Meze Soft Machine

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78952-419-2
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Soft Machine are perceived as cold and forbidding. At their peak in the 1970s, they purposefully raised the hackles of pop journalists, the musical establishment and even their own fans. Their music was designed to exclude all but the most devoted. Their line-up constantly churned, divesting themselves of every player that tried to make a human connection. Instead of the community of live performance, they favoured an abusive blast of ferocious noise.
All of this was true only for a short period of their career and is certainly not the case for more recent incarnations. If the music is given a chance, an entirely different band emerges, one that is sly, spry, tuneful, trippy and surprisingly welcoming, merging a glorious melange of prog rock, jazz fusion and much more.
This book guides you through the maze of the band's works, revealing why every album is worthy of re-evaluation, why they're so influential and why you should rush to assimilate as many of them as you can. It covers the live and studio material released by the parent group, all related projects with a 'Soft' in their name and the essential extracurricular activities of members from 1960 to the present day.

Scott Meze is a psychedelic music obsessive born in Britain but based in Tokyo, the music connoisseur's capital of the world. Soft Machine have been one of the abiding loves of his life ever since a friend played him a tape of Triple Echo while careening his thoroughly chemicalised brain through the hills of South Somerset on the back of a Moto Guzzi 850 Le Mans. You don't ignore an education like that.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meze, Scott

Leseproben

Introduction

This book documents one of the most fascinating stories in rock. It constitutes a checklist of the essential discography for Soft Machine and their offshoots and a selection of albums representing the most relevant of the extracurricular careers of their key personnel. For retrospective live and compilation albums, it lists current best-in-class releases. Around the 19 featured albums it wraps a detailed biographical framework mainly to aid exploration: the available live and session materials by the same line-up, and the solo works you might be interested in.

Before we start, let’s admit it: Soft Machine are a beast of a band. Just on personnel alone, they’re monstrously complicated to assimilate. A decade after their formation in 1966, they had no original members left, and none of those original members have ever re-joined. At that point, the group became a state of mind, and yet defining what made them unique – a centre of gravity that meant they were still a recognizable entity regardless of who was actually performing – had become impossible long before then. With other resilient but constantly churning bands of the period, such as Fairport Convention, Deep Purple, or Yes, the listener can map out the group’s eras, creating a band narrative from each permutation and advance. That’s not possible here. Soft Machine seem somehow to blend together over the years, and their albums – all obstinately numbered up to 1973’s Seven – do not represent a progression in the traditional sense.

Pete Frame’s attempt to organise the band’s history in January 1977, a messy sheet created for the Triple Echo compilation, produced a densely plotted family tree that was as difficult to comprehend as the band themselves, weirdly unfocused, and still only selective. Frame listed 15 line- ups, and his tree omits the various offshoots and diversions that see ever- permeating diffractions of what they made possible. But how could he cram it all on? Soft Machine are an incredibly connective band. You can draw direct lines between them and a wide swathe of British music in the 1960s and beyond.

Some connections are simple enough. Softs member Kevin Ayers leads to Mike Oldfield, Daevid Allen to Steve Hillage, Mark Charig to Robert Fripp. Others are surprising leaps sideways. Ric Sanders went on to become a stalwart of Fairport Convention. Dave MacRae worked with Cass Elliot, Olivia Newton-John, and the Goodies. Alan Wakeman was a long-term sideman for David Essex. Andy Summers, another direct link to Fripp, was of course, a global teen pinup with The Police.

In the incestuous annals of British sessions and fluid band membership, we can also link Soft Machine directly to artists as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon, Jon Lord, Humble Pie, Manfred Mann, Henry Cow, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Brian Eno, Jack Bruce, Elton John, Bert Jansch, Steve Hackett, and Arthur Brown – that’s the pop, blues, folk, prog, and avant-garde scenes right there, and it’s just the start. Want a hotline between Roy Harper and. Uriah Heep? Look no further. Nico and Pink Floyd? One easy step. With 27 official members and a further nine in offshoot bands with a ‘Soft’ in their name, Soft Machine seem to be right in the thick of it. And I haven’t even mentioned the tangled skeins of the Canterbury Scene, the much wider British jazz-fusion scene to which they are central and essential, the array of European players that saw Soft Machine as an ongoing cultural focus and awkward progenitor, and the host of recent bands across the world that have refracted and reinvented their sound.

