The ’van Mk I in 1968. L-R: Dave Sinclair, Richard Coughlan, Pye Hastings and Richard Sinclair. N


O MATTER HOW LONG IN the tooth one gets, the desire to believe in the indivisible unity of a favourite band is hard to


surrender. In an ideal imaginary world, one pictures them forever living in the same house – or groovy pad, preferably – wearing matching shirts and driving around in a car with the band’s logo airbrushed on the doors. This is patently an unworkable fantasy for any number of insurmountable reasons: but, you know, a warm and respectful rapprochement among the ex- members would do just fine.


It was never my intention to kick over a can of worms; but in ferreting through the early history of Caravan, cardinals of the Canterbury Scene, following the release of the pretty-damn-definitive 4-CD box set The World Is Yours: The Anthology 1968-1976, I appear to have inadvertently done just that. “So they’re releasing ME again, are they, without my permission or involvement?” says a wry Richard Sinclair from his home in southern Italy. “Have ‘they’ changed the titles again so I don’t get any royalties, or a mention in the co-writing? Do I get a copy?”


This is more than a little dismaying. The original members of Caravan – bassist/ vocalist Richard, his keyboardist cousin Dave Sinclair, guitarist/vocalist Pye Hastings and drummer Richard Coughlan – are the heroes of this particular piece. With all due respect to latter-day incarnations of the band, the original line-up is generally considered – not without reason – to be that rarest of hybrids boasting both bees’ knees and dogs’ bollocks, and I’d far rather see


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them linking arms and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ than being sundered by unresolved business machinations. I hope, trust and pray that this particular Canterbury tale will have a fair, equable and amicable denouement: for now, let’s drift back to less complicated times and consider the origins of this most beloved and beguiling of bands.


In any discussion of the nominal Canterbury Scene, The Wilde Flowers are the fulcrum, being the ensemble responsible for pollinating both Soft Machine and Caravan – and, by extension, Matching Mole and Hatfield & The North. The Wilde Flowers were evidently rooted in fertile soil: at one time or another, the line-up featured brothers Brian and Hugh Hopper, Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers, from which collective mulch coalesced the nascent Soft Machine. More pertinently where this piece is concerned, however, the four original members of Caravan had all been Wilde Flowers at some point. Richard Sinclair sets the scene: “The parents of Hugh and Brian Hopper would go out at the weekends to see my father play with his dance band at The Oddfellows Club in the centre of Canterbury and at various venues and hotels around the east Kent coast. They told my dad that their sons were wanting to start a group and needed a guitar player, and so it was my father who took me to the Hopper house – Tanglewood in Giles Lane – with his Selmer Truvoice PA amp and my Hofner Verithin guitar to meet the Hoppers, who were hairy, bearded ‘beatniks’, a few years older than me.”


Over the years, the adjectives “legendary” and “seminal” have attached themselves to


The Wilde Flowers like barnacles to a well- travelled hull. One wonders whether they were, in fact, Canterbury’s local kings of the hill at the time or whether this story has inevitably grown in the telling?


“There were bands from every school and every college playing covers of the popular rhythm and blues music of that time,” recalls Sinclair. “The dream then was to afford a Gibson 335 or an EBO bass or an SG, or a Fender Strat or a Fender Jazz Bass. The gigs we played were in pubs, clubs, village halls, schools and the Art College, and also Canterbury football ground. I only managed six months before I escaped to the safety of Canterbury Art College – making space in the band for Pye Hastings.”


Shortly before Hastings fetched up in the band via his friendship with Kevin Ayers, trainee dental technician and drummer Richard Coughlan was invited to join by Hugh Hopper. “We started to rehearse up at Hugh and Brian’s house,” says Coughlan, “along with Robert Wyatt. Basically, I was brought in because Robert Wyatt wanted to stand out the front and sing rather than play the drums as well.” Coughlan – nowadays the landlord of The Cricketers in Canterbury and the only member of Caravan other than Hastings to have weathered every line-up change since their inception in January 1968 – drily recalls that “The Wilde Flowers actually weren’t very popular, to tell you the truth. I suppose we did about one gig every fortnight. We used to play sort of jazz numbers, like Dizzy Gillespie, and we’d change them around and try to make them danceable… As I said, we weren’t very popular.”


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