Caravan - Under Canterbury's Grey and Pink Sky

The story of Caravan is part of the wider story of the Canterbury scene, the context in which the band was formed in the second half of the Sixties, within a movement capable of creating an unprecedented blend of psychedelia, rock, beat, jazz, avant-garde, pataphysics and Dadaist tendencies, with an approach that was very often more ironic and laid-back than that of the classic progressive bands. The true genesis of the phenomenon lies in the Wilde Flowers, a band active with various line-ups from 1963 to 1969, which carries within it, like strands of DNA, all the information needed for everything that followed. The very first split within the Wilde Flowers, which gave rise to Soft Machine and Caravan, already contains the chromosomes of a major musical shift.

If Soft Machine represent the more intelligible, “Apollonian” side of Canterbury, Caravan instead personify its more carefree, “Dionysian” component, one that, in certain aesthetic respects, can be likened to classic European prog-rock, with romantic, fairy-tale overtones, though showing a love of melody that is light years away from the genre's exasperating technicality. The differences in the careers of the two founding bands of the Canterbury scene would turn out to be many, despite their shared origin: while the former would have a troubled history marked by internal defections, flamboyant characters (Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers) and eccentric anecdotes, the latter would enjoy an ordinary, fairly straightforward career, with musicians who were extremely meticulous, almost clerical, in drawing up their own canons of progressive-rock.

The beginnings, from the Wilde Flowers to Caravan

Following the diaspora that led to the birth of Soft Machine, in 1966 the three surviving Wilde Flowers found themselves carrying on for a couple more years with a fair amount of live activity. At that point, the band was made up of Dave Sinclair (keyboards), Richard Coughlan (drums) and Julian Frederick "Pye" Hastings (guitar). Caravan were officially formed only in early 1968, when bassist and singer Richard Sinclair, Dave's cousin, joined that trio.

At the dawn of 1968, the original quartet got straight to work during a six-month stay just outside Canterbury, in Whitstable, where they wrote and composed the lyrics for their debut record. After moving to Graveney and then London, by the end of the summer the band returned to its hometown and signed a deal with the American label Mgm, which however diverted them to its subsidiary Verve for their first, self-titled LP (Caravan, 1968). Caravan's debut would in fact be the first official building block of the Canterbury scene, arriving a month ahead of the debut of Soft Machine. The repertoire is made up of still-immature tracks, with the exception of the singles “Magic Man” and “A Place of My Own”, which John Peel also fell in love with.

Even so, the balance between quirky interludes, pop melodies and more progressive leanings is already being achieved. The rest of the tracks, however, contain many more conventional elements drawn from folk and the new psychedelic rock, though there's no shortage of brilliant instrumental digressions either: such is the case with “Where But For Caravan Would I?”, written by Brian Hopper and Pye Hastings back in the Wilde Flowers days, or the Beatles-esque psychedelia of “Policeman”, while Pye's own brother, Jimmy “Brother Jim” Hastings, plays flute on “Love Song with Flute”, beginning a long association with the band as a hidden member. It's a more refined, subtle brand of psychedelic rock than the one offered by Soft Machine on their first two albums and by Pink Floyd on “The Piper At The Gates of Dawn“, at times even closer to the proto-progressive sound of the Moody Blues and the Nice.

The turning point comes in October 1969: Caravan are invited to play at the Amougies Festival in Belgium, and end up taking part in a strange jam session with Frank Zappa, who for bureaucratic reasons has to do without his Mothers of Invention and reinvents himself as master of ceremonies. It's right there, on that stage, that they put together a track with an already sufficiently long title, “If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You”, which would go on to give its name to the whole of their second record. At the same time, however, Caravan find themselves orphaned by their label, when Mgm is forced to abandon its British projects for reasons of economic downsizing. The band then shows up at Decca's door, who hand them over to the production of a young and talented David Hitchcock.

