Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  Etheridge played gigs in Europe immediately following the release of Bundles, and continued in Soft Machine’s new direction: guitar-driven jazz-rock fusion band. By 1976, perhaps sensing that Jenkins was controlling the ship (“Karl Jenkins actually ran the band,” Etheridge says, “and that created tensions with Ratledge and John Marshall to a certain extent”) and that guitar solos were the rule of the day, original member Ratledge split, appearing only as a guest on 1976’s studio album, Softs.

  “[Ratledge] wanted to leave for ages,” says Etheridge. “He never enjoyed life on the road. I had talked to Hugh Hopper, and he said that Mike never enjoyed the road from the very beginning. When Mike left, he was the last original member. That was quite an issue, I think. I will say this: He wrote some wonderful songs that really had some magic to them. There’s a live version of ‘The Man Who Waved at Trains’ [originally appearing on Bundles] floating around out there, and it is a lovely tune. He really had something.”

  ALIVE & WELL

  Alive & Well: Recorded in Paris, which featured Steve Cook on bass and Fairport Convention violinist Ric Sanders, appeared in 1978, and 1981’s The Land of Cockayne, an effort Etheridge refers to as a “Karl Jenkins project that had the Soft Machine name on it,” showed signs of the band on the skids.

  With few gigs rolling in, and the members pushing themselves in many different directions, the protagonists decided to go their separate ways. “Generally speaking, the band played to big audiences, and at the same time, the atmosphere in the band was not that great, to be honest,” says Etheridge. “It was always was like that; always personality problems in the Soft Machine.”

  “Soft Machine, like every band, was made up of very different characters at all stages of its life,” said Hopper (whom Etheridge once referred to as the “soul” of the band). “We all had positive and negative qualities that influenced the music.”

  “Soft Machine could have done so much more if there had been proper cohesion inside the group, probably if there had been a leader,” adds Etheridge. “Plus, the management was just dreadful. Critics said we were not the ‘real’ Soft Machine. While I think there’s continuity from Third straight through to an album like Softs, in a way, the critics were right: We were not the original Soft Machine. We were something different. And that made all the difference.”

  LEGACY

  Musicians from different eras of the band’s history, including Holdsworth, Hugh Hopper, John Marshall, and Elton Dean, joined forces to establish Soft Machine Legacy in 2004 (a cause championed by Moonjune Records head Leonardo Pavkovic).

  After getting the project off the ground, Holdsworth left and, in a turn reminiscent of the mid-1970s, Etheridge took his friend’s slot. This new lineup produced Legacy’s 2006’s self-titled debut and Live in Zaandam, as well as a concert DVD filmed in Paris.

  In early 2006, Elton Dean passed away, and the band brought in saxophonist /flautist Theo Travis, who was featured on Legacy’s 2007 studio record, Steam. Travis’s “Ambientronics” brought yet another dimension to the Soft Machine sound.

  “ ‘Ambientronics’ is a mixture of delays, an octave pedal, and a looping device, whereby I play a line and spontaneously record it and send the sound you’re playing down an octave or two,” explains Travis. “It creates a kind of matrix, a layering of rhythmic and harmonic ideas.”

  Sadly, in 2008, Hopper died, leaving Etheridge and Marshall as the only surviving musicians in Legacy whose histories stretch back to the 1970s. As of this writing, Legacy had tapped onetime Softs bassist Babbington and were continuing to tour and record; labels such as Moonjune and Cuneiform commission, reissue, and unearth Softs material.

  CARAVAN

  Though Soft Machine were the darlings of the underground in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Caravan—whose founding members were formerly in the Wilde Flowers—began to build excitement not only owing to its previous associations, but because of its lighthearted humor (sometimes based on double entendre), tireless hard work (the band did nothing but rehearse and live in tents at Graveney, outside Canterbury, for six months before they received a record contract), and ability to write classically inspired works that were witty and unpretentious.

  Early Soft Machine. Left to right: Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, and Mike, Ratledge.

