Hatfield And The North

Hatfield and the North. The white lettering on a blue background gleamed in his headlights and was instantly gone. The North. A title with immediate connotations. Bearded, savage men descending from the hills, rape and pillage, ruins and conquest. Dark centuries of barbarism, the rule of force, the primacy of power. Death and Schubert among the heather bushes

(Martin James Russell, “Death Fuse”, 1980)

Cycling out of London, Andrews came across the sign “To Hatfield and the North” and his imagination wandered into hyperborean regions of fantasy that, together with that strangeness which is a quality of his originality, combine with a moral and social sensibility [...]. A serious (but also romantic) attitude towards how life is lived, the fullness and emptiness in people, which art can only make visible by implication, in the kind of symbol that has to be coined afresh every time

(Arts Council of Great Britain, “Michael Andrews”, 1980)

It seems the idea had come from Mike Patto, future singer of Spooky Tooth. The wording on the sign you'd come across leaving London along the M1, with its elusive blend of precision and vagueness, would have made a perfect band name. But his next project was called Dick and the Firemen, and the name stayed up for grabs. The brilliance remained, though: it was his friend, guitarist Phil Miller, who gave it shape.

It was the middle of 1972 and, with the Matching Mole experience alongside Robert Wyatt now over, Miller set his mind on reforming Delivery. He gathered the former keyboardist and former drummer (his brother Steve and Pip Pyle, just out of Gong), but the former quickly left the project to join Caravan. Ironically, his replacement turned out to be none other than Dave Sinclair of Caravan, joined by his cousin Richard, who had also just left the band. The quartet's music was a far cry from the Jefferson Airplane-style psychedelia of the early Delivery, now shot through with jazz and progressive influences yet still firmly rooted in the Sixties. A new name was needed, and "Hatfield And The North" seemed perfect. Ironic and oblique, evocative yet also meticulous. Just like the sound it was meant to represent.

In January '73, the band got the chance to perform for the French TV programme Rockenstock alongside Robert Wyatt. Shortly after, Dave Sinclair went back to Caravan, leaving the keyboard chair empty. Given the kind of music Hatfield were settling into — a progressive jazz-rock in which the electric organ was essential both in the gentler passages and the sharper ones — a replacement had to be found quickly, and the band was soon joined by Dave Stewart, a restless musician already active on the front lines with Arzachel, Egg and Khan. (Stewart, incidentally, gave a different account of how the band's name came about: "My partner Barbara Gaskin was Steve's [Hillage, guitarist of Arzachel, Khan and Gong] girlfriend at the time, and she remembers that Pip was trying to chat her up. When he asked her where she was from, she said 'Hatfield'. Pip replied: 'Oh really? I've always wanted to be in a band called Hatfield And The North!'").

With Stewart on organ and — a crucial element in the band's sonic alchemy — on electric piano, the band's classic lineup was complete, and work began on their debut album. "Hatfield And The North" came out in 1974 on Virgin Records, at the time a label specialising in the most eclectic strains of progressive rock. Alongside the band's core four, the record featured numerous guests: Robert Wyatt, Geoff Leigh of Henry Cow, Didier Malherbe of Gong, percussionist Jeremy Baines and, notably, the small female choir The Northettes (Amanda Parsons, Ann Rosenthal, Barbara Gaskin of Spirogyra).

A busy tour followed, with the band sharing bills mostly with Gong, Isotope, Kevin Coyne and Stomu Yamash'ta's East Wind, taking them beyond the UK to the Netherlands, France and Belgium. But by January '75 the group was back in the studio, at Saturn Studios in Worthing. By 3 February, recording for "The Rotters' Club" was complete.

Harmonically, the emphasis fell on minor sevenths and ninths, lending the piece an undertone of melancholy, while at the same time an ascending chord progression suggested optimism, an eye fixed on the distant future.

After a few minutes, Sophie said: 'It's a bit like that record you gave Mum all those years ago.'

