The Canterbury Scene - BBC South

via percy_the_ratcatcher



http://www.bbc.co.uk/kent

One of the Canterbury Scene's main men, Daevid Allen talks about how his travels brought him to Canterbury and being part of the Scene.

Australian born Daevid Allen is one of the Canterbury Scene's leading men. He came to England in the very early sixties, arriving in Canterbury via London. He's best known as the leader of the Canterbury band Gong.

In this interview he talks about how his travels brought him to Canterbury and whether or not he thinks there was ever a 'Canterbury Scene'.


Guitarist and singer Steve Hillage came to Canterbury in 1969 to attend university. Within weeks he'd found his way into the Canterbury Scene.

Steve was studying History and Philosophy but spent a good deal of time jamming with other musicians active on the scene in those years. He was particularly friendly with the members of Caravan, and through them he was able to get a record deal.

Steve Hillage talks about his early days in Canterbury.

More about these interviews:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/kent/entertainme...




Although for many years Robert Wyatt denied the existence of The Canterbury Scene he is certainly inextricably linked to Kents own special sound and the bands that developed it into something lasting.
Moving with his parents to Lydden near Dover, before he was a teenager, Wyatt was exposed to all sorts of musical influences from the lodgers who rented rooms in the 14 room house. It was here he met jazz drummer George Neidorf and Australian hippie Daevid Allen.
Robert Wyatt talks about the early day's of his musical education.




Originally from Leicestershire, Peter Geoffrey Richardsons playing has graced many a Canterbury Scene track. 
He joined Caravan in 1972 as the viola player but also counts guitar, mandolin and cello amongst the many instruments he can play.
Richardsons arrival in Caravan coincided with the departure of the Richard Sinclair and his cousin David. Some fans objected to his viola replacing Davids keyboards but he became an integral part of the bands developing sound.
He describes how one Caravan track Memory Laine, Hugh was dreamed up.

Posted via email from up against the flooring

Lotsa Early Softies w/Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge & (sometimes) Daevid Allen

SOFT MACHINE:THE EARLY YEARS-CANTERBURY ANTHOLOGY-VOLUME 2

1.Contusions (Summer 1966 Session)
2.Another Lover Has Gone (Summer 1966 Session)
3.Fred The Fish (from 1967 45'')
4.Feelin' Reelin' Squeelin (from 1967 45'')

 

SOFT MACHINE:THE EARLY YEARS-CANTERBURY ANTHOLOGY-VOLUME 2

(PART 2)

1.I Should've Known (Recorded in UK 1967)
2.I'm So Low (Recorded in UK 1967)

 

SOFT MACHINE:THE EARLY YEARS-CANTERBURY ANTHOLOGY-VOLUME 2

(PART 3)

1.Clarence In Wonderland (BBC Recording 12-5-67)
2.Certain Kind (BBC Recording 12-5-67)
3.Hope For Happiness (oops version of the 1968 released tracks)

 

SOFT MACHINE:THE EARLY YEARS-CANTERBURY ANTHOLOGY-VOLUME 2

(PART 4)

1.We Know What You Mean (BBC Recording 12-5-67)
2.She's Gone (from 1967 45'')
3.Lullabye Letter (oops version of the 1968 released tracks)

 

SOFT MACHINE:THE EARLY YEARS-CANTERBURY ANTHOLOGY-VOLUME 2

(PART 5)

1.Why Are We Sleeping (From Mono Single Released Early 1969)
2.Save Yourself (oops version of the 1968 released tracks)
3.Joy Of A Toy (From Mono Single Released Early 1969)

 

Soft Machine - Dim Dam Dom, Oct.1967

1.Hope For Happiness
2.Improvisation Musicale

French TV, Great Quality!

 

Soft Machine on Hoepla 1967

Great song by the Soft Machine on the Dutch TV Show 'Hoeply' from 1967, with a nice bonus at the end.

 

Soft Machine - UFO Club, 2 June 1967

Soft Machine, UFO Club, London, 2nd June 1967. 'Poem for Hoppy' by Daevid Allen. Flim & Lightshow Projections: Mark Boyle & Joan Hills. P&C Boyle Family Archive.

