Breaking free from every genre boundary, Wyatt thus signs one of his greatest masterpieces, making the Dionysian and Apollonian spirits collide as in the most perfect of Greek tragedies. After a more melodic opening, in which Wyatt confesses his infidelities to his first wife Pam, the piece moves into a second, instrumental part with harsh, angry moments. As Wyatt warns us in the first half, staring sardonically into the camera as if he were the lead in a nouvelle vague film, we're then met by a "background noise for people who plot, seduce, rise up and teach". The poltergeist of Rab Spall's violin haunts the atmosphere with something vaguely sinister, thanks to the tape-manipulated sound. To lighten the mood, towards the end Wyatt hums a few lines from two songs by his friend Kevin Ayers ("Singing A Song In The Morning" and "Hat Song"). In live versions the lyrics are often improvised, as happens on the BBC's "Top Gear" programme, where he even mentions the tea trolley sitting in the corridor, to the growing annoyance of his more serious-minded bandmates.

The overall result of "Moon In June" is neither jazz nor rock, nor anything heard before: it's a genreless catharsis that, precisely for this reason, aspires to eternity.