When was Soft Machine formed?When did it split up?

Soft Machine was formed in August 1966, although gigs(under the name of Mister Head) were played as early as May. It splitup in December 1968, re-formed in February 1969 and carried on untilthe late 1970's through many line-up changed leaving no originalmember onboard. It re-formed briefly in 1980 and 1984.

What was the Soft Machine'soriginal line-up? What was the last line-up?

The original line-up (1966)consisted of RobertWyatt on drums and vocals,MikeRatledge on keyboards,DaevidAllen on guitar andKevin Ayerson bass and vocals. For abrief time, American guitarist Larry Knowlin was also a member, butleft after only a handful of gigs. Subsequently, Hugh Hopper, EltonDean, Karl Jenkins and JohnMarshall were majormembers.

The final line-up, assembled for aseries of gigs at London's Ronnie Scotts Club in 1984, consisted ofKarlJenkins andDave MacRae on keyboards, John Etheridge on guitar, Paul Carmichael on bass and John Marshall on drums.

How did the original members ofSoft Machine meet? Had they worked together previously?

Daevid Allen and Robert Wyatt first became acquainted in 1961 when Allen, who hadjust arrived in England from Australia, rented a room at Wyatt's inLydden. The two discovered a mutual interest in jazz, which resultedin a few gigs as the Daevid Allen Trio (with Hugh Hopper on bass and Mike Ratledge occasionally guesting on piano) in London, in 1963.Around the same time, Wyatt formed the Wilde Flowers with the Hopperbrothers, Hugh and Brian. The original line-up includedKevin Ayers on vocals, who left in July 1965.

The impetus behind the formationof SoftMachine in 1966 wasprovided by the meeting of Allen andAyers with Texan millionaire Wes Brunson inDeya, Majorca, on Easter Sunday. Brunson agreed to put up the moneyfor their new band, which allowed them to buy equipment and rent arehearsal room near Canterbury.

Why did they choose the nameSoft Machine ?

Mike Ratledge : "The name camesecond hand through a book by William Burroughs called 'The SoftMachine' and he in turn had taken it from a lecture by a physiologistin America... Soft machine was a generic term for the whole ofhumanity, and we were all soft machines... I guess our basicassumption was that what we liked, everybody else was going to likeas well, that we all had things in common, and therefore we all aresoft machines, and we were all going to like Soft Machine music. It might have been a false assumption but Ihope it's true".

How many albums did SoftMachine release ?

Soft Machine released 10 studio albums of previouslyunreleased material : Volume One(1968), VolumeTwo (1969),Third (1970), 4 (1971),5 (1972), Six Album(1973), Seven(1973), Bundles(1975), Softs(1976) and Land OfCockayne (1981).

The live album Alive And Well - Recorded inParis (1978) consistedonly of previously unreleased compositions. Only one track ("AllWhite") on the live album of the double-set Six Albumwas already on 5. Thesingle "Love Makes Sweet Music" c/w "Feelin' Reelin' and Squeelin'",released in 1967, consists of two songs unavailable on any album(although they were included on the triple-album compilation Triple Echo).

The album Jet Propelled Photographs compiles demos recorded in April 1967, including songs later re-recorded on official albums by Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen, as well as some unavailable elsewhere. The triple-album compilation Triple Echo (1977) includes a version of "She's Gone" that is unavailable elsewhere, and radio sessions that were later included on the double CD release The Peel Sessions, and more recently (in more complete form) on the two volumes of Hux Records' BBC Radio 1967-71 & 1971-74.

Many albums of previouslyunreleased live and studio recordings have seen the light of day inthe past few years :