 

Early Soft Machine live

(Embedding disabled by request)

 

Soft Machine - I Should Have Known

Aka "Why Am I So Short?", as it was released on The Soft Machine, Vol. 1

 

The Soft Machine - 1967 - Soon, Soon, Soon

The Soft Machine en su segunda formacion, con Kevin Ayers en Guitarra/Voz, Mike Ratledge en Teclados y Robert Wyatt en Bateria/Voz, interpretando una de las dos canciones que tocaron en vivo en el programa de tv Hoepla, el 22/9/1967: We Know What You Mean (mas conocida como Soon, Soon, Soon).
Cancion compuesta por Kevin Ayers; inedita en The Soft Machine, luego editada oficialmente en la carrera solista de Ayers. Tambien se puede encontrar una version de este tema por The Soft Machine en "BBC Sessions '67-'71" (bootleg), a mi gusto, mucho mejor que esta.

 

PSYCHEDELIC LIGHT SHOW UFO 1967: Soft Machine

A rare example of the liquid lightshow projections created in 1967 by Mark boyle & Joan hills...this was the wallpaper at the legendary ufo club in tottenham court road.

 

Love Makes Sweet Music - Soft Machine

1967 single by The Soft Machine,one of the Canterbury groups.

 

The Soft Machine - We did it Again

A song by Soft Machine, Album "Volumes One & Two ( Vol. One )" 1968
Canterbury Scene
Kevin Ayers

 

Soft Machine - Save Yourself, Memories, You don't Remember.

Soft Machine 1967 Daevid Allen, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, Mike Ratledge.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted via email from up against the flooring

Early Soft Machine (1966-68)

Amplify’d from www.headheritage.co.uk

Julian Cope’s Album of the Month

Early Soft Machine (1966-68) AOTM #120, May 2010ce

PHASE 1 – 1967 I Should Have Known (7.29) Feelin’ Reelin’ Squealin’ (2.51) Memories (2.58) Love Makes Sweet Music (2.31) She’s Gone (2.27) We Know What You Mean (3.09) PHASE 2 – 1968 A Certain Kind (4.14) Why Am I So Short?/So Boot if at all (9.02) Lullabye Letter (4.42) We Did It Again (3.46) Plus Belle Qu’un Poubelle (1.01) Why Are We Sleeping? (5.32) Note: This review is dedicated to my darling daughter Avalon – just turned 16 – whose higher appreciation for all things K. Ayers-related threw up the need for this Album of the Month.

Note 2: As a big fan of THE SOFT MACHINE debut LP, I was initially tempted to proffer that whole record as Album of the Month. Instead, however, I’ve picked only my very fave raves from the debut, inserting them all into ‘Phase 2 – 1968’. I’ve dedicated ‘Phase 1 - 1967’ to the band’s debut 45 (‘Love Makes Sweet Music’ b/w ‘Feelin’ Reelin’ Squealin’), interspersed with the quartet’s two most successful Giorgio Gomelsky demos (‘I Should Have Known’ and ‘Memories’) plus an unreleased B-side from ’67 (‘She’s Gone’) and one BBC Top Gear session from September ’67 (‘We Know What You Mean’). Ta muchly, JULIAN

Repping the Intuitive Non-Career Mover

Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge and Daevid Allen, 1967

Recorded in the seventeen short months between December ’66 and April ’68, the intensely psychedelic music contained within this Album of the Month displays such a rush & roar of Mithraic fire, such a manic intensity of youthful ardour, and such a burning desire to capture the spirit of Right Now that, despite having been recorded in umpteen different studios and with four very different (and highly successful) producers – Giorgio Gomelsky produced the Yardbirds’ hits, Chas Chandler produced Jimi Hendrix’s ARE YOU EXPERIENCED, Tom Wilson produced the Velvet Underground and the Mothers of Invention, Kim Fowley produced everyone – nevertheless, on these early recordings it is still only the extraordinary sound of the Soft Machine that ever shines through… that and the excellence of their self-written songs, of course. Back then, in the heaving & heady days of 1967, the Soft Machine’s forever-bare-chested singing drummer Robert Wyatt was a brazen & burning warrior elf with a dulcet tone like Dion Warwick and a splatter-clatter drumstyle unlike any outside the jazz scene, whilst the band’s leather-coated organist, the Norman six+ footer Mike Ratledge, evinced a keyboard sound close to the Animals’ Alan Price… but with wings. On guitar and several years older than the rest of them was the band’s mentor, the Australian beatnik poet (and future Gong founder) Daevid Allen, whose days in Paris had led him to novelist William S. Burroughs, from whose 1961 novel the Soft Machine took their name. But the band’s two high aces were undoubtedly their songwriters, singer/bassist Kevin Ayers and roadie Hugh Hopper, who’d played bass in Robert Wyatt’s earlier band The Wildeflowers. His hair receding by his early 20s, with buck-teeth and ugly as sin, Hugh Hopper nevertheless wrote poetic and desperately aching, lonely songs that the R&B obsessed Wyatt could deliver with heart-rending sincerity. In stark comparison to Hopper, the occasionally face-painted Kevin Ayers was a beautiful and beguiling psychedelicized Hans Christian Andersen figure, a Pie-eyed Piper with a flair for writing archetypally great Sandozian pop songs (check out ‘We Know What You Mean’ and ‘She’s Gone’ included herein), or intoning, nay, doxologizing lead vocals in a register deeper than Lee Marvin, and deploying – from his archaic-looking Gibson EB2 – a Molto-munting semi-acoustic bass sound even more radical than that of Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Cassady’s always-overloden (and equally archaic-looking [even to us back then, U-kiddies]) Epiphone semi-acoustic.

