The Canterbury scene

The news that Mike Ratledge has died knocks away another of the props on which my formative years were built. Ratledge was a founder member and keyboard player for the Soft Machine, a man whose furious, buzzing organ sound – somewhere between a frentic soprano sax and a power saw – burned itself into the brain, much as did his extraordinary miserablist look. Steel helmet hair, dark glasses for shutting out the world, an air of intellectual disdain that you might expect from the Oxford philosophy graduate with a taste for austere avant garde jazz that he was. Here, the look suggested, was someone who did not want and did not need to know you.

The Soft Machine came from Canterbury. By some strange alchemical combination of time, geography, personality and opportunity, the Kent town became the centre of experimental music in the 1960s and 70s, the like of which did not quite exist anywhere else and quite probably could not have done. While in London, Liverpool and Dartford (just up the road from Canterbury and home to the Rolling Stones) the nation’s creative youth were energised by American rhythm and blues, in Canterbury the pupils of Simon Langton grammar school exchanged Cecil Taylor albums, practised irregular time signatures, experimented with tape loops and read Alfred Jarry. They liked rock and pop too, but there was something about Canterbury’s down-at-heel gentility that that made them seek out sounds that gave them a necessary degree of ironic detachment.

It also had something to do with grammar schools. Designed to train the minds of the promising middle classes, selective grammar schools are an anomaly in the current British educational system, but they survive somehow in Kent, where a fifth of all those in the UK are to be found. They provided a safe environment in which to rebel. I went to a grammar school in nearby Faversham, by which point the pupils were listening to Eddie and the Hot Rods rather than Cecil Taylor, more’s the pity. I much preferred the music that had come out of Canterbury the generation before me. It was music that broke free from the conventions but was whimsical about having done so. It was rebellion for quiet minds.

The Soft Machine – Mike Ratledge, Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt – on French TV show ‘Ce Soir en Danse’ in 1967, playing ‘A Certain Kind’,’Save Yourself’, ‘Priscilla’, ‘Lullabye Letter’ and ‘Hope for Happiness’

There was also a local pride involved, inevitably. These people came from near by; they lived near by. You might run into them in the street. When I had a Saturday job in Canterbury I nearly sold some floor tiles to the bass player with Caravan, the sister band of the Soft Machine who were most closely associated with the area and whose jazzy, melodic sounds, combined with regular local shows, made them a firm favourite. Something about a music that was progressive yet modest, catchy yet consistently uncommercial, that was peculiarly English in a way that folk rock thought that it ought to be but wasn’t really – you knew where you were with the Canterbury scene.

There were many bands and solo artists linked to that scene. Few were Canterbury natives, some probably never came within miles of the town, but such was the movement of personnel from one band to the next, with a commonality of ideas and ideals, that you could automatically recognise the taste of it. You pored through the credits of the albums on display at Whitstable’s Rock Bottom and Faversham’s Gatefield Sounds and would decide that album by someone you’d not come across before now that had a saxophone contribution from that Canterbury-ish band you liked, so there had to be something worth listening to. And that’s where the Saturday job money went.

The Daevid Allen Trio, Wilde Flowers, Soft Machine, Caravan, Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, Gong, Lol Coxhill, Egg, Uriel, Arzachel, Gilgamesh, Hatfield and the North, John Greaves, Henry Cow, Mike Oldfield, Robert Wyatt, the National Health, Hugh Hopper, Soft Heap, Caravan of Dreams, Nucleus, Delivery, Quiet Sun, Matching Mole, Steve Hillage, Khan, In Cahoots…

As widely different in style and fortunes as such names were, they all had a linking sound. The jazz influence was most obvious, often manifesting itself in rambling keyboard solos from the likes of Mike Ratledge, David Sinclair, Dave Stewart and Steve Miller. There was the taste for quirky time signatures, long instrumental numbers broken up into different parts (itself a suggestion of classical music influences), silly song titles from people who didn’t really have much to say about the word beyond a post-hippyish philosophy of calm, and a sense of self-mockery even while you were serious about the music. Occasionally a Canterbury Scene acolyte broke out into fame, most notably Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and the Adiemus record of Karl Jenkins, who took over from Mike Ratledge as the lead figure in Soft Machine. But such New Age-ish music was too insipid to qualify.

Decades on, and the music of the Canterbury scene sounds lost in another world. It was progressive music that never progressed. It was folk music for a few discerning folk. It’s not a music that I listen to much these days, though the startling creativity of the first three Soft Machine albums has not faded, and individuals such as Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt were blessed with genius. But the Canterbury musicians opened my ears, and those ears have stayed open. Through them I discovered jazz of several kinds, learned to delight in experimental music (and in the arts generally), and found a home in what was radical that has sustained me for decades. Modestly radical, perhaps, but that’s the middle class, grammar school-educated upbringing for you. As the Canterbury musicians pass on, one by one, I am all the more grateful for the inheritance.

Links:

• The essential online reference source on the Canterbury bands is Calyx. It’s never going to win any design awards, but it is packed full of reliable information
• The best book for history of the Canterbury scene, and much else besides, is Marcus O’Dair’s Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt. Wyatt ended up carving out his own distinctive musical world, but he was drummer and singer with the Wilde Flowers, the Soft Machine and Matching Mole
• And here’s a Spotify list filled with quirky rhythms, odd melodies and rambling Mellotron solos to whet the appetite…