The Soft Machine – Volume One
Meanwhile, over at, rock writer and critic, Sid Smith’s excellent Postcards From The Yellow Room blog, a recent extended podcast featured a discussion and reminisces of the latter day Soft Machine albums.
Unfortunately – for me, anyways – the latter day Soft Machine albums fall largely into the unholy bracket that is jazz-fusion. Man alive! Jazz, and all its derivatives, one of the few musical genres with the potency to send us at HFoS Towers into a prolonged sleep, one from which we’re often too afraid to stir, for fear it might still be playing. Very often it is; such is the nature of a beast notorious for getting permanently stuck in the neutral gear of tedium.
Nevertheless, the talk was a hugely entertaining one, as are all of Mister Smith’s podcasts (as well as a great source for some obscure musical finds) and can be heard right here. Don’t forget to subscribe.
Talk of The Soft Machine’s later releases inspired me to dust off the band’s first two albums for a well deserved airing. This was before the unsavoury jazz-element had taken a grip and the debut album, called The Soft Machine but later known as Volume One, is, for me, the best thing these onetime pioneers of the British underground put out.
For a start, Volume One features the original members (minus Gong’s Daevid Allen), Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge and Kevin Ayers. For a band that, by the time of their final studio release – 1981′s much maligned The Land of Cockayne – had changed its membership 100%, this has to be the essential line-up. And that has nothing to do with Head Full of Snow being unapologetic fans of Kevin Ayers’ early solo releases.
In 1968, The Soft Machine were delivering an eclectic form of avant-garde, psychedelic progressive rock, straight to the lugholes of a swinging London, populated by the fortunate few who didn’t have to work for a living. Unlike The Pink Floyd, perhaps their biggest rivals for the underground crown, they completely bypassed the mainstream, but it’s hard not to be impressed by Volume One’s hectic brilliance.
Not a brilliance that will find a cure for cancer, but one that ensures it sounds just as innovatively opulent today as it did 42 years ago.
Truth be told, nobody’s ever going to accuse Robert Wyatt of being the best singer in the world – although his version of Elvis Costello’s ‘Shipbuilding‘ from 1982, with its lyrics concerning the return of shipbuilding to communities vandalised by a heartless Tory government (sound familiar?) to aid in the upkeep of their vote-winning Falklands War, is one of the more powerfully moving attacks on Thatcher from that cursed decade – but his voice is memorably enchanting throughout, as is his off-the-wall drumming.
‘Hope For Happiness’ is possibly one of the most invigorating openings to an album a drunk man could hear, with its multitracked vocals coming at you from every angle; but when the entire record slips into the musical landslide of this first song, you know you’re tentatively stepping on sound sonic territory. Well, if you’re me you do.
Everything about Volume One is right and even if you choose not to listen to the bizarrely whimsical lyrics, Mike Ratledge’s fluid fingering of a keyboard is rarely bettered. He might’ve come across as a bit of a miserable bastard, but the magic he weaves on the organ is indisputable.
Po-faced keyboardists aside, we cannot recommend this album enough. And if that doesn’t tempt the tentative, well there’s always Kevin Ayers’ dulcet tones, featured on ‘Why Are We Sleeping’ and, if you get hold of the right reissue, the 7″ B-side, ‘Feelin, Reelin, Squealin’. God bless.
Volume One by The Soft Machine is available to buy from Amazon.co.uk
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