The Canterbury Scene - BBC South

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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.

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Ayers Interview 2003 - Wyatt disses Canterbury !

via percy_the_ratcatcher at whatevershebringswesing

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

'You need a bit missing upstairs to play this game'

Acid-dropping, Hendrix-supporting, Burroughs-quoting, groupie-eschewing Kevin Ayers has spent 40 years making music and evading fame. The founder of Soft Machine talks to Jonathan Glancey

Jonathan Glancey The Guardian, Friday 4 July 2003 Article history

Public school rocker with plummy accent: Kevin Ayers in Soft Machine (top) and on his own.

"It was an extremely dull grammar school, and I can't remember a single stimulating thing about Canterbury." Is Robert Wyatt, former Soft Machine drummer, singer and songwriter, being disingenuous?

For any English schoolchild suckled on the avant-garde "Canterbury sound" of the 1960s - the jazz-folk-pop fusions of Soft Machine, Caravan, Egg, Gong, Hatfield and the North and Kevin Ayers' Whole World - the Simon Langton school in Canterbury was a kind of English Haight-Ashbury, a happening centre of all things mystical, mythical, anti-establishment, acid-laced, and musical.

In their dreams, man. It was no such thing. Not even close. Yet, it was here, amid the chalk and gowns, that a nucleus of talented, literate and artistically inclined young musicians emerged to produce a sound that, while never likely to challenge Phil Spector's wall of sound in terms of commercial success, much less the Mersey sound of the Beatles, continues to haunt the byways and backwaters of British music.

Kevin Ayers, born in 1945 in Herne Bay, Kent, was one of the people drawn into the intimate circle of well-bred Canterbury schoolboys - Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge, Hugh and Brian Hopper - who happened to meet the real thing, Daevid Allen, in 1961.

Allen, an Australian, had worked with the waywardly brilliant writer William Burroughs, author of The Soft Machine (1961), in the US, and in Paris with the avant-garde Californian composer Terry Riley, whose minimalist masterpiece In C was to be a huge influence on Steve Reich and Philip Glass, as well as Ayers's future British band, Soft Machine.

Allen had long hair. He had dropped acid. He recorded music in his houseboat on the Seine. He must have seemed amazing to a group of artistic, middle-class schoolboys told to get their hair cut and do their ties up.

Ayers was easily assimilated into this magic circle. The son of Rowan Ayers, a BBC producer, he was partly brought up in the Far East by his stepfather, a district officer in British Malaysia. In Canterbury, just a few miles from Herne Bay, where colonial officers went to retire, he discovered his latent musical talent with this group of Canterbury schoolboys jamming in the graceful Georgian house that belonged to Robert Wyatt's mother, Honor, where Daevid Allen rented a room.

Here they listened to the latest jazz while coming to terms with Dadaist art and surrealist poetry. At first Ayers thought the music "weird" and even "utter gibberish", especially played on cutlery and kitchen instruments. But, gradually, and with Wyatt drumming, Hugh Hopper on bass, his elder brother, Brian, playing lead guitar and saxophone, Richard Sinclair on rhythm guitar and Ayers singing, The Wilde Flowers, Ayers' tribute to Oscar Wilde, were formed in June 1963.

In Deal, not so far from Canterbury, I listened, last month, with an enthusiastic if never exactly wild flowering of dedicated Ayers supporters, Soft Machine aficionados and a budding generation of sixth-formers and college students, to Kevin Ayers material, drawn from a back catalogue of four re-released EMI CDs - Joy of a Toy, Shooting at the Moon, Whatevershebringwesing and Banana Amour.

Ayers is too self-deprecating, too elusive and knowing to ever have made it big. Yet his songs are special, some catchy and weird, others poppy and even rocky, yet others gone with the wind, ethereal, surreal, the stuff of early drafts of poems better sung than confined to print. They are delightful, but impossible to pin down.