  Kevin Ayers: Joy of a Toy (1969)

  Right out of the gate, guitarist Pye Hastings, bassist/vocalist Richard Sinclair, keyboardist David Sinclair (Richard’s cousin), and drummer Richard Coughlan proved they were different from their Canterbury compatriots with their 1968 self-titled debut on Verve—a record that blended tricky time signatures, sweet melodies, driving (at times militaristic) rhythms, and Brit folk and jazz chord voicings in songs such as “Place of My Own,” “Love Song with Flute,” “Policeman,” “Magic Man,” “Ride,” and “Where But for Caravan Would I?”

  “I think the first record was a kind of mess,” says Richard Sinclair. “But an interesting mess. It was good mixture when Caravan started. We all had the same goal: to make our music, write it ourselves, and make a living from it.”

  Though Caravan’s deal with Verve led to nothing (MGM, Verve’s parent label, ceased operations in the U.K.), the band was soon picked up by Decca (on their sub Deram) at the urging of producer David Hitchcock.

  Produced by the band and Terry King (their manager), Caravan’s sophomore record, the suggestive 1970 effort If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You, boasts songs that would become cult classics: the fourteen-minute extended classical-jazz-blues track “Can’t Be Long Now/ Francoise/For Richard/Warlock,” the title track (a semi-Latin/pep-rally pop song marked by grinding organ tones and contrapuntal vocal melodies), the heartbreakingly whimsical “And I Wish I Were Stoned/Don’t Worry,” and the dreamy ten-minute suite “With an Ear to the Ground You Can Make It/Martinian/Only Cox/Reprise.”

  Though their records had yet to chart, the band’s hard work was about to pay off: They were turning the heads of promoters and club owners, who were keen on booking them, and were ready to unleash 1971’s seminal In the Land of Grey and Pink.

  Featuring Richard Sinclair’s “Golf Girl” (a personal song wrapped in satirical lyrical layers), the sword-and-sorcery-laced “Winter Wine,” and the side-long, nearly twenty-three-minute epic “Nine Feet Underground,” composed largely by David Sinclair (the latter two as surreal and inviting as the two-toned landscape of Anne Marie Anderson’s cover image), In the Land of Grey and Pink is seen as the band’s best work.

  “In the Land of Grey and Pink came from a real extreme [sentiment],” says Richard Sinclair. “[David] had had enough of writing, because he had done so much on the first two records. Dave was really bursting with music and really needed to get this composition out, so he wrote twenty minutes’ worth. We now have ‘Nine Feet Underground’ because of it.”

  Despite the creative outlet, it wasn’ t long before David Sinclair left Caravan to join Robert Wyatt in Matching Mole, which was (in a strange way) more pop-oriented than Caravan. Caravan then released 1972’s blues- and jazz fusion–based Waterloo Lily, featuring keyboardist/piano player Steve Miller, who’d been fronting his own band, Delivery (with his younger brother, guitarist Phil Miller, and saxophonist Lol Coxhill, both of whom appear on Waterloo Lily).

  “I’d met Steve because I began playing with Phil Miller, and the band needed a keyboard player and Steve was blues- and jazz-oriented,” says Sinclair. “It was something I’ve never done—play pop music from jazz and blues. The music on Waterloo Lily was generated, really, as a collage of the band members’ playing styles.”

  Despite the fact that Caravan were taking chances (Hastings even dared to have orchestration on the record), Miller decided that Caravan was not for him, and Richard Sinclair, wishing the band’s musical path had evolved into something with more of a jazz edge, also split (within only days of Miller’s untimely exit) in July 1972.

  GROWING PLUMP

  Caravan may have been broken, but the group
was picking up the pieces (and very nicely). Determined to continue through further personnel shifts, Caravan eventually boasted a lineup that included bassist John G. Perry, Peter Geoffrey Richardson on viola and, ironically enough, returning hero David Sinclair. It was this configuration that produced 1973’s For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night.

  It was as if Caravan hadn’t missed a beat. With the addition of more synthesizers, (the ARP 2600, specifically) Caravan’s music not only retained its established inane wit (“The Dog, the Dog, He’s At It Again”) but further pushed into progressive jazz/folk/classical territory with songs such as the opening track “Memory Lain, Hugh/Headloss,” “Hoedown,” the knotty “C’thlu Thru,” and the odd-tempo rousing rocker “L’Auberge Du Sanglier/A Hunting We Shall Go/Pengola/Backwards,” the final section of which is a Mike Ratledge composition.