If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You (1970) came about this way, with a title derived from a mangled version of a Bob Dylan song (“All Over You”) and with a green cover photo taken in London's Holland Park. The standout track is the title track itself, which opens up the branches of the trees for us with a jazz-pop exercise in 7/8 that would become the band's trademark, an unusual, contagious rhythm on which both vocalists leave their mark: Richard Sinclair's deeper voice repeats the line “Who do you think you are?”, while the more graceful Pye Hastings sings the verse in an almost Wyatt-like tone.

Most of the tracks that follow, though varying in length, are instead structured as mini-suites, with at least two movements and equally long titles: “And I Wish I Were Stoned/ Don’t Worry” opens under the banner of an introspective, serene first section and a second part that's more jazzy and colourful, releasing a kind of emotional explosion. As the minutes go by, the song builds and grows ever stronger, until an apparently improvised drum enters our ears, stamping a delightful refrain into them. The spell continues with “As I Feel I Die”, also split into two passages, a thrilling combination of pop humour and jazz-rock geometry, with Pye Hastings' delicate voice escorting us all the way to the instrumental duel between the two Sinclair cousins, with an obsessive lyric and an exceedingly heavy melody played breathlessly.

“With An Ear To The Ground You Can Make It/ Martinian/ Only Cox/ Reprise” unfolds on an even deeper level, representing the epitome of Canterbury rock, but it's guest flautist Jimmy Hastings who truly leaves his mark, managing to pass through an impressive number of moods within ten minutes. The catchy psychedelia of “Hello Hello” is a clever lesson in how to write a song that is at once radio-friendly and intelligent, with the added value of one of the strangest percussion parts ever recorded. A captivating melodic line, once again cleverly cast in a 7/4 pattern, gallops relentlessly through the listener's head.

The tribal “Asforteri 25” is then counterbalanced by the imposing suite “Can’t Be Long Now/ Françoise/ For Richard/ Warlock”, in which Dave gives a splendid demonstration of his skill as an organist, while Richard provides an intricate rhythmic backdrop. At a certain point, the keyboards are replaced by Jimmy Hastings playing flute to surprising effect, while the track closes with a rare guitar solo by Pye Hastings, in an instrumental crescendo that brings this sprawling, goliardically 14-minute-long track to a close, without ever once growing tiresome. The closing track (“Limits”) is finally a delightful, almost bossa-nova-style happy ending.

If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You is an album that pleasingly spins together all the elements of the Canterbury sound. Much of this green record is dominated by the genius of Pye Hastings, who arranges and writes the songs, establishing himself as one of the great scriptwriters of progressive. The album spreads Caravan's reputation across Britain, a fame also sustained by intense live activity but which, above all, culminates in the release of In The Land Of Grey And Pink (1971).

Success, in the land of grey and pink

Caravan's masterpiece is released by Deram as the first number in the Sdl series, retracing the lines already laid out by the second album and refining that prototype, thus finding the exact coordinates of the Canterbury pop sound. The splendid pink record, with its rosy, fairy-tale cover art by Anne Marie Anderson, opens with the utterly accessible "Golf Girl", dedicated to Richard Sinclair's future wife; the girl in question is named Pat and, dressed in PVC, sells tea in a rather whimsical love song, shaped by sax and percussion, right through to the flute's triumphant finale, which make the complexity of a sound that is exclusively Canterbury's own seem effortless.

The whole of side one is made up of a pot-pourri of melancholy, serene love songs, starting with the fantastical, allegorical epic of "Winter Wine", which Pye Hastings describes in the liner notes as "probably the finest song Richard Sinclair ever wrote". The slow but inexorable progressive crescendo is broken only by a more relaxed, jazz-inflected section, while the return of the vocals culminates in a sunny "we'll be together all the time", setting up the close of a track that's striking for its ability to blend lightness and tension without ever letting them collide. On "Love To Love You (And Tonight Pigs Will Fly)", the microphone instead passes to Pye Hastings, on a track that's only superficially frivolous, built on a simple C-F-G major accompaniment that never quite takes off. 