"I would have made a very unlikely star with a voice like mine," he says in his rich, upper-middle-class baritone, in his house near Carcassonne in southern France. "I mean, a public school rocker with a plummy BBC accent... hardly."

And, yet, one of Ayers' first demo tapes includes a Lennon/McCartney-style number, She's Gone, proving that he could have cut it with the pop stars. "I did want to make some money. Not that I ever did," he says, "which is why I'll have to make some more records and go on tour again, but I get terribly bored with all the travelling, the hotels and the general waiting around. And, while a bit of recognition and celebrity is nice, a little goes a very long way."

Ayers tripped off to Ibiza with Daevid Allen. He has always liked sun, sea and freedom. And, the girls. "The girls, today, are my two daughters, a couple of wives in the past... and I've just bust up with my latest lady, sadly; not that I intend to write angst-ridden songs about it. You get past that phase. It's very charming to see the Rolling Stones banging on about teenage love - ooh, baby, yeah - but I'm afraid it's not quite my bag."

Freedom was something he felt denied him when The Wilde Flowers metamorphosed briefly into Mister Head and then Soft Machine, with Wyatt, Ratledge and Allen, in the summer of 1966. Ayers and Allen had met the Texan millionaire, Wes Brunson, who gave them the money to buy new equipment and a rehearsal studio near Canterbury. They formed Soft Machine after Allen had phoned Burroughs in the US to get approval for the name.

Soft Machine's music was a rainbow of sounds and songs drawn from gamelan to pop, via jazz and Terry Riley's minimalism. There was nothing quite like it. They played on the same bill as Pink Floyd at the International Times launch party in October 1966 and became regulars at the UFO club on London's Tottenham Court Road in the spring of 1967.

They were, along with the likes of Pink Floyd and the Nice, one of the underground bands of the moment. And, like most head-expanding underground bands, they were met with baffled incomprehension and even hostility outside London. "I only ever walked offstage once", says Ayers. "It was when the beer bottles started flying. Not my scene." The band moved to France where they were welcomed as Dadaist heroes and played venues like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris.

Allen was refused entry back into the UK that summer. He gave up Soft Machine, stayed in Paris and formed a new band, Gong, and later the Invisible Opera Company of Tibet, the Magick Brothers and, eventually, back to Gong again. Performing as a trio in London, Soft Machine was much admired by Jimi Hendrix who asked them to tour the US with him. "He thought we were terribly cute," says Ayers, "and absolutely no threat to his sensational stage presence. He was quite right."

The six-month schedule was punishing, especially as the band was writing and cutting its first album, Soft Machine Volume One. At first, Ayers went for the rock 'n' roll lifestyle hammer and tongs. "I was completely drunk with the whole thing. Girls lining up outside the door, free drink everywhere". But he soon tired of it.

"I went on a very strict macrobiotic diet and I didn't go out partying. I became alienated from everything that was going on around me - because of the violence and extremity of it. At its worst, it was plane, hotel, gig, hotel, plane, hotel, gig. Mike Ratledge and I would just stay in. He read books, while I used to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling. At the end of 1968, I couldn't take it any more."

The sex, drugs and booze were one thing, the rock'n'roll, or what passed for it in Soft Machine's world, another. "Mike and Robert were far more musically literate than I was, and I think my simplicity bored them. They were going more in the direction of jazz and fusion, which didn't interest me. I was strictly pop. They were into what I consider to be self-indulgence. It's stuff you play for yourself, and 'fuck the audience'... so I took my simplicity elsewhere."

In 1970 Ayers formed the Whole World, a particularly eclectic band that included a teenage Mike Oldfield on lead guitar. Oldfield's demos of Tubular Bells were made on Ayers' tape-recorder. As Oldfield limbered up for global stardom, Ayers left for France to play with Daevid Allen's Gong.

