Matching Mole - An avant-prog flash in the Canterbury sky

Foreword

At the start of the 1970s the Canterbury scene was going through a phase of deep transformation. The psychedelic utopia of the 1960s was gradually giving way to a more fragmented, erudite and unpredictable music, suspended between jazz, progressive rock and the avant-garde.

Leaving Soft Machine

Robert Wyatt played a leading role in the birth and development of the entire movement, first with the Wilde Flowers' early days, then with the first four Soft Machine albums. During these years something within Soft Machine broke down, and first Kevin Ayers and later Robert Wyatt left the band.

It really pleases me that people love the Soft Machine records, it's a beautiful thing; it makes me realize that, deep down, it wasn't a waste of time. Personally, though, that whole experience left me with little self-respect and without a penny in my pocket, with nothing at all! That's why at a certain point I said enough.

(Robert Wyatt)

This desire for change was already showing in 1970, when Wyatt was still an integral part of Soft Machine. That year saw the release of his first solo album, “The End Of An Ear” (1970), a complex, difficult work, stubbornly ahead of its time, which tried to forge a new musical language by drawing on various genres without being pinned down to any of them. “The End Of An Ear” stands as one of the most radical experiments in “total music” of the entire decade. After recording “Fourth” (1971), likely due to differing views with Mike Ratledge over the band's musical future, Wyatt left Soft Machine.

The birth of Matching Mole

Cbs Records, already Soft Machine's label, then asked Wyatt to form his own band. This marked the beginning of a new story, that of Matching Mole. A very short story (just two albums released in 1972), but far from fleeting. The line-up – alongside Robert Wyatt on vocals and drums – included guitarist Phil Miller (Delivery, Caravan, Hatfield And The North), bassist Bill MacCormick (Quiet Sun, Brian Eno), keyboardist David Sinclair (Caravan) and, as a guest only, pianist Dave McRae (Nucleus). The band's name came from a joke on the French translation of “Soft Machine” (“Machine Molle”), later reinterpreted through English homophony to mean “fighting moles” or “moles in opposition”. More than just a new band, Matching Mole represented a decisive turning point for Wyatt: a free laboratory where the musician could move away from the rigidity of his previous experience and develop a more personal, emotional and unstable kind of songwriting, one that would pave the way for his future solo masterpieces.

The first album

Matching Mole, their debut, was released in April 1972. Having abandoned the radicalism of “The End Of An Ear”, Wyatt opens the album with a romantic love song. “O Caroline” is an oddity in Wyatt's discography, a poignant ballad dedicated to artist and activist Caroline Coon, melodic and probably wrapped in an excessive layer of syrup. “Instant Pussy”, built entirely around a bassline and Wyatt's vocalizations, and the ironic “Signed Curtain” (piano and voice) offer a possible summation of what Wyatt thought Soft Machine should have been. What's especially striking is that, even as Wyatt ironically narrates the song's own structure while performing it (“this is the first verse, this is the chorus etc.”), his melancholic voice and unique timbre keep the listener hooked as if in a trance.

From this point on, the vocals disappear and the record becomes (almost) entirely instrumental. “Part Of The Dance” (nine minutes) is a clear nod to contemporary instrumental prog, a meeting point between King Crimson and the Soft Machine of “Third”. It's the only track not written by Wyatt, but by Phil Miller. Side B consists of four tracks that, though different from one another, seem to form a single hypothetical instrumental avant-prog suite, split between “Instant Kitten”, a dazzling progressive interplay of guitar, drums and keyboard with the odd minimal vocalization used almost as an instrument, “Dedicated To Hugh, But You Weren’t Listening”, jazz rock with an avant-prog intro dedicated to Hugh Hopper, “Beer As In Braindeer”, avant-garde by way of avant-prog, and “Immediate Curtain”, which closes the record with an unexpected drift into cosmic music. In 2011 the album was reissued with the addition of the previously unreleased “Memories Membrane”, eleven minutes of fusion/jazz-rock that deserved to be discovered much sooner.

The second album, a historic cover

There's certainly no shortage of courage in Matching Mole's debut, and in November of that same year, Little Red Record, produced by Robert Fripp (further proof of the band's ties to King Crimson), with Brian Eno contributing synths, represents its natural evolution. The cover, emblematic of the band's political views, draws on a (still disturbingly relevant) Chinese government propaganda image intended for international distribution, titled “We Are Determined To Liberate Taiwan”. While on “Matching Mole” Wyatt had written seven of the eight tracks, on “Little Red Record” he writes nothing at all, and every composition is the work of the trio Dave McRae (who permanently replaced David Sinclair), Phil Miller and Bill MacCormick.

The album opens with “Starting In The Middle Of The Day, We Can Drink Our Politics Away”, featuring Wyatt's unconventional vocals over McRae's keyboards and Brian Eno's synth. “Marchides” takes us back, with a fair amount of violence and distortion, to the most radical avant-prog moments of the debut. With the triptych “Nan True's Hole”, “Righteous Rhumba” and “Brandy As In Benj”, we once again get the sense of a unified prog suite that combines Canterbury-style disenchantment with bizarre dialogues foreshadowing, as if glimpsing into the future, the early albums of The Residents (“Righteous Rhumba”), alongside decidedly avant-prog complex structures.

The acoustic ballad “God Song” could be described as a Wyatt-esque take on Jethro Tull's “My God” (1971). Brian Eno's touch is unmistakable in the opening minutes of “Gloria Goom”, while, to close things out, “Flora Fidgit” clearly evokes the Canterbury sound of Hatfield And The North, and “Smoke Signal” opens with a theme on McRae's keyboard before deconstructing it until it dissolves entirely.

The epilogue, from attempted rebirth to the end

After a European tour with Soft Machine, Matching Mole disband. There's no single explanation for the split: the group suffered from internal tensions tied to the highly improvisational nature of their music (the same reason behind Sinclair's first departure), compounded by Wyatt's emotional instability at the time. It's hard to imagine what might have happened next, had history not taken a tragic and entirely unexpected turn in June 1973.

Some accounts suggest Wyatt was planning to reform the band with other musicians and release a third LP. Unfortunately, on June 1st, 1973, his alcohol addiction caught up with him, and Wyatt fell drunk from the third floor during a birthday party. It marked the beginning of a new chapter that could no longer include drums, nor a new incarnation of Matching Mole. Among the various curiosities attached to “Little Red Record” is therefore also the fact that it stands as the last album on which Robert Wyatt plays drums. It's the start of a life that would lead to the arduous rebirth embodied by "Rock Bottom” (1974), one of the most important albums in the history of rock.

The posthumous live albums

To better understand this brief but essential period in the band's history, it's also worth listening to a series of posthumous live recordings from 1972: BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert, released in 1994, Smoke Signal, released in 2001, featuring the previously unreleased “March Ides I”, “March Ides II” and a cover of Hatfield And The North's “Lything & Gracing”. In 2002 came March, which includes a live version of Caravan's “Waterloo Lily”, and finally, in 2007, On The Radio, featuring a sprawling twenty-minute suite-length version of “Marchides/Instant Pussy/Smoke Signal”.

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