The whole album is steeped in an irony that at times turns even macabre. The idyllic title track contains all the bittersweet essence of the genre, amid distant bells, organ solos and lyrics saturated with wordplay and English humour ("In the land of grey and pink/ where only boy scouts stop to think"). The true pièce de résistance of In The Land Of Grey And Pink, however, is the monumental "Nine Feet Underground" (23 minutes), which took up the entire second side of the vinyl edition. The piece takes its title from the cupboard located "nine feet underground" where David Sinclair lived when he composed the three songs ("Dave's Thing"), which were then fused together into an eight-part suite. It's therefore a musical collage of varied mood, mostly instrumental, driven precisely by Dave Sinclair's organ and Pye Hastings's wild guitar.

After the peak reached in the grey-and-pink world, Caravan's story takes a downward turn. Their colourful fairy tale is now slowly beginning to fade: the rest of their output no longer seems quite so illuminated, though it remains at least pleasant throughout. The decisive blow, without doubt, is the departure of Dave Sinclair, who, after taking part in friend Robert Wyatt's "The End of An Ear" (1970), decides to join him in Matching Mole. He's replaced by Steve Miller (Delivery), brother of the better-known Phil (Matching Mole, Hatfield and the North), a jazz pianist whose style shapes the sound of the new Caravan.

The newcomer's influence is immediately apparent in a marked instrumental biodiversity compared to previous work, yet most of the album's tracks still bear the unmistakable stamp of Pye Hastings's pop humour, even as Waterloo Lily moves in a more dogged jazz-rock direction. Lol Coxhill's schizoid sax playing also helps fuel the new mood, while wind instruments are generally far more prominent than in past work, where the connecting thread had been the sound of the keyboards.

Released in May 1972, Waterloo Lily sports a curious cover, taken from a detail of William Hogarth's "The Tavern Scene", the third episode of "A Rake's Progress", a series of eight sequential works depicting the adventures of the spendthrift merchant Tom Rakewell, from the moment he inherits his fortune to his mad death in an asylum. The fleshy title track takes its cue precisely from the image of the prostitute depicted on the cover, with Richard Sinclair's scorching narration, full of twists, worming its way into the listener's head. And while in the effervescent suite “Nothing at All / It’s Coming Soon / Nothing at All (Reprise)” some passages from the new Caravan can even recall the jazz dynamics of Soft Machine, "Songs and Signs" instead occupies a kind of crossroads between the old enchanted pop and the new sugar-coated jazz-rock, where the voices of Richard Sinclair and Pye Hastings blend with the unusual sound of the electric harpsichord and Steve Miller's solos.

Side two, on the other hand, draws on a more traditional Caravan: it opens with the swaying "Aristocracy", a whimsical pop song that could just as easily have fit on earlier albums thanks to its supple rhythm, but it's the record's second suite, “The Love In Your Eye/ To Catch Me A Brother/ Subsultus/ Debouchement/ Tilbury Kecks”, that's the true jewel in Waterloo Lily's crown, where the pied piper Jimmy Hastings symphonically returns to the fore, amid Colin Frechter's string arrangements and a string of guest musicians weaving through oboe (Barry Robinson), sax (Lol Coxhill) and trumpet (Mike Cotton). Sealing the album, finally, is the sweeping "The World Is Yours", a utopian love poem gripped by nostalgic fever.

Waterloo Lily clearly shows the transition between these two periods and, like most transitional albums, has its high points as well as its flaws. All things considered, though, it's worth remembering Caravan's origins, deeply rooted in the jazz heard around Robert Wyatt's house: up until 1972 there had been a peaceful coexistence between the pop-rock leanings of some band members (Pye Hastings) and the jazz tendencies of others (Richard Sinclair), with the early albums sitting in homeostasis between these two impulses. On Waterloo Lily, it's the pop component above all that suffers, largely set aside in favour of a far more eclectic strain of jazz.