‘Love Makes Sweet Music’ 45

In September ’66, having followed Daevid Allen’s international beat connections from cloistered Canterbury up to London, the Soft Machine found themselves performing at one of the Marquee Club’s earliest Spontaneous Underground performances, soon afterwards being invited to share the stage of Tottenham Court Road’s UFO Club with Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd. It was in this fertile and lysergic atmosphere of experimentation that the Soft Machine rose to the challenge of re-arranging and deconstructing all the best songs that Hugh Hopper and Kevin Ayers could heave at them. Producers flocked to produce the band’s debut 7” single, but it was sleazoid LA scumbag Kim Fowley who dragged them through the portals of CBS Studios and successfully transformed Kevin Ayers’ darkly monstrous and highly experimental ‘Feelin’ Reelin’ Squealin’’ – a real Ayers vocal and bass tour de force – into a veritable Boris-the-Spider-thon. Displaying typical Fowley overkill, the producer emphasized the doomy discord of Ayers’ lyrical bombinations by layering the super sweet choruses extra-saccharine harmony vocals from Daevid Allen and Robert Wyatt, then undermining the entire song with an almost musique concrète approach to its bizarre instrumental section of piano-and-flute cut-ups, all achieved in a manner guaranteed totally to blow the band’s collective mind. Daevid Allen later commented: “The thing about Kim Fowley was, he was a complete codeine freak. So he never stopped talking. But secondly, he astonished everybody by taking the 8-track master tape and cutting; splicing the eight-track master tape, which nobody had ever seen done (laughs). It was really wild to make "Feelin', Reelin', Squealin'." So [Fowley] made these huge massive splices right across all of the 8-track… if you fuck it up, that's it, that's the end of the master.”[1] Believing Fowley’s recording of ‘Feelin’ Reelin’ Squealin’’ to be an excellent B-side but just too uncommercial for the single, the band next – just one month later – entered London’s Advision Studios with Jimi Hendrix’s producer Chas Chandler, who’d chosen for the prospective A-side another highly catchy Kevin Ayers song ‘Love Makes Sweet Music’, with Robert Wyatt as lead singer. This time the delightful results were picked up for a one-off record deal by Polydor Records, who released both tracks in February ’67, a full month before Pink Floyd’s own 45 debut ‘Arnold Layne’. Unfortunately, despite mucho airplay from John Peel and Radio Caroline, ‘Love Makes Sweet Music’ totally failed to chart. The band was nonplussed. To the fascinated media, the Soft Machine were – alongside Pink Floyd – considered to be co-heralds of the so-called Psychedelic Underground. And yet, with no long-term record deal forthcoming, no money could be made available to them for recording a debut LP. Refusing to appear discouraged, the band now entered London’s De Lane Lea Studios with Yardbirds producer Giorgio Gomelsky with the sole intention of creating a demo with which to sell themselves to a record company. Unfortunately, Gomelsky’s De Lane Lea sessions were haphazardly prepared and the results extremely patchy: the incredible clatter of R. Wyatt’s drums being lost in the colossal reverb of the studio, the sinewy Stylophonic Ratledge organ oft reduced to nowt but a distant chordal pad, Daevid Allen’s guitar too often merely perfunctory, and the molto-hefty Ayers bass merely dancing around the head of the listener, rarely landing a truly sonic KO. Inappropriately, time that should have been better spent on new songs by Kevin Ayers and Hugh Hopper was instead forfeited on a couple of Robert Wyatt’s oldest, most jazzy mid-60s songs (’You Don’t Remember’, ‘That’s How Much I Need You Now’), which here in Spring ’67now sounded merely anachronistic. Despite all of this, a wonderful version of H. Hopper’s magnificent ‘Memories’ was committed to tape replete with D. Allen’s moody signature blues lines, as was a stupendous 7-minute burn-up of Hopper’s “I Should’ve Known’, today perhaps the only recorded evidence of Daevid Allen’s guitar genius during his entire time in the band.