From then on, like some gentle Ancient Mariner, Ayers has played and recorded for whoever will stop for him or whenever the mood takes him. He kept away from Britain during the punk explosion, recorded a strangely conventional rock album, Diamond Jack and the Queen of Pain, with local musicians in Spain, and the lovely Falling Up, with songs of wine and love, made in Madrid in 1988.

"The music executives were putting some pressure on, which is why I ended up making a couple of records that sound like anyone else's. My real records have always been messy things, but the industry doesn't like this. Nearly all best-selling albums have a consistent sound to make them easy to position and market. Well, I tried, but my heart was never in it. I think you have to have a bit missing upstairs, or just be hungry for fame and money, to play the industry game. I'm not very good at it."

Falling Up got Ayers back onto the British stage, but it was the acoustic Still Life with a Guitar (1992) that saw him happily on the road in Britain, the US and Japan. Playing small venues, he has found new audiences, and especially when he recorded Hymn with Ultramarine, whose techno-ambient sound gave us a Kevin Ayers for the DJ generation, as did his later tours with the Wizards of Twiddly, a band that spawned, among others, the Coral.

"Well, I suppose I must get down to making that new record," says Ayers, a charming, quietly spoken and intelligent man working on the fringe of an industry that thrives on hype, volume and the selling of sensitive souls. A soft machine in a hard world, it is little short of a miracle that this civilised chap is still charming us with songs that come as much from the brain, and art, as a heartful of soul. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

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KEVIN AYERS INTERVIEW by Jimmy James (May 1998)

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KEVIN AYERS INTERVIEW

by Jimmy James (May 1998)