'You mean "Hatfield and the North"? Yes, maybe you're right. It's hardly the most fashionable genre I could have chosen to imitate, I realise that.'

'No, but it works. For you it works. It's sad and... cheerful at the same time.'

(Jonathan Coe, "The Rotters' Club", 2004)

When "The Rotters' Club" came out in February 2001, not every reader could immediately grasp the musical reference chosen by author Jonathan Coe. Yet, once again, it was the perfect title. Ideal for framing the ensemble narrative of a group of school friends in provincial Britain during the second half of the Seventies. Against a backdrop of miners' strikes and the dawning Thatcher era, the dreams and missteps of the protagonists feel almost like a hapless mirror image of the Harry Potter saga — without the magic, but with just as much sense of humour. And, above all, with that same feeling of here-and-now urgency that makes adolescence, even more than fantasy literature, utterly unmissable.

Echoes of a youthful infatuation with progressive rock, as well as the reckoning with the emerging punk scene, run through the situations Coe describes. And the 1974 Hatfield And The North concert at Barbarella's in Birmingham is a pivotal moment in the plot. Hatfield, too, are the perfect band for Coe's novel. With their intricate yet never self-serious compositions, their homely and even slightly naive charm, and their airplay confined almost entirely to college and university radio (save for one appearance on Top Of The Pops, in '74 itself), they are the best mirror for the extraordinary ordinariness the author celebrates. As for the other dominant traits, it's easy to draw a parallel between the wry, knowing mood running through the record's grooves and the deadpan irony of the novel. Even the book's record-breaking feat (the nearly fourteen thousand words without a full stop that make up its final chapter stood for almost two decades as the longest sentence ever to appear in English literature) seems to echo the band's own convoluted style.

But it's above all the duality of feeling evoked — which Coe would return to in the sequel "The Closed Circle" — that defines the character of the two "Rotters' Club". While in the novel's case the mix of sunniness and nostalgia is easily traced back to its well-crafted coming-of-age setting, stepping into the magic of Hatfield And The North's sound may require a bit more analytical effort. A certain ambivalence of mood had been one of the hallmarks of progressive music since its earliest years, a genre defined precisely by its ability to combine not only distant styles and compositional schemes but also distant emotions and atmospheres. In the case of the so-called Canterbury scene, of which Hatfield are often seen as exemplary representatives, certain recurring elements had codified the acoustic-emotional spectrum since the late Sixties. Beyond a taste for electric jazz and an always slightly drowsy pop sensibility, it was above all two insights from the earliest Soft Machine that left their mark: the use of fuzz on bass, which brought the instrument from the background to a melodic lead role, and the application of the same effect to the Hammond organ, giving it a far more psychedelic and aggressive character. Thanks to the combination of these devices, the Canterbury palette became capable of seamlessly juxtaposing liquid, radiant sounds — at times almost pastoral — with more corrosive, even scorching passages; all without following the emerging language of hard rock, but instead forging its own idiom, neatly summed up by the two very brief instrumentals "(Big) John Wayne Socks Psychology On The Jaw" and "Chaos At The Greasy Spoon", and by the opening of "The Yes No Interlude".

Gentleness and harshness, then: but how did we get from there to the luminous melancholy of Hatfield And The North? At least two more intermediate steps are needed. The first concerns the voice, or rather the voices: that of Richard Sinclair, that of Robert Wyatt (absent from "The Rotters' Club", but often alongside the band) and that of the three "Northettes". Much of the lightheartedness that comes through in the songs is bound up with the affability of the vocal performances, never grandiose, always easygoing even in the most abstract and convoluted sections. A good example is the lengthy "Fitter Stoke Has A Bath", which alternates between sung lyrics (buoyed by the graceful backing vocals of the Northettes) and purely syllabic vocalising: the melodic lines are far from banal — even the most "pop-song" portion is anything but straightforward — but Sinclair's conversational tone makes the melody feel almost like a snippet of overheard chat, turning complexity into effortlessness. The following section, closer to jazz scat, sounds instead entirely free and playful, like a nonsense little tune improvised in the shower in a moment of total detachment from one's worries. That these worries must, somewhere, sooner or later resurface is ultimately always implicit in the voice itself, which remains composed and languid throughout, careful never to feed illusions or emphatic flights of fancy.