The trio in Dulwich Park, London, 1967

In late April, the Soft Machine joined the Move, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Flies, the Deviants and the Floyd at Alexandra Palace for the now-legendary all nighter THE 14-HOUR TECHNICOLOUR DREAM,[2] but their recordings with Gomelsky had clearly come to nothing. In June, two new recordings of Hugh Hopper’s songs ‘She’s Gone’ and ‘I Should’ve Known’ were recorded for a possible second Polydor single, but no offer was to be forthcoming. Without a record deal, the summer was spent jamming almost unpaid at various happenings throughout France. However, disaster struck on August 24th when, on returning to the UK, Daevid Allen was refused re-entry for having previously overstayed his visa stipulation. Continuing as a trio, Ayers, Ratledge & Wyatt made several European TV appearances throughout the autumn, also making their first trio studio recordings for the BBC’s Top Gear, before joining the Who, Eric Burdon, Tomorrow, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix at London’s Olympia for December 67’s CHRISTMAS ON EARTH RE-VISITED. And it was here that Jimi Hendrix’ managers, Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffrey, offered the flagging band a management contract plus the support slot on Jimi Hendrix’s forthcoming US tour. Touring with Hendrix throughout February and March ’68, the trio honed down their songs into such immaculately-performed jewels of turbo-charged performance that they (at last) secured a record deal with ABC Records, who booked the band recording time at New York’s Record Plant Studios, to be overseen by Velvets/Mothers of Invention producer Tom Wilson. At last, at long long last, the Soft Machine received their belated opportunity to create a worthy LP statement and the results were spectacular. Gone was the lumpen chord work which had pervaded the weaker performances of the original quartet, replaced instead by a sound of extraordinary economy. Where once both Daevid Allen and Mike Ratledge had been content to punctuate the sound with stabs and sweating chords, now Ratledge entirely backed off, forfeiting his chordal organ washes for the sweet harmony vocals of Ayers and Wyatt. Where the quartet’s guitars and organ had previously drizzled sound across the entire rhythm section, now vast sonic spaces appeared that teased out every drum roll, every atonal freakout, every overdriven proto-Lemmy bass chord that Kevin Ayers thrummed out of his big semi-acoustic bass. More importantly, despite its re-write this self-titled trio album was a masterful exercise in jagged futuristic song experiments, songs such as the expansive & exhilarating ‘Lullabye Letter’ and ‘Why Are We Sleeping?’, radically confident garage soul songs quite unlike the cocktail jazz-tinged psychedelic R&B soul hybrid of just one year earlier. Despite its excellence, however, THE SOFT MACHINE was also far too little and far too late. Further held up until November ’68 for its US release, THE SOFT MACHINE would not even gain its own UK release until the 1970s. Exhausted by their seemingly endless US tour and unable to control his naturally hedonistic ways,[3] Kevin Ayers quit the band to pursue a solo career. Their psychedelic beginnings clearly over, roadie H. Hopper now laid to rest his years of superb songwriting and replaced Ayers on bass, joining Mike Ratledge on his curious quest to turn the Soft Machine into a pure jazz rock ensemble.

In Conclusion

Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt on Belgian TV, 1967

So listen now to this Album of the Month and think of what might have been. With the plethora of hip producers already involved in creating the early Soft Machine canon, I’ve often fantasised how great the band’s debut LP could have been had strung-out soul visionary Guy Stevens been hired as their producer in late 1966. With their R&B and soul fixations, perhaps Messrs. Ayers, Allen, Ratledge & Wyatt would have followed the Hapshash & the Coloured Coat trajectory and delivered us a stylish & freeform psychedelic soul debut LP on the Minit Records label. I know it’s daydreaming, but let me daydream. Music this adventurous should make its listeners daydream. Furthermore, just take one final look at the sheer Visionary breadth of musical and songwriting talent (barely) contained within the ranks of the early Soft Machine and try NOT to gasp at the possibilities and potential of what more coulda been.