I left the group when it turned toward the audience. When the music evolved in a pop-rock direction, I felt the need to do something else, so I formed Hatfield and the North. I'm not good at writing music for the masses.

(Richard Sinclair)

The balance breaks down: the first split

At this point, the period of uncertainty is soon fuelled by further defections: Steve Miller joins Lol Coxhill for a few projects, while Richard Sinclair, disillusioned with the new direction the band had taken, reunites with his cousin Dave in Hatfield & The North, leaving Hastings and Coughlan as the sole heirs to the Caravan name.

After Waterloo Lily, the crisis then begins to deepen. For Girls Who Grow Plump In The Night (1973), conceived with violinist Geoff Richardson and Dave Sinclair pitching in part-time to help his former bandmates, may be the last album worth noting. The title ("for girls who grow plump in the night") alludes to the pregnant girl on the cover, but neither the wordplay nor the return of prodigal son Sinclair are enough to bring Caravan back into the spotlight. "Memory Lain Hugh" sums up everything good that emerges from the record, undoubtedly chipping away at the epitaph of a golden era. Special mention also goes to the strange nod to Soft Machine on the frantic "Backwards", the chilling "C'Thlu Thlu" and the epic crescendo of "L'auberge du Sanglier", split into five parts with a sumptuous orchestral arrangement.

The loss of inspiration becomes outright evident in October 1974, when a new live album is released. The attempt to combine a symphony orchestra with progressive rock results in the rather unconvincing Caravan & The New Symphonia, thanks to arrangements by Simon Jeffes, leader of the Penguin Café Orchestra.

In that same ill-fated period, new bassist Mike Wedgewood (ex-Curved Air) makes his live debut, and Caravan move to Miles Copeland's Btm label, which leads them to mid-chart success with two albums. The first half of this diptych is the uneven Cunning Stunts (1975), an amusing spoonerism of "Stunning Cunts" (we'll let readers work that one out!), driven by the success of the singles "Stuck In A Hole" and "The Show Of Our Lives". The album was originally meant to be titled "Toys In The Attic", but that name was snapped up a few months earlier by Aerosmith. Once again, though, the Wanderlust syndrome gets the better of things, and a dissatisfied Dave Sinclair decides to leave, quitting the band for good to focus on his solo career. In 1976 keyboardist Jan Schelhaas (ex-Gary Moore Band) joins the core line-up, just in time to release the over-structured pop of Blind Dog at St. Dunstans.

In 1977 comes the even less sophisticated Better By Far, which despite Tony Visconti's production and a new deal with Arista isn't enough to close out the first chapter of the band's career. In 1977, in fact, the two Sinclairs join Camel, bringing their style along with them — so much so that the press would jokingly nickname the line-up "Caramel".

The second act: a return to the roots

The second chapter in Caravan's story, marked by an endless string of reunions, actually begins back in 1979, when Hastings, Coughlan, Richardson and Dave Sinclair come back together for The Album (1980), on the Kingdom label. The record is met with a rather cold reception, though, and leads to another swift breakup. That disappointment would nonetheless have beneficial effects on Caravan, since in 1982 the band gets back on its feet and follows up with another "green record", Back To Front, an album that at times recaptures the magic of the original trio of records, thanks to the rediscovered inspiration of the original quartet (the two Sinclairs, Coughlan and Hastings). Ignored outright by both public and press, Back To Front is a fairly uneven album, though dotted with a few glimmers of charm and Canterbury-style saudade, as in "Proper Job/ Back To Front" and "Back To Herne Bay Front".

At this point dissatisfaction wins out, and Caravan's story goes on hold for almost a decade. In the Nineties, the band members finally find time for new reunions, both on stage and on TV, which in turn yield further albums. Right at the dawn of the new decade, in 1990, the quartet reunites for a tour for the first time in many years, resulting in the enjoyable All Over You, featuring eleven reworked tracks.