The further element that makes the sound of "The Rotters' Club" so special within the Canterbury scene is Stewart's keyboard work, and in particular his Fender Rhodes. With the start of the Seventies, several bands in the scene expanded their keyboard arsenal with Mellotron, synthesizer and electric piano. Dave Sinclair of Caravan turned to the Hohner Pianet, Steve Miller played Wurlitzer on "Waterloo Lily". Stewart himself, on Hatfield's debut album, used the Pianet alongside the Rhodes, but on "The Rotters' Club" he switched over entirely to the latter. The Fender electric piano was the instrument of choice in jazz fusion circles, especially in the United States, and its crystalline tone was ubiquitous in Chick Corea's dazzling solos with Return To Forever, or in the stellar funk of Herbie Hancock and George Duke.

Among the Canterbury crowd, Dave MacRae of Matching Mole and Mike Ratledge of Soft Machine also embraced the Fender sound, but the role Dave Stewart carved out for the instrument on "The Rotters' Club" remained singular. "Under Dub" is, among the shorter pieces, perhaps the most telling illustration of its importance. The silvery notes of the electric piano dot the score like brushstrokes in a pointillist painting: they're everywhere, shaping both background and foreground, yet they remain distinct and never crowd the scene. Breaking up the chords with arpeggios and delays, Stewart doles out their shimmer sparingly, carving out space for Sinclair's bass and the flute of guest Jimmy Hastings (Caravan), who doubles the piano's phrasing before drifting off into ever more distant flourishes by the end of the piece. What Stewart builds is a fine, unrelenting drizzle, the kind that lets shafts of sunlight filter through and carries with it a bittersweet wonder, blending the joy of the moment with the awareness of its fleetingness.

“Almost everything is organized. You'd be surprised. There are some freer areas, but the music is planned out and you always have an idea of what you're going to do and what you're going to play.”

There follows what might read like a suggestion for some kind of musical Scrabble: “All the gigs are structured. We're usually on our way to a gig and the set gets rewritten in the van: the various parts of the pieces get moved around and the music gets rewritten. Every time we do a gig, the set gets turned upside down and scrambled. That's one of the things I find difficult, because I can't read music. So I spend my time before a gig listening to and relearning things from a cassette recorder.”

(Richard Sinclair interviewed by Chris Salewicz, NME, November 1974)

Hatfield's music sounds jovial and easygoing, but it's programmed with meticulous precision. One could argue that the band's game was the exact opposite of that played by other giants of progressive rock: while some of the most prominent outfits strained to make their music sound conspicuously erudite and intricate, Hatfield did their best to hide it. It was perhaps also because of this impression that their music met a different fate from that of other prog bands. Little regarded at the time ("The Rotters' Club" made just one appearance in the UK album charts: a single week, at number forty-three), it retained, partly thanks to its commercial failure, a certain credibility among critics and (proto) alternative listeners. In the memory of this section of the audience, the band remained something of a footnote next to the projects more closely tied to Robert Wyatt; yet if one tries to map out the dozens of "neo-Canterbury" artists active in the decades following the Seventies, it becomes clear that the Hatfield model is, in all likelihood, the most imitated of all.

Almost fifty years on from their last studio album, the style of Miller, Pyle, Sinclair and Stewart remains, in a way, the most iconic distillation of the Canterbury sound, and it stands as an essential reference point for musicians who draw inspiration from it. Credit goes above all to that meticulously planned interplay which, while it gave even Richard Sinclair a hard time, made possible the illusion of spontaneity that won over their admirers.