As bassist, frequent songwriter, and occasional vocalist in the original Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers was a key force in early British psychedelia and progressive rock. In just two years the group had evolved from the goofy, effervescent psychedelic pop of their 1967 debut single "Love Makes Sweet Music"/"Feelin' Reelin' Squealin'" to the dada jazz-rock minimalism of Ayers' infamous "We Did It Again." After the Soft Machine opened for the Jimi Hendrix Experience across the States in 1968 and recorded their first studio album, Ayers left the group to establish a long-running solo career with more pop-oriented material, delivered in a witty, near-bass profundo voice. On most of his albums he explored the little-trod midpoint between weird pop and the most accessible, humorous face of prog-rock, crafting bouncy songs of indolence and whimsy that often tapped island rhythms. Leading British experimental musicians like Lol Coxhill, David Bedford, and a pre-Tubular Bells Mike Oldfield passed through his band while he veered between sunnier variations of Syd Barrett and dissonant experimental jams. He never did land a hit album or single in Britain, despite issuing numerous LPs on Harvest, and in the US he was a definitive '70s cult artist. He's only recorded sporadically in the 1980s and 1990s, with his more recent efforts even harder to locate in the import bins than his early solo material. Now in his early fifties, Ayers made a rare visit to the States to play a few gigs in California in May. Backed by the SF band Mushroom at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, he was in merry form as he went through a set of some of his more well-known vintage tunes, such as "Lady Rachel," "Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes," as well as the Soft Machine cuts "Why Are We Sleeping?" and "Save Yourself." Before soundcheck he found a few minutes to talk about the Canterbury scene with a few local fans and writers. Q: What was unique about the Canterbury scene? KA: Mike Ratledge from the Soft Machine had a degree in Oxford University in philosophy at 22. I mean, he won a scholarship and then said, fuck that, I'm going to play the organ. This was unique in pop. You don't find many people with honor degrees playing pop, even from that kind of literary background. Normally it was sort of art school. England is so defined, the class system, your education. I think what was unique about the Canterbury scene...these were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people. Q: Did you have a similar kind of literary upbringing to Robert Wyatt? KA: Not from my parents, no. Robert had his from his parents, 'cause his parents were middle-class intellectuals. I was brought up in Malaya. But that is the difference, that this was the first time that anybody from the middle class, well-educated, joined the pop scene. This was comfortable kids who went to university. Q: I'm surprised you call it pop. KA: Well, I don't know, what else would you call it? Plop? (laughs) The whole thing about Soft Machine was that it had all these people from, as I said, middle-class literary educated backgrounds, suddenly going "fuck it, I'm not going to join med school, I'm not going to become a lawyer or a doctor. I'm not going to be a professional." And this hadn't happened anywhere else in pop. That's why the Canterbury scene was unique, because that is what happened there. Q: You started off in the Wilde Flowers, then you showed up in Majorca to find Daevid Allen to put the band together. What made you go find him? KA: Daevid Allen was the first hippie that I'd met. He was straight out of the beat scene, and he was very convincing (laughs). He read a lot. He was articulate. He turned us on, Robert and me and Mike, to all this--especially American--beat literature. And we suddenly thought, wow...you have to imagine, just out of an English private school, and suddenly you get this sort of exotic person coming through, who says, "fuck this, fuck that. Smoke pot, read this." He actually had something to say, he actually had a viewpoint. I suppose everybody else had no idea. All these people just came out of school, sort of wandering around in the job market, "what do I do now"--suddenly Daevid Allen's going, "Smoke pot now, peace love and fuck your neighbor." That was something. As opposed to nothing. Q: Is that hippie ethic something that still motivates you? KA: I think that the basic philosophy was very good. It was just be nice to each other, and don't step on other people's toes and infringe on their freedom. I think that's still valid. It just made sense, especially when...I keep talking to you about English schools. Unless you've been to one, you have no idea how bad they are. I mean, you just would not believe them. You only start learning when you leave school. Q: The Soft Machine had a whimsical feel. Was that influenced by your literary background? KA: We just had different references. We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it. If you have the same background, it doesn't matter which school you've been to, if you've read the books, have the knowledge, and you have the intellectual curiosity, you can talk to anybody who has the same thing, and you know what you're talking about. So you relate that way. The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas. They'd read different books. So we actually got away with making a lot of crap. I don't mean crap--I mean that it wasn't professionally as good as what other people were doing. Other people had much better sound, and they had good producers. We worked alongside the Pink Floyd, we played gigs together, and we suddenly saw them go, whooosh!! with huge sales. But we were just dancing in the dark. There were groundbreaking ideas, musically and intellectually. Post-war generation asking serious questions. Q: When you made your first solo record, you were obviously still on good terms with the Soft Machine, since they play on a lot of it. KA: It was family for me--the only family I knew. We all lived together in one house. Q: When you went solo, was it because you wanted to play and write different material than what the Soft Machine were doing on their first album? KA: Soft Machine were going more in the direction of fusion jazz and I didn't like that. They were going more in the direction of jazz, which didn't interest me. I was strictly pop. They were into what I consider really to be incredibly self-indulgent music. It's