Footnotes: Daevid Allen interview with Richie Unterberger. Former anarchist and Deviants singer Mick Farren, commenting on the backstage arrangements at the legendary psychedelic event THE 14-HOUR TECHNICOLOUR DREAM that many of the members of even the supposedly most illuminated and experimental of bands exhibited a disturbing ‘brown ale consciousness’. In the same interview with Richie Unterberger, Daevid Allen remarked of Kevin Ayers: “I've never seen anybody take so much alcohol, so much damage. It would kill anybody else. I've never seen anyone drink like him. He's got an extraordinary ability to drink, and an extraordinary ability to rejuvenate himself. He goes right to the edge, and then he goes swimming and runs around for a week and then comes out and starts again. I've never seen such an extraordinary level of ability to drink so much, and get away with it. He's gotten away with amazing amounts of stimuli. He really put it away.” Read more at www.headheritage.co.uk

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/e14d

Biba Kopf Kevin Ayers Epiphany

http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/8GgBS8PJb3lvelHbbvx6YBhJ6ojaqk32tNipB_WwBZqDgj_ppmG_PfR_Mp8AYldg-N7MK5nJHpP01zYpaciXAumLYj92zg0n5cmgM8Leeq3F0A/KAWire.pdf

From richardbrunoelliott at the whatevershebringswesing yahoo group: http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/whatevershebringswesing/


The Wire
epiphanies
Biba Kopf has his life changed by a
mysterious noise in the night


During one of their habitual tirades against the
evils of Western music, party leaders in Beijing
once unfavourably compared the oeuvre of Elvis
Presley with the Chinese revolutionary hit "The Faeces
Collectors Descend From The Mountain". Had the
venerable cadres been more familiar with Yukio
Mishima's startling literary debut Confessions Of A Mask
(1949), in which a four year old Yukio recounted his
sexual arousal at the sight of a youthful night-soil man
coming down the slope, they might have have been
more careful about the selections for their youthpurifying
revolutionary jukebox. For Mishima's encounter
was, he wrote, a presentiment that "there is in this world
a kind of desire like stinging pain". So who knows what
unusual longings Beijing's injudicious cultural watchdogs
unleashed in the hearts of young China?

A kind of desire like stinging pain... In musical terms
such a desire manifests itself through disharmony, dirt in
the ear, the spillage of noise. Pardon my pretension, but
my Christmas holiday reading of Deadly Dialectics: Sex,
Violence And Nihilism In The World Of Yukio Mishima,
accompanied by a video of a childhood favourite Tom
Sawyer—well, it was a holiday — unreeling in the
background, triggered a memory of the first time I was
really aroused by noise. It occurred during the following
Sawyer scene: a barge loaded with a cannon floats
downriver, intermittently firing salvos with a view to
raising the corpse of the hero, presumed drowned. The
blast, the recoil, the sonic boom rolling across the
surface of the water in this instance failed to bring up a
bloated body. But it did conjure for me the image of a
six-foot plus British blond, with a voice as deep and
resonant as that unfolding sonic boom. Inevitably, I
heard it first through the darkness of a late-night John
Peel show back in 1972, the voice naturally preceding
the name of its bearer. It was shrouded in a dense fog of
sound, consisting of depth charge bass and a knot of
indistinct, yet squealing lead noises, which slowly and
inexorably ricocheted across the song's watery base.
Maybe I should have gotten out more, but back then I'd
heard nothing like it, especially not the voice. Its very
English baritone defied the period predilection for mid-
Atlantic accents, just as the song cleared itself of rock's
usual drab, denim debt to 12 bar blues. I flipped on the
bedroom light and carefully noted the details of this, to
my fresh ears, unearthly performance. The singer? Kevin
Ayers. The track? "Song From The Bottom Of A Well".



