Fabulously Flamboyant Friday: When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth Pt. 2 – Canterbury

Welcome back my friends to the flamboyance that never ends, as Fabulously Flamboyant Friday sashays up to the crease to deliver yet another groin-polished googly from the gasworks-end of musical magnificence.

I’m afraid, dear reader, it’s time once more to cower behind the sofa as we continue our examination of that most divisive, derided and ridiculed of musical genres – progressive rock: sparkly capes, triple-necked guitars, inflatable dinosaurs, concerts on ice, off-the-scale levels of bombast, pretentiousness, pomposity and, of course, lashings of tea. So be afraid, dear reader. Be very afraid indeed…

In part one of this series we examined the faltering first steps of progressive rock via the prism of the rapidly shifting musical and social scenes of Great Britain in the mid-to-late 1960s. A time when British and European bands – bands with reputations built largely upon playing music derived from American rock’n’roll, R&B, blues and soul – began looking to their own musical heritage and started to incorporate elements of western classical and traditional music into their writing.

Our journey considered the early steps of symphonic and psychedelic rock, and concluded with what many consider to be the first genuine prog rock album: In The Court Of The Crimson King, the 1969 debut album by King Crimson. Our tale however, was a very London-centric one. One that neglected a key period, location and some very important players in our prog rock story. The place is Canterbury, the time is 1965 and the pivotal (if somewhat obscure) artists are The Wilde Flowers.

A few weeks ago I travelled to Kent on a hugely enjoyable progtastic pilgrimage to watch performances by Caravan, Soft Machine and the mighty Hawkwind. After my ears stopped bleeding (Hawkwind do not faff about when it comes to lashings of volume) I wandered into the nearby cradle of English Christianity: Canterbury – a town still redolent with the spirits of Chaucer, Beckett and Marlowe.

I decided to have a nose around the old Cathedral Quarter, treated myself to a quick hunt in the town’s excellent (if rather pricey) second-hand record shops and thoroughly enjoyed a splendid day of a-wandering and meandering around this venerable old town. However, this kind of mission will inevitably leave a chap sore of foot, empty of belly and, above all, thirsty. So, on a beautiful late summer’s evening in the glorious garden of England, I settled into The Old Buttermarket Inn (where they serve a very creditable rabbit pie and mash), began my exploration of their splendid selection of ales (Harvey’s Sussex Best was the clear winner) and pondered the importance of Canterbury to the development of progressive rock music.

As noted above, the first part of this series was very London-centric. But that’s not particularly surprising, because Britain’s music scenes are often city based: Liverpool’s pop explosion, Birmingham’s heavy metal scene, the Madchester movement and of course the musical melting pot of London. And, in Canterbury, during the late 1960s and early ’70s, a similar process took place when a loosely aligned bunch of musicians, inspired as much by jazz, folk, church hymns and classical music as they were by rock and roll, embarked on a path that would establish a series of bands such as Caravan, Soft Machine, Gong and Hatfield & The North, that would prove to be hugely influential in the development of prog rock.

Our Canterbury tale begins, appropriately enough, on a Friday evening in January, 1965, in the bar of the Bear And Key pub on Whitstable High Street. The band making their live debut that night were called The Wilde Flowers – a fairly short-lived group from nearby Canterbury. Their line-up included Kevin Ayers, Richard Sinclair, Brian Hopper, Hugh Hopper, Robert Wyatt and – watching from the audience – Pye Hastings. For any student of the Canterbury scene, that roll call is seminal (stop sniggering at the back). Rock history tells us The Wilde Flowers’ debut was a shambolic success, but it was also the first step on a journey that would put Canterbury very firmly on the UK’s musical map and make it a cornerstone in the development of prog rock.

It’s a genuine shame The Wilde Flowers couldn’t hold things together, because that group contained a serious amount of musical talent. But, by the summer of 1966, The Wilde Flowers had split into two distinct bands: Soft Machine and Caravan. Soft Machine were loud, raucous and in-your-face, with lots of distorted organ and lashings of fuzz bass, all played via their tortured and heavily over-driven 100-watt Hiwatt and Marshall stacks. They very quickly became the darlings of the London underground scene, joining Pink Floyd as regulars at the legendary UFO club in Tottenham Court Road (and later at The Chalk farm Roundhouse).