stuff you play for yourself, and "fuck the audience." Q: What about playing "We Did It Again" for half an hour for Brigitte Bardot? KA: That's a serious statement. I think she said to get those wankers off or something. Q: In an interview you said all your songs, except for a few romantic ones, were pataphysical. Where did you come across pataphysics? KA: I think that was just a literary thing. The fact that you actually string a few sentences together was important in those days. Soft Machine became famous in France before anything else happened. They adopted us. The French like arty things, they like something a little bit different. In fact, what made Soft Machine was an article in Nouvelle Observateur, which at that time was a very...in those days, things like Melody Maker and NME, it mattered then. If someone wrote something about you, it could make or break you. Now it doesn't matter at all. We got written up, I think, 'cause Mike was fucking the journalist, actually. So we got a good review, and that was it. Suddenly France just opened up. We were the darlings of the literary scene there. Q: Who were your main literary or formative influences? KA: Philosophically, the only person that influenced me was Gurdjieff. What he said made sense to me. What I really liked about him was, he was a total charlatan. He didn't make any bones about it. His thing was that you cannot present the truth to people in simple form. You have to elaborate. Otherwise they're not interested. Did you ever read his book? It's just bullshit, absolute bullshit. But he says, you have to write 100 pages to say one sentence, to make it interesting for people. Otherwise they won't accept it as real. You have to say a lot in order to get a little across. Q: Are you still inspired by things like that when you write? KA: It's still there. I mean, I still think he was absolutely right. His two premises were, you have to say a lot to get a little across. you have to excite people. The other thing was, we're only working at five percent of our potential, which made total sense. What I loved about him...he came to America, you know, and he was very good at raising money. One of the things he did here was, he was in New York, he invited a bunch of people, saying, "this is the time of your life." And he made them have sex, and charged them a lot of money for it. And they were saying, "Wow, thank you, this is the best night of our lives." He just talked dirty to them, so they all had sex with each other and [said] "wow, this is so good," and they gave him thousands of dollars. What he did was say, "Look, this is what you really want to do. I'll organize it. Just give me the money." Q: When do you think you most fully realized your own potential with your music? KA: I don't think I can answer that. It's hypothetical, one will never know. I mean, some days you wake up and you think, Jesus, I could be a really good comedian. Then half an hour later, you forget the idea. People who really want to make money in this world make it. You have to have tunnel vision. You have to say, this is what I want to do. I believe that. If you wanted to make money, you would make it. Don't you ever wake up in the morning and think, geez, I could really do with a lot of money? You think, I have a brain, I could use it, I could actually do this, I could play the stock market, I could be a televangelist or something. You could actually do it if you really wanted to do it. But you would have to really want to it. So basically you wake up in the morning and say, "oh, I don't really want to do anything." Q: Is commercial success something you still aspire towards? KA: No no no. It's all been a total fluke. I would have liked to have made more money, 'cause I think everybody has a creative period, normally between about 19 and 30. That is the time when you have to establish yourself in life. If you haven't made it by the time you're thirty, you never will, basically. Okay, forty (laughs). If you wind up forty and you don't have a house and a car and life insurance and health insurance, you know, you're fucked. Q: Was it frustrating for you not to have much success in the States? KA: I didn't really have that much exposure here. It would have been good. Basically the idea is to make a bunch of money with the creative talents you have before you're forty. I'm not answering your question, am I? This is the underlying thing, this is what is behind it. Whatever it takes, whether it's America or Holland, I don't know, it doesn't matter. You have a certain window in your life where you're intellectually curious, you have energy, and you're not blase, and you're not tired of life. That's when you have to do it. That still doesn't answer your question. It does, actually, really. Q: You're talking about hitting thirty- were you conscious of the British underground that had started around '67 losing momentum around that time? KA: You only become conscious of things that you have things to compare them to. You can't make assessments if you don't have something to compare them to. I think that what happened with post-war society--suddenly young people were going, we don't like what our parents are doing. We don't like war. The war was over, people had money, and they had time. It was like a one-off. My youngest daughter says to me, geez dad, I wish I'd lived in the sixties. I know what she means, because there was a whole bunch of stuff happening. People were pre-video and people read books in those days, and talked to each other. It was a unique time. In fact, if you check the history of human beings, you'll find it's the only time that young people ever got up and had any effect at all. What happened was that the establishment moved in and discredited them- "they're hippies, they don't wash, they smoke pot." But there were huge advances in human rights and basic freedoms. It never happened in the history of man, never. Q: Are you going to do more stuff with the people you worked with in the Canterbury scene? KA: No. Q: Do you communicate with them? KA: No, I don't know where they are these days. It's very sad, 'cause we were very close to start with. That's okay, it happens to the best of lovers. Also see our 2008 Ayers interview and our Robert Wyatt interview See the rest of Perfect Sound Forever MAIN PAGE ARTICLES STAFF/FAVORITE MUSIC LINKS WRITE US Read more at www.furious.com

 

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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.