Over time, The Wilde Flowers gravitated towards a more soul-influenced direction at the behest of Wyatt and Hastings: the band’s line-up continued to evolve like an organism, with Ayers, Wyatt and the Hoppers gradually breaking away and Dave Sinclair joining. “He was originally our bass player,” remembers Pye Hastings, “but after a week he said he wasn’t happy in that role and he turned up with a keyboard, a Vox Continental.” Richard Sinclair re-entered the picture – “I was just available at the time and decided yes, this is a good idea” – and, as Hastings sees it, “no one wanted a soul band anymore so we decided to write our own material, and Caravan was really born at that point.”


In the first instance, Caravan were the very model of symbiotic interdependence. Harking back to the fanciful image at the start of this piece, they did in fact live in the same house for a while. “We started out as a group of friends, wanting to write our own music, living together for six months in a house in Westgate Terrace, Whitstable,” says Sinclair. “Our friends Soft Machine, having made their first LP, were in the USA on tour with Jimi Hendrix. We had been left all of the Softs’ backline equipment – Marshall amps with 4x12 cabs – and Hugh Hopper, who was roadying for the Softs, left me his Fender bass. Cousin Dave had the Hammond A100 which his dad bought him. We made one hell of a din together, and listened to many music recordings on Pye’s Ferrograph reel-to-reel tape recorder.”


What were the ingredients that seasoned the stew? “We were listening to most of the things that were going on,” notes Coughlan, “things like The Electric Flag and Vanilla Fudge, and working out what we were going to do ourselves. There was a lot of rehearsal, a lot of time spent just playing instruments.”


Sinclair recalls “listening to Soft Machine, Brian Auger, Hendrix, Don Ellis, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Wes Montgomery, Spirit, Frank Zappa, Chris McGregor, and many more popular artists of the time. For many nights we would listen to the soundtrack of Magical Mystery Tour, recorded from the TV.” Rather sweetly, Sinclair adds: “my main influences were Pye, David and Richard C.”


In short order, Caravan struck out for London’s psychedelic clubs. “We were coming in on the tail end of a lot of stuff, end of ’67, early ’68,” reflects Coughlan. “The whole hippie thing was almost over then. We were very pleased to be doing it, although a lot of places like Middle Earth and UFO were basically finishing up round about that time.”


Was it nevertheless as magical an era as those of us who weren’t there imagine it to have been? “It was a fantastic period of time with lots of craziness,” confirms Sinclair. “After eight gigs in south east Kent we performed a concert in London and then were written about in International Times and were offered recording contracts. After a few weeks


the grounds and then it started to get a bit cold by October, so we erected the tents inside the hall. Mine was over a radiator. I remember every Wednesday we would take the tents down so the vicar could run the youth club in the evening.”


Late summer ’68 also saw the band entering Advision Studios to record their mysterious, miraculous and mystifyingly unsung debut album. In the sleeve notes for The World Is Yours, Mark Powell suggests that Caravan deserves to be feted alongside Piper, SF Sorrow and Music In A Doll’s House in the pantheon of UK psych landmarks, and he’s absolutely right. The whacking, well- rehearsed confidence of the band’s performances offsets the softly impressionistic shimmer of Pye’s melodies: vaulting sprites of the upper atmosphere such as ‘Place Of My Own’, later to become the band’s debut single release in January ’69, and ‘Magic Man’. The latter track features a charmingly reflexive Canterbury Scene signifier: “Soft Machines, Hearts Club bands and all, are welcome here with me.” The practice of penning droll self-referential lyrics among the Canterbury bands and their


trying to stay in London, we took up an offer with the Verve label, and moved back to Canterbury to carry on with making music.”


The freshly established London office of Verve had indeed signed the band after an abortive episode wherein Pye Hastings had taken Caravan’s sole demo tape to Chris Blackwell at Island Records, and Blackwell had asked the bemused vocalist, “Who’s the crap singer?” Blackwell foresaw a future for the band as an instrumental outfit in a similar vein to The Nice, but it was budding producer Tony Cox, who had seen Caravan perform at Middle Earth, who introduced Caravan to Ian Ralfini and Martin Wyatt of Robbins Music and thereby facilitated the publishing deal which led to Verve.


An enduring legend in Caravan lore concerns the band, with their £7-per-head retainer from Robbins Music, setting up camp in their rehearsal space – Graveney Village Hall – “for a good six months” according to Coughlan. As Sinclair describes it, “in the late summer months we camped in


affiliates is an intriguing and delightful tic: one hears it in ‘Why Am I So Short’ from Soft Machine’s debut album (“I’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pam”), ‘Thank You Pierrot Lunaire’ from their ’69 follow-up (“In his organ solos, he feels round the keyboards…”) and thereafter in any number of Cantuarian touchstones (Egg’s ‘Visit To Newport Hospital’, ‘Licks For The Ladies’ by Hatfield & The North, etc). When asked where or with whom this cheering practice originated, Sinclair suggests “possibly the audiences always asking about all the others! What’s wrong with supporting your mates?” Hear hear.


Elsewhere on Caravan, ‘Love Song With Flute’ memorably introduces Pye’s gifted flautist/saxophonist brother Jimmy Hastings into the equation, while Richard Sinclair’s looming ‘Grandma’s Lawn’ provides cousin Dave with the opportunity to execute a wonderfully spidery opening run on his Hammond, rattling with skeletal key click at the front of the notes. Dave also excels by slamming out the darkest blues- gothic chord voicings this side of Vincent Crane and Hugh Banton over the spellbinding closed-loop riff of ‘Where But For Caravan Would I?” with its implacably alternating bars of 6/4 and 5/4. Tony Cox’s production – without recourse to phasing, backwards tapes or cross-channel panning – still manages to be cavernously psychedelic, with the most monumental valve compression deliriously draped over everything: listen to it sucking away at the cymbals at the end of the Syd Barrettesque ‘Cecil Rons’, for example. What was the band’s opinion of all this at the time? “Well, I was just thinking about that today,” muses Coughlan. “It was really sort of over-produced, and I remember at the time none of us were very pleased with how it turned out. I think it was the only thing Tony Cox


had ever done. There was too much reverb on things. I don’t mind it so much these days… I’ve sort of got used to it.”


Caravan was destined to abruptly disappear from record shop shelves when the London branch of Verve ceased trading, necessitating a frustrating trudge to another label. Scant momentum was lost, however, as the band’s failsafe reputation on the domestic and European university circuit was already burgeoning by the time a deal was inked with Decca. If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You, featuring the band framed in the foliage of Holland Park on the sleeve, emerged on the Decca imprint in September ’70 and stole the hearts of discerning punters forever more with the inclusion of the band’s signature and best-known composition, the 14-minute ‘For Richard’. Originating from Richard Sinclair’s shadowboxing bass riff, the piece was teased out into a carefully apportioned group huddle, with Pye’s pillowy introductory motif drawing the listener on like a siren.


While the hedge-clipping solo on ‘Hello, Hello’ rivals the Bonzos’ ‘Trouser Press’ as regards imaginative recycling of the


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