Soft Machine were responsible for what is now generally regarded as the first record release of the Canterbury scene: Love Makes Sweet Music (1967). It was their first single and one that features none other than Jimi Hendrix on guitar. Soft Machine never really cracked the UK market in a big way, but they developed a tremendous following in mainland Europe, particularly in France, and toured successfully in the US with The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Unfortunately, they also managed to shed original members at an alarming rate.

Daevid Allen was first to go. The Australian musician had been knocking around Canterbury since the early ’60s and was one of the founder members of Soft Machine. However, after one of the band’s very early trips to mainland Europe in the late 60s, Allen was refused readmission to the UK on the grounds of visa irregularities (how times have changed) and was forced to return to France. He faffed about for a bit, dodged a few arrest warrants, and eventually formed the hugely influential Gong (with the poet Gilli Smyth, his partner from his early Canterbury days and an occasional performer with Soft Machine).

Daevid Allen’s Gong were soon producing an eclectic mix of jazz, space and psychedelic rock – a splendid mix indeed and one that worked well, both commercially and artistically. The high water mark of their career probably occurred between 1973 and ’75, when (inspired by Bertrand Russell’s famous teapot analogy) they released their Flying Teapot Trilogy: The Flying Teapot, Angel’s Egg and You, which told the somewhat incoherent tale of Zero the Hero and the Pot Head Pixies from the planet Gong (listen dude, it was the ’70s, OK? You weren’t there, man. You weren’t there…).

Anyway, Kevin Ayres was next out of the door. He didn’t enjoy touring or life on the road and soon left Soft Machine for a pretty decent solo career. After his departure, Soft Machine began their gradual metamorphosis into a splendid jazz-rock fusion band. They probably hit their creative peak with their third album, the somewhat unimaginatively titled Third (1970), and their move towards jazz-rock accelerated after they’re third founding member, Robert Wyatt, jumped ship in ’71.

Robert Wyatt eventually formed his own band, Matching Mole (a pun on the French translation of Soft Machine), and was preparing for the release of his second solo album when he unfortunately fell from the window of an apartment in Maida Vale. Astonishingly, he managed to survive a four storey fall, but sadly he fractured his spine and has been paralysed from the waist down ever since. Soft Machine produced some magnificent work in the first half of the 70s, but by 1976 (when Mike Ratledge departed for a solo career) they had no original members left. Nevertheless, they had made their mark as key players in, and founding members of, the Canterbury scene.

In contrast to the often raucous Soft machine, Caravan remained a largely Canterbury-based band and developed a gentler, whimsical and more bucolic approach to composition and performance. One that would come to define their career and (for many observers) one that delivered the definitive Canterbury sound. Their eponymous debut album of hazily English psychedelia was released in October 1968 and received tremendous radio support from the BBC’s John Peel. They followed this up with three classic albums that perfectly illustrated the distinct nature of the Canterbury scene: If I Could Do It Again, I’d Do It All Over You (1970), In The Land Of Grey And Pink (1971), and Waterloo Lily (1972).

They did plan to name one of their subsequent albums as Toys In The Attic, but unfortunately the American rock band Aerosmith beat them to it. So they decided to rename their album with the naughtily cheeky spoonerism, Cunning Stunts (inspired by the punchline of a joke about the difference between a magician’s wand and a policeman’s truncheon: one is for cunning stunts and the other is for stunning….). Bizarrely, in a tale worthy of the legendary UK rockers Spinal Tap (the band who quite frankly taught Led Zeppelin everything they know), there was an artwork mix-up during translation for the Belgium market and the album was printed and actually charted with their cunning spoonerism embarrassingly reversed.

And while we’re on the subject of Canterbury bands and their musical sojourns on the continent, another key event we need to consider in the development of prog rock took place in Belgium in 1969: the Festival Actuel. This festival took place in the small town of Amougies and featured Caravan, Soft Machine, Daevid Allen, Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, The Nice, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and many more musicians from the worlds of rock, pop and jazz.