And yet, let’s go out on the street now and talk to girls in short skirts. Those who aren’t beating you back with their Michael Kors handbags are giving you blank stares, and so, I bet, are the majority of their brothers. Soft Machine remain largely unknown in their native Britain, and they never quite cracked America. Save for one blip in 1970/1971 that saw Third and Fourth nudge the British charts, their sales were always meagre, and the original band’s career barely remained afloat for the 13 years it lasted. But within the niche of their sound world, their stature remains immense. I bet there’s not an issue of Prog magazine today in which someone doesn’t acknowledge their influence.

If the wider world has very little understanding of who Soft Machine are and what they mean, it’s largely the band’s own fault. No other artist in the history of rock has been as pig-headed. During their entire initial run, they eschewed making emotional connection on stage. They didn’t care what people thought of them, they had no interest in compromising to meet commercial values, and they made no effort to lower themselves to the masses. They seemed purposefully designed to be unapproachable and aloof to newcomers, with a sound to which you had to accommodate yourself rather than expect anything resembling a learning curve. Venture into the hall where they were booked in 1970, and you were likely to hear half-hour-long pieces divested of comprehensible structure and played at brain-splitting volume intended to drive you back out into the street. The band themselves wore earplugs.

Soft Machine were named – as a direct provocation – after William Burroughs’s novel, a catalogue of sex fantasies and body horror, but they never claimed outlaw status for bedsit rebels who thought swearing or drug references were the height of transgression. They soon abandoned the conventional games of pop, meaning no hit singles to lodge in your head, no youth anthems, no inviting melodies to hum, precious few songs of any kind, and little of the traditional virtuosity where you can fixate on a musician’s skills as a handle on the larger construct. Even their best seller Third attempts to distance you from the title onwards. It’s a plain-wrapped, hermetically sealed double album with one track per side, and you’re not going to make the least sense of it until you’ve struggled to play it many times over. Any failure to penetrate the disc must be yours alone. The band won’t help. Open the gatefold and all you see is disdain.

If that’s not enough to make the early band seem snooty and unpleasant, there’s the way they baited and then derided the so-called highbrow, whose defences were finally tumbling in the late 1960s. All four group members who first brought the name to media attention in 1966 were from well-off families and attended private schools. Keyboard player Mike Ratledge was an Oxford graduate with classical training. The others – guitarist Allen, bassist Ayers, and drummer Robert Wyatt – thought nothing of hopping around Europe and sunning themselves on Mediterranean islands for months. They had family connections. They believed that a band of intelligent radicals could storm a business as idiotic and piecemeal as pop: one-eyed visionaries in the land of the blind.

They were right. Within six months, they were the coolest band in Britain – or the second-coolest, depending on how you view Syd Barrett’s similarly haughty Pink Floyd. In the Summer of Love, Soft Machine took their theatre of contempt to the French Riviera, where a hipper-than-London glitterati fawned over hour-long performances of ‘We Did It Again’ – a piece that was minimal, monotonous, and meant to menace attendees. The avant-garde thought them delectable.

Of course, the unique times helped, but the band couldn’t have done it without substance behind them. Like Pink Floyd, Soft Machine were the vanguard of a new kind of sophisticated progressive rock that soon wrested fashion away from smiling bands in matching suits and leering men in their 20s hocking teenage highs. Art schools and the air of betterment, hallucinogenic drugs and the opening of mental horizons, and a new permissive attitude all fed into the remarkable luck that Soft Machine were the right band at the right time.

Before Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, before Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats even, they collided rock, soul, and jazz, concocting a tumbling free-form fusion that was richly psychedelic and thoroughly unpredictable – intensely plotted compositions in complex meters one minute, breakneck improvisations the next. By Third, they were the most adventurous of all the progressive bands, pooling into their mix everything from Stockhausen’s radical European skronk to Terry Riley’s American minimalism. And just like the hip in France, the British establishment bent backwards to accommodate them. They were the first rock band to take their cacophony to the classical stage at the Proms, and they refused to temper the onslaught even for an audience in formal dress.

The result was the expected howl of outrage from snobs threatened by barbarians at the gate – and well they should be, since history showed the barbarians soon overran everything the snobs thought they had secreted away for themselves. But after the Proms, Soft Machine declared they were having none of it. They claimed they didn’t like the audience, the attention, or the prestige, and would go back to blowing for longhairs in rock venues, thanks all the same.

But it was a smokescreen. The fact is that in 1970, Soft Machine were less- suited to shift into the cultural establishment than Deep Purple. The obstinate nature of their sound precluded widespread acceptance. The Nice had an act just as extreme, but Keith Emerson wrote classical themes for classical instruments, and the last thing Soft Machine were...