lived with us for a while. Later in the ’60s there were many of us, the ‘baby boom’ generation, all making friends and striving to be creative. It was encouraged, in fact! The city does have an art college, Kent University and other colleges and so there has always been a high student population in a small city. The reality of a special music development having a relationship to the Canterbury area is only founded on the recordings made available first by Soft Machine then by Caravan, written about by the pop music press.


“Still my favourite explanation of the Canterbury Scene is by Robert Wyatt, who says: “It’s the Romans’ fault, they built the first theatre in England in Canterbury 2,000 years ago”. Try as they might with cement and high-rise shopping areas, they could not erase the Roman party dealings of fun, life and death in a theatre now nine feet underground. Canterburied.”


Having recorded their acknowledged masterpiece with Grey And Pink – an album which went gold nine years after its release, and which remains on catalogue even now – the members of Caravan grew restless as the expected and well earned ascension to the next level of success failed to materialise. A disillusioned Dave Sinclair left in August ’71, soon to resurface with Robert Wyatt in Matching Mole. Sinclair would subsequently come and go from Caravan like a mirage, but his initial departure hastened an unavoidable process of unravelling for the original line-up. Richard Sinclair brought in Delivery keyboardist Steve Miller for ’72’s Waterloo Lily, an album which contains numerous priceless moments – not least Sinclair’s ribald, Rabelaisian title track, as serpentine and pugnacious as a superior Jack Bruce composition, and Pye’s epic ‘The Love In Your Eye’ and affectingly sincere ‘The World Is Yours’ – but which lacks the cohesion of yore. Miller and Sinclair were


The Waterloo Lily model circa ’72 with Steve Miller (second right) in for Dave Sinclair.


pulling in a jazzier direction that ran counter to Hastings and Coughlan’s instincts.


“The band were at a low musical output after Dave left the band,” Sinclair admits. “Gone were the days when we would spend many hours together experimenting with music, and it was a time when many musicians were forging ahead with new techniques, rhythms and harmony. Pye, Richard and I were living apart in our separate worlds, and I had been playing with Steve Miller’s brother Phil, and had met up with Lol Coxhill and other London jazz musicians. Enjoying a jazz/blues approach with these musicians, where a lot of improvising and not so familiar harmonies made the music less predictable, was a step away from Grey And Pink. I introduced Steve’s blues approach to Caravan, which only turned out to be a stepping stone to forming a new band with Steve one year later.”


This band, with some personnel tweaks, would become the mighty Hatfield & The North: which is another story for another time. The same is true of Caravan’s career following Miller and Sinclair’s departure in summer ’72, in which an infusion of fresh blood – particularly Geoff Richardson on viola – and the release of ’73’s resolutely direct For Girls Who Grow Plump In The Night gratifyingly expanded the band’s fan base and drawing power as a live act. Then punk rock happened: another story for another time.


When asked if he is still in occasional touch with his Caravan bandmates, Sinclair appears philosophical: “Sorry to say, no contact from Pye and Richard, who I believe have retired from music making. The last happy moments we spent together were in ’90 when the original Caravan reformed to do a TV show and some gigs. One of these was my first visit to Italy, where at a concert in Perugia I met friends from The Fasano


Rotters Club, who invited me to go with my wife Heather to visit the area we now live in.


“It’s a beautiful area, next to a nature reserve. The house is a stone dwelling called a trulli and we are surrounded by fruit and nut trees. There is no noise or air pollution. We have space for our own studios for music, artwork and ceramics and growing our own vegetables. We have made many new music friends here: it’s a very creative atmosphere to be living in, with many fans of Caravan, Hatfield and the Canterbury musicians.


“I saw my cousin Dave recently on a trip to Japan, where he is now living. I was playing some shows with Alex Maguire, Michel Delville and Tony Bianco. Dave came to the show in Osaka and joined me on stage for the first song of my solo set, ‘Disassociation’. This year on my birthday I am playing a concert in The Fasano Kennedy Theatre, near to where I now live. It’s The RS Birthday Band with Jimmy Hastings on sax and flute and David Rees Williams on piano…”


At the start of this piece, I was only being partially facetious with that idealised image of the indivisible unity of a favourite band. In the final analysis, what we’re really talking about is a circle of old friends: and surely that is the most invaluable and irreplaceable aspect of this whole story?


Thanks to Richard and Heather Sinclair, Richard Coughlan, Mick Houghton and Mick Capewell (www.marmalade-skies.co.uk)


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