  For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night rests alongside In the Land of Grey and Pink in terms of its dynamism and interactivity. Caravan were simply locked in, and they capitalized on this creative cohesiveness by recording the live orchestral effort Caravan & the New Symphonia in 1974 (containing new material and songs from For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night, which translate very well to this symphonic setting), and following it with the somewhat unfocused (but still intriguing) Cunning Stunts in 1975, a record that broke into the Top 50 in the U.K.—the first Caravan record to do so.

  Though Cunning Stunts was a minor hit, it was, ironically, Caravan’s last studio album to appear on Decca—a troublesome situation that kicked off an unfortunate series of events that sent the band into a bit of a creative tailspin.

  While the follow-up, 1976’s Blind Dog at St. Dunstan’s (on BTM Records), just missed the Top 50 on the British charts, the trend of collecting uneven tracks into an album—a trend that (in retrospect) appeared to take shape as early as Cunning Stunts—was starting to take full effect. Dave Sinclair left once again and Jan Schelhaas, a future member of Camel, took over the keyboard reins.

  In this configuration, the band’s sound morphed into something a bit more compromised: It was far too involved to be pop and much too middle-of-the-road to be considered “progressive.”

  “Pye had always been pushing for that popular rock approach,” says Sinclair. “He was not like his brother [Jimmy], who is a real jazzer and had played with the BBC Orchestra. I suppose you can say [Pye] was influenced by Kevin Ayers—someone who taught him to play guitar.”

  Caravan continued into the late 1970s and the 1980s with records such as Better by Far and Back to Front. Reuniting in the early 1990s—with Richard Sinclair, Pye Hastings, Richard Coughlan, and David Sinclair—the band decided to have another go at it, though (of course) more lineup changes were to follow.

  To their credit, Caravan managed a studio record, 1995’s The Battle of Hastings, and have continued into the twenty-first century, most notably with an appearance at the Northeast prog rock festival NEARfest in 2002.

  HATFIELD AND THE NORTH, NATIONAL HEALTH

  After his departure from Caravan, keyboardist Steve Miller worked with Lol Coxhill in Coxhill/Miller, and bassist/singer Richard Sinclair eventually formed Hatfield and the North (a name taken from an English motorway sign) with Phil Miller, keyboardist /composer Dave Stewart of the late-1960s/early-1970s classical rock band Egg, and former Gong and Delivery drummer Pip Pyle.

  “I was really ready to leave Caravan when David Sinclair left, because he was the only chance to make [the band] move in a Hatfield-type direction,” says Sinclair.

  Via Virgin Records, the Hats released their jazzy and absurd 1974 self-titled debut (which is largely composed of interconnecting suites and musical interludes and features Robert Wyatt, in wordless duet with Richard Sinclair, on Phil Miller’s entrancing “Calyx”) and followed it up with 1975’s The Rotters’ Club, on which Dave Stewart, who’d penned complex songs such as “Lobster in Cleavage Probe” and “Son of ‘There’s No Place Like Homerton’” for the debut, comes into his own.

  “It was a proper creative entity,” says Phil Miller. “I think The Rotters’ Club is the summation of that, actually. With The Rotters’ Club, we worked far harder to learn the music by heart. We always rehearsed, whether there was a gig or not, and worked on original music. Dave [Stewart] became more involved in the writing and started composing music specifically with players in the band in mind.”

  Hatfield and the North folded not long after the release of The Rotters’ Club as Phil Miller (later of his own band In Cahoots) went on to join National Health in 1975 with Stewart, drummer Pyle, Gilgamesh guitarist Phil Lee, bassist/vocalist Mont Campbell (formerly of Egg), and second keyboardist Alan Gowen, who’d been in Gilgamesh as well as Sunship with one-time Crimson percussionist Jamie Muir. (Interestingly, King Crimson and Yes drummer Bill Bruford was the original drummer for National Health until 1976.)

  Through various personnel changes, National Health released three records of highly composed and expertly performed jazz- and art-rock material: 1977’s self-titled debut, Of Queues & Cures, and D.S. al Coda. (Playtime, featuring a four-member lineup led by Gowen, including Henry Cow bassist John Greaves, appeared in 2001 on Cuneiform Records.)