"Share It" opens the record, its lyrics zeroing in on the band's musical ethos ("There's no way of understanding what's been going on/ I lost track yesterday [...] Please do not take it seriously really, what a joke!/ The only thing that matters is to share it"). The hammy melody carried by Sinclair's voice would work well enough in a children's song, but the instrumental interplay places the track in altogether different territory. From the very first bars, Stewart's Rhodes threads a sequence of extended chords with a distinctly jazzy edge. Pip Pyle, co-writer of the piece, lays down beneath the other instruments a relentless groove that already offers a fine glimpse of his expressive signature: a fusion drumming style that combines lightness and urgency with real personality, sweeping the listener into an imaginative flow without ever trying to steal the scene. Halfway through the track, Stewart launches into a delightfully playful Moog solo, and the contribution of Miller and Sinclair in holding up the harmony becomes more apparent — doubly so when, shortly after the two-minute mark, a refrain-like motif returns to make the track's atmosphere even more placid.

"Lounging There Trying" bears Phil Miller's signature, and is more or less the kind of episode Sinclair was referring to in that '74 NME interview as "stuff a bit like Django Reinhardt – the weirdest material." It's a convoluted solo piece, closer in truth to Henry Cow territory than to gypsy jazz, though lightened by the contributions of the other three musicians, at first discreet and then increasingly inventive.

"(Big) John Wayne Socks Psychology On The Jaw" and "Chaos At The Greasy Spoon" act as an intro to "The Yes No Interlude," the record's first long track, its title inspired by a segment of a popular game show ("Take Your Pick!", which aired in Britain for much of the Fifties and Sixties). It's a decidedly segmented composition, written by Pip Pyle and fleshed out with horns from Jimmy Hastings (saxophone), Tim Hodgkinson and Lindsay Cooper (clarinet and bassoon, of Henry Cow) and Mont Campbell (formerly bassist with Arzachel and Egg, here playing French horn instead). Opened by a flurry of fuzzed-out riffs in the vein of Soft Machine, within two bars in 5/4 it shifts into a hiccupping horn-driven 13/8, over which Phil Miller stretches out a sharply diagonal solo built on the augmented whole-tone scale (also a favorite of Robert Fripp, and notable for its lack of any real harmonic center, which makes it especially disorienting). Moving on, a keyboard carpet in 6/8 lays itself over the odd meter, and Jimmy Hastings' saxophone finds room for a rare improvised section. The chaos is cut short by the return of the opening riff, and a gentle, swinging 4/4 courtesy of Pyle provides the backdrop for airy embroidery from Stewart's Rhodes and Miller's guitar. The tour de force closes once again with that big opening riff, out of which, however, slips a rising chord sequence (with a descending chromatic bass line!) that leads without a break straight into "Fitter Stroke Has A Bath," a far more limpid piece, also written by Pyle.

