This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
MARCO ROSSI travels back to a time when prog rock bands roamed the earth and


grown men in floppy hats squabbled over mellotron settings while spotting connections between Bach and The Hobbit.


On the one hand, the way-overdue release of remastered versions of the first two albums by SOFT MACHINE (Polydor) is a cause for the utmost celebration round our way. We’ve


put up the bunting and laid out bowls of Twiglets and cheese footballs, and I’ve even undone two buttons on my cardigan out of sheer esprit de corps. On the other hand, no doubt thanks to


the fucking credit fucking crunch, the albums are only being released in digital format. Now I know this is the coming thing, and in future all recorded music will be downloaded directly into our systems in the form of suppositories or airborne viruses, but I would suggest that a goodly proportion of the target demographic for this release belongs to a generation that can still recall the uncomplicated joy of skinning up on a big old gatefold sleeve; so this decision seems a tad indefensible. The physical artefact is everything for us old ’uns. On another other hand, as a vegetarian


with a beard I definitely have one sandal in the camp which supports carbon footprint reduction, so where does that leave us? Well, it’s all about offsetting. Polydor could surely have pressed up a limited run of 500 Softs albums with scrumptious packaging if they pledged to make a few million less copies of the next release by, say,The Pussycat Dolls? Just a thought.


Anyway, on to the albums themselves,


and what a blast it is to hear them again; particularly as the remastering has subtly blown the dust off of the brush strokes without interfering with that lovely patina of age. The organic avant-pop of the self- titled ’68 debut album in particular benefits greatly from an enhanced dynamic range, even if it could never exactly be mistaken for hi-fidelity. Is there any substance to Kevin Ayers’ contention that producer Tom Wilson spent the entire studio session on the phone to his girlfriends? It certainly makes for a persuasive mental image: “Heyyyy baybeh, what’s happenin’… That noise in the background? Just some pussy-whipped punk-ass Limeys. Baby, guess what? I’ve got a pair of your knickers ohhhnnn…” Mind you, he was American, so he wouldn’t have said knickers. Pants, then. Hang on, Americans call trousers pants… Yes, anyway, the point is that this approach may have resulted in some irretrievably murky mixes, but the most successful tracks – ‘Hope For Happiness’, ‘We Did It Again’, ‘Why Are We Sleeping’ –actually benefit from the sonic mystery, sounding like subversive eastern European surrealist manifestos. The best was yet to come however,


namely Soft Machine Volume Two –originally released in ’69 and an immovable fixture in my “10 favourite albums of all time” list. When Kevin Ayers left the band and went back to bed to dream the songs for his exquisite first solo album, Robert Wyatt and Mike Ratledge teamed up with former Hendrix roadie Hugh Hopper to create Soft Machine’s exuberant all-of-a-piece masterpiece. Equal parts


68


fuzz bass, keening Lowrey organ, plaintive vocalese, cynical self-referential whimsy and dazzling melodic sunspots, it laid the very template for the Canterbury Sound; but this bounteous combination of elements was evidently unsustainable. When Robert Wyatt was somewhat rancorously shown the door in ’71, the last traces of Soft Machine’s quirky charm, warmth and essential humanity went with him. What a pity: they had the formula for smelting pure gold within their grasp, but somehow ended up making Curly Wurlies instead.


After my KEVIN AYERS fest in the last ish, I’d better not go on about this particular Soft Machine émigré too much lest it becomes too pathetically apparent how much I actually


love the man. Suffice to say that Kevin’s mid-’70s Island-era albums The Confessions Of Doctor Dream And Other Stories and Sweet Deceiver have just been reissued –on the Harvest label, confusingly, along with ’76’s return-to-Harvest LP Yes, We Have No Mañanas, –and each is winningly tricked out with copious bonus tracks drawn from contemporaneous John Peel sessions and BBC Radio 1 In Concert appearances. If none of these can quite top the bracing


strangeness of the early albums, there’s still plenty to recommend. Dr Dream has that harrowing 18-minute title track for starters, with Nico bearing it away like a ghost Valkyrie. Sweet Deceiver, meanwhile, successfully veers from ludicrously catchy bantamweights such as ‘Guru Banana’ to the decadent ennui of ‘Toujours La Voyage’, and Mañanas is blessed with the dignified gravitas of ‘Blue’, one of Kevin’s myriad career highs. All three albums boast innumerable examples of guitarist Ollie Halsall’s spontaneous, jaw-dislocating brilliance –worth shelling out for in their own right, before we even get to Kevin’s inimitable songs.


Now, FRUUPP were another one of those bands I missed out on at the time, other than falling prey to the common assumption that their name derived from the sound made by one of those


valedictory farts that makes dogs bark and triggers car alarms four streets away. As it happens, the name was born from the last remaining letters on a sheet of Letraset –although, with splendid perversity, the band added an extra ‘p’. What’s in a name? Plenty, in Fruupp’s


case. Esoteric’s reissue of all four of the band’s albums spanning the ’73-’75 era (Future Legends, Seven Secrets, The Prince Of Heaven’s Eyes, Modern Masquerades) reveals that these wonderful Irish proghounds were sparky, creative souls specialising in restlessly convoluted song structures a la Gentle


Giant. They were handy players –particularly guitarist Vincent McCusker, a speed-of-light prestidigitator in the Ritchie Blackmore vein– but what emerges most strongly is the conviction that they consistently pushed themselves to the very limit of their abilities, to exciting and inspirational effect. ’74’s Seven Secrets is the pick of the bunch: check out the giddy rapture of ‘Elizabeth’ to hear them at their flighty neo-classical best.


In other news, it’s hats-in-the-air time once more thanks to a string of noteworthy jazzy prog reissues. Strange Pleasure and New Dawn (both Esoteric) are by GALLIARD, Deram


Nova’s semi-legendary brassy Brummies whose purposeful, stentorian, heraldic approach –leavened with the occasional burst of sitar –is very much to my taste. Both albums, first issued in ’70, are pretty much indispensable for fans of the form –but New Dawn just aces it for the cool strut of ‘Premonition’ and the expansive, optimistic ‘New Dawn Breaking’.


Meanwhile, Changes (Repertoire) by CATAPILLA finds vocalist Anna Meek howling like Lady Macbeth trapped in an artesian well while the band trance out with saxes, guitars


and keyboards over extended one-chord improvisations behind her. Originally released on Vertigo in ’72, Changes rather wonderfully calls to mind any scene from an already dated Hammer or Amicus production of the era in which someone starts hallucinating at a groovy party, knocking over the lava lamps while everyone’s faces go fisheye and elongate, and voices echo echo echo…


I leave you with the undiluted jazz-rock of THE KEITH TIPPET GROUP and Dedicated To You But You Weren’t Listening (Repertoire) –which neatly draws its title track from


Soft Machine Volume Two, roughly where we came in. Typical of the quixotic marginalia one could find on the Vertigo label in ’71, it comes dressed in a lovely early Roger Dean sleeve and features the cream of British fusionists (Elton Dean, Marc Charig, Gary Boyle, etc) going utterly bananas, forever. ‘Green And Orange Night Park’ sounds like a wild boar covered in itching powder being battered to death with three drum kits. Excellent.


www.esotericrecordings.com www.repertoirerecords.com


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