As an arousing icon of transgression Kevin Ayers
hardly bears comparison with Mishima's night-soil man,
but you have to remember things were more innocent
then. (Or perhaps it was just
me — I can only imagine the
jolting pleasures of coming of
age to, say, a group like Coil.)
Naturally enough I sought to
repeat the experience and searched
out the song on the LP,
Whatevershebringswesing. The
anticipation was great but getting it
home was an immense disappointment.
Far from being an album spilling over with
dirty noises akin to "Bottom Of A Well", it
began with some orchestral idyll called "There
Is Loving", followed by a collection of dotty
ditties and a totally daft take on Velvet
Underground's "Sweet Jane", called "Stranger
In Blue Suede Shoes" (my George Washington
complex impels me to admit I made that last i
connection long after the fact). I mjght have shelved, it in
disgust, but economic factors dictated I couldn't afford
to play the thing just once. So the true pleasures of
Kevin Ayers's music surfaced slowly: his very Englishness
(probably preserved by a childhood largely spent in
some Far Eastern colony); his awry wit and lazy charm,
which manifested themselves in the countercultural
equivalent of a Noel Coward song; and a yen for
experiment that dated back to his experiences in
Canterbury during the early 60s, when he partnered
Australian gonzo Beat alchemist Daevid Allen in the first
version of Soft Machine.


Indeed, the two finest pieces on Soft Machine's debut
album are credited to Ayers. The first is a lengthy stiffriffed
workout on a track with a passing resemblance to
The Kinks' proto-Metal masterpiece "You Really Got
Me", called "We Did It Again". Legend has it that Ayers
wanted the group to hammer away at the single,
unvarying title phrase for as long as they could stand it,
with no changes or embellishments, but the others
buckled long before he did. The second is the great,
cod-philosophical wake-up call "Why Are We
Sleeping?", in which he dramatised the teachings of his
guru, Gurdjieff (in the 60s everyone needed a guru).

The fact that he quit Soft Machine after their first, by
all accounts gruelling US tour with Jimi Hendrix was the
first indication of Ayers's proto-slacker tendency to
escape to the Balearics at the first whiff of the kind of
serious hard work that prefigures commercial success.
He continued to escape there throughout what you
might charitably call a career of missed chances,
throughout which the dividends became frustratingly
more erratic as it progressed to his present invtsibftty Cr
you could read his laziness as his means of preserving
the fragile, but very precious qualities that set him apan
from his contemporaries. Though not without their
strong moments, Ayers's later albums became more
straitjacketed inside the usual rock expectations. But he
first three are all wonderful mixes of wistful, summery
(no, I can't believe I'm writing this either), vaguely
philosophical songs like Joy Of A Toy's "Lady Rachel",
harder edged locomotive pieces such as "Stop This
Train", and alternately hazy or Spike Jones-y
experiments. In addition, they are about as far rerrc. =:
from rock as you could then stretch while still being
somehow part of it. No real surprise, given that they are
performed by bizarre ensembles of noted fringe players
including his former partners in Soft Machine — most
persistently, Robert Wyatt — composer David Bedford
(also responsible for Ayers's off-the-wall arrangement
saxophonist Lol Coxhill, and... a very young Mike
Oldfield, whose double tracked bass and guitar parts ori
the title track of Whatevershebringswesing amount to
the loveliest two minutes in the entire Kopf collection.

Whereas by current standards "Song From The
Bottom Of A Well" now sounds positively creaky rather
than Big Noise creepy, the Whatevershebringswesing SB.
remains my single-most transgressive disc. Just watch
your friends recoil in horror when they discover they're
falling for an album with Mike Oldfield on it.

RIP Hugh Hopper

(FROM Wiki)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Hopper

"Hugh Colin Hopper (born 29 April 1945 - 7 June 2009) was a progressive rock and jazz fusion bass guitarist. He was a prominent member of the Canterbury scene, as a member of Soft Machine and various other related bands

Early career:
Starting in 1963 as bassist with The Daevid Allen Trio, alongside drummer Robert Wyatt, he alternated between free jazz and rhythm and blues. In 1965 with his brother Brian, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Richard Sinclair he formed The Wilde Flowers, a pop music group that never released any records during its existence, but spun off into two other influential Canterbury scene groups, Soft Machine and Caravan..."

(WHICH BRINGS US TO THIS FROM: música ácida blog..::HOT SHIT COMING THROUGH)
http://mza-acid.blogspot.com/2009/06/daevid-allen-trio-live-1963-uk.html

The Daevid Allen Trio Live 1963 (UK)
(DL ON ORIGINAL BOGPOST LINK)
"This disc features one of the earliest line-ups of The Soft Machine playing at the Marquee Club in London (where The Who would soon make their reputation). The music is not easy listening by any means and can only be recommended to die-hard fans of Canterbury groups. The liner notes feature fond reminiscences by Daevid Allen and gentle caveats by Hugh Hopper. Despite the occasionally amateurish playing and musical pretensiousness of the group members (at the time of this recording they claimed to be strictly jazz fans), the disc is an important historical document and should be seen as such. Parts of the songs appear in later Gong recordings, and Daevid Allen continues reciting poetry and anecdotes between songs during his live performances. "
*Info en español, aca.