  “I’m not being humble here, but I only wrote one piece for National Health, and that didn’t compare to what Dave and Alan [Gowen] wrote,” says Miller. “I thought they were the cornerstone of why National Health was such a formidable beast. Alan, who unfortunately died too young in 1981 from leukemia, was a fantastic writer, and his contributions were superb. They were not impossible, but they were demanding pieces in the chord progressions and lead voicings.”

  Meanwhile, Sinclair had a bit of fun with the irreverently titled Sinclair and the South before eventually joining Andy Latimer, Andy Ward, and Pete Bardens in Camel.

  “People say, ‘Don’t you think that the Canterbury Scene is a bit of a hoax, a myth, that it really doesn’t exist apart from people trying to link various musicians?”’ asks Sinclair. “I’m not sure about that. But I’ve tried to catalog everything I’ve done under ‘C’—Camel and Caravan. [laughs] It’s easier for people to find the music bin.”

  GONG: THE SPACE WHISPERERS

  No longer permitted in the U.K. because his visa troubles, former Soft Machine guitarist Daevid Allen made a life for himself along the Mediterranean in the late 1960s.

  “I was no stranger to Paris, as I had been there earlier in the 1960s and stayed at the Beat Hotel—a kind of vortex for writers and artists of the day—where I met Beat author William Burroughs and writer/painter Brion Gysin,” says Allen. “It was intellectually challenging, and almost all of my ideas were revolutionized by living there for about six or seven months.”

  After a brief stopover in Majorca (more like he was run out of the country by authorities for suspicion of political insurgency), Allen returned to Paris, and Gong began in earnest in 1969.

  “I was lucky enough to be an active participant in the cultural revolution in England, and I saw similar things in France, as well, with the student riots of May 1968,” says Allen, who was heavily influenced by Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett (and what he calls, his “glissando guitar” playing). “By contrast, in France, there was this huge tension building up—and I was on the side of the students, of course—and it was the same cultural energy as Britain, but expressed in dif ferent ways. It was a really interesting education for me, because it represented this kind of yin and yang.”

  RADIO GNOME INVISIBLE

  Allen strived to make music that could create a transcendent experience, a spiritual change in the world, and attempted to do so through writing songs.

  In the fall of 1969, flanked by partner and vocalist Gilli Smyth, saxophonist /flautist Didier Malherbe (whom Allen had met on Majorca when the former was living in a goat herder’s cave), and percussionist Rachid Houari, Allen recorded 1970’s Magick Brother, a record full of cosmic guitar effects, Smyth’s patented “space whisper,” and memorable but laconic rockers, introducing us to the songwriter’s knack fo
r spinning whimsical mythological tales.

  Nineteen seventy-one’s Camembert Electrique and Continental Circus (the sound track to a 1971 documentary of the same tide on the subject of motorcycle racing—one of a few sound tracks for French cinema Gong had recorded at the time) continued in this direction, defining and giving shape to the musical, conceptual, and mythological maelstrom that was swirling around Allen’s head since before Gong was officially formed.

  “The very idea of Gong—even the title—really came from Bali,” says Allen. “Being Australian I related to the Balinese culture, and I saw the symbol of a gong—it’s round, you hit it, and it rings for a long time—as almost like the spiritual ohm, which encompassed everything.”

  It was in 1973 that Allen introduced the so-called Radio Gnome trilogy (a concept that was addressed on Camembert Electrique), which encompasses 1973’s Flying Teapot and Angel’s Egg, and 1974’s You (all of which were released through the fledgling Virgin Records).

  The trilogy attempted to offer an alternative reality (a competing mystical religion of sorts, based on the global myth of the hero’s journey) while combining elements of the artistic and political movements Allen most admired: surrealistic humor (of the sort similar to Alfred Jarry’s political satire, Ubu Roi, which sparked riots in the streets of Paris in the late nineteenth century), the anti-musical performance-based Fluxus movement, and outright anarchical (though peaceful) protest.

  Allen, a Beatnik and former communist turned hippie, created Planet Gong (a largely invisible “world” inhabited by Zero the Hero, Pot Head Pixies, Yoni the witch, a magic earring, and octave doctors, which sends the people of Earth—and anyone else tuned in—positive energies and secret transmissions) as a way to subvert the accepted form of reality and offer another mental and spiritual pathway.