In 1991 Richard and Dave Sinclair decide to form Caravan of Dreams, with ex-Camel man Andy Ward and Jimmy Hastings, while Richard Sinclair self-releases "Rsvp" (1994) in a private edition, shortly before permanently relocating to Puglia. That same year sees the birth of Mirage, a Canterbury super-group bringing together musicians from both Caravan and Camel, just as Caravan's own recording activity also resumes with some regularity. In 1994 it's the turn of Cool Water, which dusts off tapes recorded between 1977 and 1978, but the more convincing release is The Battle Of Hastings (1995), an album whose title is a playful pun on the two brothers' surname, while also being the historic name of the famous medieval battle in which the Normans invaded England.

To prove the band means business this time, a new autumn tour is organised, but Geoffrey Richardson is no longer available. His absence brings back Jimmy Hastings (horns) and adds Simon Bentall (percussion) and Doug Boyle (guitar). Jim Leverton (bass), who had already appeared on The Battle of Hastings, remains on board. From 1997 the "caravan" gets rolling again, touring alongside their friend Kevin Ayers in an attempt to revive the old Canterbury glory days. This experience yields material for two albums, Canterbury Comes to London and Travelling Man.

Meanwhile an endless string of anthologies comes out, while on the archival front, over the course of the decade, BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert (1991), Songs For Oblivion Fishermen (1998), Ether Way (1998) and Surprise Supplies (1999) are released, collecting Seventies radio recordings.

The caravan rolls into the new millennium

The 2000s open with Universal remastering the band's classic catalogue. This reissue campaign also unearths a fine 1974 concert, released under the title Live at the Fairfield Halls (2002).

A year later, Caravan try their hand again with another studio recording, The Unauthorised Breakfast Item (2003). For the occasion, the line-up is full once more; alongside Pye Hastings (vocals, guitar), all the pieces that have shaped Caravan's history are present: Doug Boyle (lead guitar), Jan Schelhaas and Dave Sinclair (keyboards), Geoffrey Richardson (viola, banjo, ukulele), Jim Leverton (bass), Richard Coughlan (drums) and Jimmy Hastings (horns). The humour of the title this time digs up an incident involving Pye Hastings' neighbour and the police, though the overall inspiration probably isn't quite on the same level, even if the tracklist is punctuated by ten rather enjoyable episodes, starting with the title track and "Tell Me Why".

In 2004/2005, to celebrate their thirty-fifth anniversary, the band commits to another tour, culminating at London's "Bloomsbury Theatre" in a short acoustic concert, the first of its kind in Caravan's history. From this point on, however, live shows are set aside due to the health problems afflicting Richard Coughlan, who would pass away in 2013 after a long illness.

Almost at the same time as the drummer's death, the band's fourteenth studio album, Paradise Filter (2013), comes out, released thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign. Alongside captain Pye Hastings (guitar, vocals) are Geoffrey Richardson (viola, violin), Doug Boyle (lead guitar), Jim Leverton (bass), Jan Schelhaas (keyboards) and Mark Walker (drums), who bring to life a set of ten tracks in which the progressive sound of their early days has by now faded, giving way to a graceful pop-rock, as in the piano-led "Farewell My Old Friend" or the seductive "All This Could Be Yours".

Eight years pass before a new album, It's None of Your Business (2021), built on leaner, lighter electro-acoustic arrangements, aside from the title track and the closing suite. There's no shortage of social commentary either, as in "Spare A Thought", in which Hastings criticises the follies that led to the pandemic, while "Every Precious Little Thing" urges listeners not to take the good things in life for granted. More elaborate pieces, such as the title track and "I'll Reach Out for You", finally showcase the band's renewed experimental ambitions.

To this day, the indestructible Pye Hastings, who in 2017 also made his solo debut with From The Half House, remains the driving force behind Caravan, whose records are now produced in private recording studios in Canterbury, where his son Julian also works as sound engineer. The band's story thus cyclically returns to the Kent town where their wonderful, two-toned fairy tale first began.

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