Over the years I’ve read a number of accounts that seem to suggest this event was pivotal in the development of prog rock. This supposition is built upon the fact that a great deal of musical cross-fertilisation took place at this festival, with many band members joining other musicians on stage to interact, improvise and swap ideas. The one I’d really liked to have witnessed was the Pink Floyd set where Frank Zappa apparently joined them onstage for a raucous 25-minute improvised performance of Interstellar Overdrive.

By the early-to-mid 70s, the Canterbury scene had broadened out to include several more like-minded bands, including the aforementioned Gong, Spirogyra, Egg, Henry Cow, Hatfield and the North, National Health, Slap Happy and a by now solo Kevin Ayres. Accordingly, the influence of the scene began to spread and draw in other like-minded musicians. Some of the notable ones included the superbly talented guitarist Steve Hillage (who was studying at the Canterbury campus of the University of Kent), the multi-instrumentalist wunderkind, Mike Oldfield, and the composer and multi-instrumentalist David Bedford.

Hillage joined Daevid Allen’s Gong for their most creatively successful period, before leaving to enjoy a splendid solo career that continues to this day (I saw him last year with his current outfit, System 7, and he was still on blistering form). Mike Oldfield signed up to play bass guitar for Kevin Ayres’ backing band, The Whole World, and of course went on to record the planet-rogeringly successful Tubular Bells and lay the financial foundations of Richard Branson’s Virgin empire. It is instructive to note that when Oldfield was asked to perform Tubular Bells for the BBC arts programme, Second House, he surrounded himself with many of his fellow musicians from the Canterbury scene. David Bedford, like Oldfield, also joined Kevin Ayres’ band. Bedford signed up as both a musician and as Kevin’s orchestrator, and went on to enjoy a splendid solo career that straddled beautifully the genres of rock and avant garde classical music. Bedford eventually settled down as the Composer in Residence at Queen’s College, London.

Another early prog rock band that needs to be mentioned here are Camel. Although they were originally formed in Guildford, they became closely associated with Canterbury, simply because so many of the musicians that drifted in and our of Camel’s line-up came from the original Canterbury scene. Caravan members were particularly prone to this journey, so much so that the British music press began to jokingly refer to the two bands as Caramel. This apparently did not go down particularly well with either camp, but they did eventually admit it was a fair cop when a number of ex-Camel and ex-Caravan members joined forces to tour and play the music of both bands under the name of Mirage.

Of course, the Canterbury scene came to a juddering halt with the mid-70s arrival of punk rock. A few bands continued and some great work emerged. But, for about the next twenty years, the Canterbury scene remained, for the most part, the preserve of rock geeks and prog nerds. However, somewhere around the mid ’90s, that began to change. A new generation of music fans and critics started to rediscover the original Canterbury scene and began to re-assess the influence these fine and long-neglected musicians had had on the initial development of progressive rock music. And the conclusion they reached was that its influence was significant indeed

That being said, so diverse was the original Canterbury scene (and trust me – we’ve barely scratched the surface in this article) that it’s almost impossible to pin down a coherent narrative description of its diverse and eclectic musical style. However, it is possible to nominate a few highlights that can stand as exemplars for the scene. For me, Soft Machine, Caravan and Hatfield and the North were the outstanding bands to emerge from this kaleidoscopic musical melange. If I had to choose just one, I’d probably say the Hatters take first prize with their two magnificent mid-70s albums, Hatfield and the North (1974) and The Rotters’ Club (1975). Chuck in Soft Machine’s Third (1970), any of Caravan’s classic trio of early 70s albums and Robert Wyatt’s wonderful solo album, Rock Bottom (1974) and I’d say you’d have a pretty representative sample and a useful starting point for an exploration of this utterly magnificent genre.

Anyway, I think that’s probably quite enough of my prattling for one evening. We’ll pick this tale up again in part three, when we’ll take a plank-spankingly long look at prog’s golden period of the early 1970s. But, for now, I think we’ll wrap things up with a performance of… Wait… What’s that you say..? How can we possibly have a progtastic Friday without serving up a substantial portion of The Blessed Phil? At least twenty minutes, you say? Well, now that you mention it, that’s a very good idea; a very good idea indeed. And after all, I can always say that GQ made me do it…