LIVE AT THE MARQUEE CLUB
cd rip-Passw: mza-acid
Publicado por Pablo Cazorla (a.k.a. The Bomber)

(READ THE Wiki LINK FOR THE IN-BETWEENS, BUT HERE ARE THE FACTS OF DEMISE)
"...Hopper was diagnosed with leukemia in June 2008 and underwent chemotherapy. As a result of his illness and the treatment, he canceled all his concert appearances. A Hugh Hopper benefit concert took place in December 2008 at the 100 Club in London and featured In Cahoots, members of Soft Machine Legacy, Delta Sax Quartet, Sophia Domancich and Simon Goubert, Yumi Hara Cawkwell, and the Alex Maguire Quartet. Another benefit was planned for late June 2009. [5] He married his partner Christine on 5 June 2009 and died 7 June."


(ADDENDUM 6/14 -- THE INDEPENDENT HAS FINALLY RUN AN OBIT & RETROSPECTIVE)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/hugh-hopper-innovative-bassist-with-soft-machine-and-stalwart-of-the-canterbury-scene-1703161.html

Hugh Hopper: Innovative bassist with Soft Machine and stalwart of the Canterbury scene
Friday, 12 June 2009

Hopper with Soft Machine outside the Royal Albert Hall before a gig with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1970: (L-R) Mike Ratledge, Hopper, Robert Wyatt and Elton Dean (GETTY)

The bass guitarist and composer Hugh Hopper was a pivotal member of Soft Machine, the Canterbury group which went through many incarnations and shifts in musical identity and proved more successful in continental Europe than the UK in the late Sixties and early Seventies. A friend and schoolmate of the founder-member, drummer and vocalist Robert Wyatt, Hopper contributed to the group's psychedelic debut in 1968 and was their road manager before replacing bassist Kevin Ayers on the jazzier Volume Two album the following year. Hopper was a mainstay of the Softs until May 1973, his trademark fuzz Fender Precision bass riffs and experiments with tape loops as important to the group's ever-evolving sound as Mike Ratledge's Lowrey electric organ through five albums, including the best-selling Third (1970) and Fourth (1971).

Having issued 1984, his first solo album, in 1973, Hopper left the Softs and worked with the Japanese percussionist and composer Stomu Yamash'ta and the American keyboard-player and composer Carla Bley, and was involved in the influential jazz-rock bands Isotope and Gilgamesh. But he remained best known for his association with the Canterbury scene in general, and Soft Machine in particular, and played in several groups with former bandmates and associates such as Soft Heap, Soft Works, Soft Bounds and Soft Machine Legacy, as well as with European admirers and like-minded spirits in Hopper Goes Dutch or Hugh Hopper's Franglodutch Band.

Born in 1945, Hugh Hopper was the son of a book-keeper and a piano-playing psychiatric nurse. The couple encouraged the musical pursuits of Hugh and his older brother Brian; they attended St Stephens School and then Simon Langton School For Boys in Canterbury, alongside Ratledge and Wyatt. The friends sang in the school choir and developed a common passion for classical and avant-garde music and jazz. Hugh was the keenest rock'n'roll and rhythm'n'blues fan and played clarinet, piano, his mother's acoustic guitar and his brother's electric guitar before saving up to buy a Höfner electric bass. They were joined by Daevid Allen, an Australian beatnik, and Ayers, a "colonial" teenager who had been in and out of various boarding schools.

In 1962, Hopper, Wyatt and Allen formed the Daevid Allen Trio. Despite appearances at Peter Cook's Establishment Club, the Marquee club and the ICA, their jazz and free-form poetry didn't fit the mood of the time and they broke up. Two years later, Hopper spent time in Paris with Allen. "That was an important time for me. It was the first time I took acid and got into tape loops," Hopper told Graham Bennett, the author of Out-Bloody-Rageous, the Soft Machine biography.

In 1964, Hopper, his brother Brian – who had taken up the saxophone – Ayers, Wyatt and guitarist Richard Sinclair started The Wilde Flowers. They made their debut at Whitstable in January 1965, playing Chuck Berry, Beatles and Kinks covers as well as versions of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk jazz tunes and original compositions such as "Memories", "Have You Ever Been Blue?", "Don't Try To Change Me" and "I Should Have Known" by Hopper, who swapped his newly acquired Burns Bison for a Fender Precision bass and came up with the then unusual idea of the group performing their hour-long set without pause to encourage non-stop dancing, originating what would later become known as the "famous Soft Machine head-down medley."

