implements of moribund suburbia, the album’s genially suggestive title track was deemed catchy enough – despite its cunningly off-centre 7/4 lope – to merit release as a single, leading to a scarcely- believable appearance by Caravan on Top Of The Pops. Coughlan notes that “Marmalade were on as well, I can’t think who else was there. I know that Tony Blackburn was the man in charge. I don’t remember much about it except Pan’s People, for some reason.”


“We were with the Terry King agency at this time,” says Sinclair, “and Terry organised cash for us to buy some colourful clothes from King’s Road – crushed velvet bell-bottomed trousers, leather jackets with tassels – so we looked the part as we mimed to the soundtrack. I can remember the make-up feeling like a death mask, and the most interesting part of the session was listening to the sexy Pan’s People dance routine sounding like a herd of elephants on the wooden stage…”


Up until this point, Pye Hastings had brought the majority of the band’s material to the table, as Sinclair recalls. “Pye used to come up with most of the ideas that got heard because he was actually interested to sit down and complete them.” For Caravan’s third album, however – April ‘71’s flawless In The Land Of Grey And Pink – it was Richard and Dave Sinclair who stepped up to the plate. Richard penned the inscrutable title track, the measured, elegiac ‘Winter Wine’ (“probably the finest song he has ever written,” as Hastings once observed) and the frivolous ‘Golf Girl’. The latter has become another of the brightest stars in Caravan’s


26


firmament, a persuasively elliptical love song built upon simple yet arresting imagery (“It started raining golf balls, and she protected me”). A fantastic, retina-bothering clip of the band performing the song on German TV’s Beat Club in full op-art migraine vision is available for all to cherish on YouTube. Dave supplies funky Mellotron – one of the precious few occasions in recorded history in which that adjective can be applied to prog’s sepulchral gloom box – while his own mammoth composition, the 23-minute side two-straddling ‘Nine Feet Underground’, is a veritable showcase for his distinctive wah- wah and fuzzbox assisted lines, subtly shifting tonal palette and highly advanced sense of spiralling melody. I’d marry that sound if I wasn’t already spoken for.


Pye’s sole composition on the album, ‘Love To Love You (And Tonight Pigs Will Fly)’, refines and perfects the winning meld of instantaneous appeal, lightness of spirit and elegant sort-of-rock (Caravan were always somehow more than rock, even when they rocked) he and the band had perpetrated from the outset. Taken as a total piece of work, Grey And Pink represents something of a high water mark for the Mk 1 Caravan and “Canterbury Scene” recordings on the whole – if you accept the generic term. One is minded to ask whether the Canterbury bands themselves felt that the media made too much of the perceived similarities between them? “Probably, we are all different from each other,” reflects Sinclair. “But it’s flattering to have been recognised as a ‘movement’ nevertheless: we have Pete Frame’s family trees to thank for that! I can say that the


Canterbury Scene was significant because of my personal associations to the place. I know that it’s not the same for many of the other players, who are tired of the label…”


To these ears, however, it seems likely that the psychogeography of Canterbury must have factored into the music to a significant degree. “Yeah, I think so,” says Coughlan. “The music was conceived out in the countryside, and of course we were drinking in the local pubs – and here I am back again! It’s the first time I’ve lived in Canterbury for 40-odd years. It’s a very young city these days because of the university, which wasn’t around when we started. You look down the high street and everybody’s 25. It’s better now: it was quite a staid place when we were young.”


Sinclair fondly ruminates on the matter: “For my part, there was a family history of music making, firmly rooted in Canterbury. My father and my grandfather – both Richard Sinclair – performed in south east Kent, and myself, RS the third, was born in 9 Downs Road, Canterbury. My grand - parents trod the boards of the Victorian music halls as musical entertainers. My dad gave me a ukulele when I was three years old and set me off with ‘She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain’… Mum played the piano and we listened to music every day on the radio as I was growing up, and we would go out to watch my Dad play.


“There was great acceptance for the music in our home. David, Pye and I started music together, playing in our front room, and Pye


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