"Didn't Matter Anyway," on the other hand, comes from Sinclair's pen, and is the record's most conventional piece: a lovely, reflective slow number, with Hastings' flute providing the melodic lead and some exceptionally delicate ride-cymbal work from Pyle. After "Under Dub," written by Miller, comes Stewart's pièce de résistance: "Mumps," which at just over twenty minutes is not only the longest track the band ever recorded, but also one of the most ambitious compositions in the whole history of the Canterbury sound. Explicitly divided into four sections (the last one a reprise of the first), the suite runs through the entire emotional spectrum of Hatfield And The North: the serene suspension of the brief "Your Majesty Is Like a Cream Doughnut (Quiet)" quickly gives way to the blazing "Lumps," dominated by the dialogue between Rhodes and guitar. Amid darting odd meters and distorted zigzags, the section plays as much on Stewart's taste for rhythmic instability (try "counting" the meter of that e-piano ostinato — it keeps changing!) as on the disorienting mutability of Miller's lines, which swing from tangles that are almost impossible to parse to flashes of exemplary melodic clarity. The Northettes' vocal inserts, occasional spotlighted appearances from Sinclair's bass (his is the intricate 12/8-14/8 theme governing the central minutes) and Stewart's frequent keyboard changes (organ, synthesizer, acoustic piano, with electric piano as the connective thread) sketch a kaleidoscopic landscape, against which Sinclair's sung entrance, around the halfway point, stands in sharp contrast. With just a handful of cryptic lines ("I have minded my P's and Q's/ Tried not to damage any W's/ And if I tread upon a B/ I'll pick it up and tell it earnestly 'I'm sorry!'" being the first) the vocalist steers the flow of emotions back toward a luminous drowsiness, briefly interrupted by Miller's guitar flare-ups, and then quickly explored again — in a more enigmatic, funky vein — by the instrumental portion that fades, at the fourteen-minute mark, into "Prenut," with a sax solo slowly dissolving into silence.

The third section too, shorter than the one before it, shows a decidedly fusion-oriented bent, but its role seems above all to be that of a prelude — with its magmatic, somewhat nocturnal flow — to the triumphant return of the opening theme in "Your Majesty Is Like A Cream Doughnut (Loud)." After a few bars of re-exposition, delivered with a grandeur absent from the rest of the record, the theme nonetheless curls back into modest, dignified lines, closing out the composition and the album on an unexpectedly austere note.

This also marked the end of Hatfield's recording career. After some forty further European dates (again the UK, the Netherlands, France, Belgium), Richard Sinclair left the band in June 1975. The difficulty of reconciling musical commitments with family life, along with the sense that his creative contribution was becoming less and less relevant, pushed him to move from London (where he shared a small flat near Regent's Park with Pyle, Miller and their respective families) to Canterbury, where he took up carpentry. Over the following two years he still dabbled in music now and then, under the jokey name "Sinclair & The South," and in 1977 he returned to the scene with Camel, recording with the band the captivating "Rain Dances" and "Breathless."

The other three, more firmly oriented towards instrumental fusion, carried on under the new name National Health, bringing aboard Gilgamesh keyboardist Alan Gowen, fretless bassist Neil Murray (later replaced by Henry Cow's John Greaves) and, this time on a permanent basis, ex-Northette Amanda Parsons. Virgin, unenthusiastic about a project so squarely devoted to jazz-rock, used the name change as an excuse to withdraw its backing, and the band's three albums were released on lesser labels (the first, self-titled one came out in 1978 on the jazz imprint Affinity Records).

Meanwhile, Dave Stewart teamed up with National Health's very first drummer (and longtime King Crimson member) Bill Bruford for three brilliant albums, while Pyle joined Soft Heap (alongside Gowen and two former Soft Machine members, Hugh Hopper and Elton Dean). The Eighties brought Stewart pop success, first with ex-Zombies singer Colin Blunstone ("What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted," 1981) and then with his partner Barbara Gaskin (that same year, the single "It's My Party" reached number one on the UK charts).

Yet the affection felt by that small but devoted band of Canterbury enthusiasts for Hatfield never faded, and in the decades that followed there were partial rekindlings of the band's live activity: in March 1990 and again around 2005-2006 (in both cases without Stewart). Archival compilations had already begun appearing from 1980 onward ("Afters") and then, once interest in classic prog had reignited, in the 2000s ("Hatwise Choice" and "Hattitude," in 2005 and 2006 respectively).

In 2006, the death of Pip Pyle effectively brought to a close even the "long tail" of the Hatfield And The North project. Like the band for which he was one of the principal composers, the drummer remained a name perhaps little known outside the circle of devotees, yet exemplary in his ability to combine imagination, refinement and a lack of showiness. Dave Stewart wrote, in remembrance of him, words that also fit rather well the experience of the group as a whole:

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11/06/2023