In 1966, however, when Wes Brunson, a rich American acquaintance, decided to bankroll a group featuring Allen and Ayers, who recruited Wyatt and Ratledge, Hopper decided to stick with the Wilde Flowers until summer 1967, and that autumn he became Soft Machine's road manager. By then, they had lost Allen and were one of the happening groups in London, playing hip venues like Middle Earth alongside Pink Floyd, and were managed by Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffery, who also looked after Jimi Hendrix.

Hopper put up with two gruelling tours of the US in 1968 with the Softs bottom of the bill to Hendrix, driving huge distances with their equipment while the musicians flew to the concerts. "I think I only carried on because I knew it couldn't get any worse. It did, of course," mused Hopper who received $100 a week plus expenses for the back-breaking work.

At the end of the first tour, the Soft Machine recorded their eponymous debut at the Record Plant in New York. It featured three Hopper compositions, "Why Am I So Short?", with lyrics by Wyatt, "A Certain Kind" and "Box 25/4 Lid", an instrumental written with Ratledge on which Hopper played bass. He quit as roadie during the second US tour and was asked to step into Ayers' shoes when Probe, the band's American label, demanded a second album. His first appearance with the Softs was in February 1969 at the Royal Albert Hall for a Rock Proms concert, again with Hendrix topping the bill. "We did a run-through for the sound check and all the other musicians who were standing around clapped. That had never happened to the band before," he recalled.

Hopper's presence meant a shift towards improvisation and a jazzier approach with unusual time signatures, though it was Ratledge who suggested he use a fuzz box. "The pieces Mike had written for Volume Two needed the contrapuntal bass parts to sound as strong as the keyboard and not just as background," explained the bassist, who also played alto saxophone and acoustic guitar and composed several tracks including the album's stand-out "Dedicated To You But You Weren't Listening". "We were going back to the jazz thing, and I was very influenced by Frank Zappa. Our heroes were more jazz men than rock musicians," said Hopper.

In 1969, the Softs played on Ayers' Joy Of a Toy album and overdubbed two tracks on The Madcap Laughs, the first solo album by the former Pink Floyd mainman Syd Barrett. "He didn't even tell us how it went. We just had to listen to it until we had some idea," Hopper recalled. The Softs toured Europe again, building on their 1967 reputation when they had been the darlings of the French underground. "There was plenty of nervous tension in the band. We were irresponsible young men in charge of powerful machinery. The music was played incredibly loud," admitted Hopper. With Elton Dean on alto saxophone and saxello, Third, the 1970 double set, featured four 20-minute pieces, including Hopper's "Facelift", recorded live but reworked with loops in the studio.

Soft Machine were moving further away from the Dadaism and pataphysics of their early days towards a more austere, instrumental jazz fusion, and by the time they recorded Six, Hopper said, "I was starting to get bored." Hopper made 1984, an experimental album loosely inspired by George Orwell's novel and influenced by Riley's sound collages, and left before Six appeared in the shops. "I hadn't really been enjoying playing for some time. I wasn't really interested in the music the other guys were interested in," he said. His place was taken by Roy Babbington and Soft Machine continued for another six years.

Hopper was happier guesting on Wyatt's sublime Rock Bottom album (1974), leading his own Hoppertunity Box project and working with Richard Sinclair, pianist Keith Tippett and others. He stopped playing for a few years and drove a taxi in Canterbury. In 1984, he wrote The Rock Bass Manual and returned to music with renewed enthusiasm, issuing a further 20 albums, including Jazzloops (2002).

Diagnosed with leukemia a year ago, Hopper stopped touring; he was grateful for the benefit concerts organised at the 100 Club in London and in Whitstable last December. A similar event in France later this month will become a tribute to him. With his receding hairline, horn-rimmed glasses and grey moustache Hopper looked like a university professor. He was philosophical about his success in Europe. "I get these German journalists asking me about the 'Canterbury music school'," he said. "With hindsight, I'm sure it sounds like a great place."

Pierre Perrone

Hugh Colin Hopper, bass guitarist, composer: born Whitstable, Kent 29 April 1945; twice married (two daughters); died Whitstable 7 June 2009.