Monday Long Song

Soft Machine founding member, keyboard player Mike Ratledge passed away last Wednesday at the age of 81. Although he left the band as long ago as 1976, his contributions to their first eight studio albums and countless subsequently released live sets are immense and the stuff of legend. Here's the short lived 1969 version of Soft Machine consisting of Ratledge, Hugh Hopper, Brian Hopper and Robert Wyatt, performing on John Peel's Top Gear. Within months Brian Hopper was out, to be replaced by Elton Dean, thus completing what many consider to be the classic line-up of the band.

Soft Machine - Facelift / Mousetrap / Noisette / Backwards / Mousetrap Reprise

Monday Long Song

Sitting between Soft Machine's earliest psychedelic Canterbury scene fusion odysseys and the contemporary jazz-rock noodlings of their later line-ups, is the sometimes overlooked Karl Jenkins period. These days he is Sir Karl Jenkins, noted classical composer, though at the time he joined the band in 1972 he was a jobbing musician who'd already served as saxophonist for Graham Collier's late 1960s' group, played on the original recording of 'Jesus Christ Superstar', lent his oboe talents to Elton John's 'Tumbleweed Connection' and co-founded the mighty Nucleus with Ian Carr. 

Karl Jenkins' eight year tenure with Soft Machine commenced with 'Six', the album Swedefaced above. It's an ambitious affair, a double LP - one studio and one live. The band rarely sounded more European than they do on the Karl Jenkins composition, 'The Soft Weed Factor'.

Soft Machine - The Soft Weed Factor

Monday Long Song

I dig all the various Soft Machine permutations from across the years to some degree or other, but I'd particularly like to thumb a lift on any passing time machine that could whisk me back to witness the Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper, Elton Dean, Robert Wyatt line-up in full flight. Fortunately, while I'm waiting for someone to invent said time machine, there are far-out clips like this one to keep me grooving.

Monday Long Song(s)

Friday evening front row view

After managing, one way or another, to miss Soft Machine in concert for the entire first half-century of their existence, I'm now playing a belated game of catch-up having seen them twice in the past nine months, most recently last Friday evening at a venue just eight miles up the road from my house. Between tunes, guitar virtuoso John Etheridge mused on the band's long history, it's legacy, illustrious former members and, crucially, the precise nature of their genre - '...Jazz-rock? Prog-rock? Jazz-prog?...'

The original recordings of 'The Tale of Taliesin' and 'Hidden Details' are separated by 42 years, yet feature three of the same personnel - Etheridge (now aged 71) drummer John Marshall (78) and bassist Roy Babbington (79). The current line-up is completed by 55 year-old multi-instrumental whippersnapper Theo Travis, who has played with the band for a mere 13 years, while somehow also maintaining both a solo career and one as a sideman for artists such as King Crimson, David Gilmour, David Sylvian and Steven Wilson. Soft Machine ripped into both of these tunes and many others on Friday evening with all the thrilling inventiveness and attack of players a fraction of their respective ages. It really was a terrific show.

Soft Machine - The Tale of Taliesin (1976)

Soft Machine - Hidden Details (2018)

Monday Long Song

My penultimate concert of 2018 was a date on the 50th Anniversary tour of the legendary Soft Machine - this in spite of the band having actually formed 52 years ago. Robert Wyatt, Daevid Allen and Kevin Ayers passed from the ranks fairly early on and the last original member (Mike Ratledge) left as long ago as 1976. The current line-up consists of bassist Roy Babbington who played with the band from 1971-76 before returning in 2008, guitarist John Etheridge who has been there since 1975, the frail but phenomenal John Marshall, currently in his 46th year behind the drum kit and 'new' boy Theo Travis who has been contributing a bewildering variety of instrumentation since 2006.

'Out-Bloody-Rageous' is a Mike Ratledge composition from the band's 'Third' LP, issued in 1970. The current line-up revisited the tune on-stage the other night and in truncated form on their latest album 'Hidden Details', but here, featuring a line-up of Hugh Hopper, Elton Dean, Robert Wyatt and Ratledge, is the 48 year old 19 minute original in all its glory.

Soft Machine - Out-Bloody-Rageous

The Moon in June

A little over a week ago, our mutual blogging chum Alyson (of What's it All About?) posted the latest instalment of her fascinating series in which she celebrates every full moon throughout the course of the year - the one due last Thursday (June 28th) was apparently known to Native Americans as the Strawberry Moon. So far I've managed to miss all of the previous full moons in 2018 thanks to either inclement weather, work or simply by being asleep, but, on Thursday evening, as I wearily climbed the wooden hills to Bedfordshire, I glanced out the window and there it was, hanging in the inky blackness, very large and certainly somewhat unusual in colour. I grabbed my faithful point and press and fired off these couple of shots to capture the moment. Perhaps not so much strawberry, as tangerine!

I can't imagine that Alyson will use today's tune at anytime during the course of her series, particularly as the month in question has now passed. 'The Moon in June' originally appeared on the third Soft Machine LP in 1970 and featured a semi-improvised vocal by Robert Wyatt that alluded heavily to an adulterous romantic fling. This version, however, was recorded for John Peel's Top Gear radio programme and features a completely different, though equally rambling lyric from Wyatt, this time concerning The Soft Machine themselves, their contemporary pop-star pals and previous appearances at the BBC and on Peel's show.

'...so to all our mates like Kevin, Caravan, the old Pink Floyd allow me to recommend 'Top Gear' despite its extraordinary name yes, playing, playing now is lovely here in the BBC...' 

'...music-making still performs a normal function background noise for people eating and talking and drinking and smoking that's all right by us don't think that we're complaining after all it's only leisure time, isn't it?...' 

Soft Machine - The Moon in June (BBC Version)