• Jet Propelled Photographs : compiles demos recorded in April 1967, including songs later re-recorded on official albums by Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen, as well as some unavailable elsewhere; released by Decal/Charly (UK) in August 1989. This has been repackaged and re-released many times, occasionally with totally irrelevant packaging...
• The Peel Sessions : a compilation of Soft Machine's recordings for John Peel's BBC programme between 1969 and 1971; released by Strange Fruit Records in 1990. It has now been superseded by Hux Records' two BBC Radio double-CDs, the first covering the 1967-71 period, the second the 1971-74 period.
• BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert : the legendary 'Soft Machine & Heavy Friends' live sessions recorded at London's Paris Theatre on March 11th 1971; released by Windsong in May 1993. Features the 'classic' quartet with guest brass players. It has been reissued, with one additional track, as Heavy Friends by Hux Records.
• BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert : yet another live session at London's Paris Theatre (July 1972), and one of Karl Jenkins' earliest performances with Soft Machine; released by Windsong in 1994. It has been reissued as Soft Stage by Hux Records.
• Rubber Riff : known as the long-lost Soft Machine album, this is actually a collection of short library music tracks, recorded by Jenkins, Etheridge, Babbington and Marshall with Jenkins' wife Carol Barratt in April 1976; released by Voiceprint in 1994.
• Live In France : a rare (radio broadcast) performance (totalling 105 minutes) by the quartet of Dean-Ratledge-Hopper-Marshall, recorded in Paris in May 1972; released by One Way Records in October 1995; reissued (remastered and repackaged) by Cuneiform as Live In Paris in May, 2003.
• Spaced : heavily manipulated/looped/etc. recordings originally used as part of a multimedia show; released (in edited form) by Cuneiform Records in 1996.
• Live At The Paradiso : an oft-bootlegged performance from March 1969, this was finally given legitimate release more than 25 years after the event; the trio of Wyatt/Hopper/Ratledge running through most of Volume Two in an intense performance; released by Voiceprint in November 1996.
• Virtually : a live recording made by Radio Bremen, only a few days after the 'Soft Machine & Heavy Friends' session; in contrast this features just the quartet of Dean-Ratledge-Hopper-Wyatt; released by Cuneiform in 1998.
• Live 1970 : a reissue of Live At The Proms (minus the organ intro to "Out-Bloody-Rageous") with two bonus tracks, excerpts from "Facelift" and "Moon In June" from a gig without Elton Dean in either Swansea or London in February 1970; released by Voiceprint in 1998.
• Noisette : this CD is taken from the famous Croydon concert on January 4th 1970, which provided most of the substance for the version of "Facelift" on Third; for contractual reasons the unedited version of this piece has not beeen included (the rights belonging to Sony), but the remainder of the band's performance is now available, including classic versions of "Eamonn Andrews", "Mousetrap" and "Esther's Nosejob" as well as "12/8 Theme", a Hugh Hopper composition until now only available on his solo album Monster Band.
• Turns On Vol. 1 & 2, released separately by Voiceprint in 2001, gathers most of the existing live and radio recordings by the early incarnations of Soft Machine, dating from 1967-68 and previously only available on bootlegs. The sound quality for most of these documents is well below professional standards. Boths CDs have liner notes by Brian Hopper.
• Backwards, released by Cuneiform Records in May 2002. It consists of a 40-minute live session from May 1970 ("Facelift", "Moon In June [instrumental section]" and "Esther's Nosejob"), as well as two excerpts from a 1969 radio session by the mythical septet incarnation of Soft Machine, and the no less legendary original demo version of "Moon In June", a brief excerpt of which had appeared on the Flotsam & Jetsam compilation. The complete recording is 20 minutes long, the first half of which was recorded solo by Robert Wyatt in 1968, and the second by the trio version of Soft Machine in the spring of 1969. (Note: the "Moon In June" demo as featured on the original pressing Backwards was taken from an acetate; shortly after the CD's release, a much better (tape) copy was found, and has been included on the more recent pressings).
• Floating World Live, a live concert for Radio Bremen by the Bundles line-up (and including material from that album, plus improvisations and an early version of "Song Of Aeolus"), from January 1975 (MoonJune Records)
• Grides, a double package released by Cuneiform Records in 2006, including a CD of the Amsterdam Concergebouw concert of October 1970 (including an early incarnation of "Teeth"), and a 20-minute DVD of the band's appearance on the German TV Beat Club programme in March 1971 (with extra footage not aired at the time, and minus the dated visual effects)

Have Soft Machine's albums beenreissued on CD? On which labels?

• Soft Machine and Volume Two were reissued as a two-on-one CD by Big Beat Records in May 1989.
• Bundles, Softs and Alive & Well were released in the UK as a 3CD boxed-set by Charly in early 1992, and were also available separately.
• Six was finally released on CD in Japan in late 1992, by Sony.
• Soft Machine and Volume Two were reissued separately by One Way Records in February 1993.
• All CBS-era albums were reissued by One Way Records (USA) between September and December 1995, and again - in remastered form - by Sony Music, under the supervision of Mark Powell, in 2006. Only Fifth included bonus material - an alternate take of "All White"
• Land Of Cockayne was reissued by One Way Records in February 1996.

Why were particular titleschosen for albums and compositions?

• "Hope For Happiness" - "I wrote this song as an expression of the interest I had in Eastern cultures and philosophy from an early age and which also interests a lot of other people with side references to mysticism, the occult, other-worldliness, astrology etc. etc. Bound up with this was a growing feeling I had in the early sixties for Indian classical music and Indonesian gamelan music. Thus were born the 'raga-sagas' of which "Hope For Happiness" was but one part" (Brian Hopper)

Who were Soft Machine's maincomposers ?

In the early days, a lot of songsby HughHopper (not yet a bandmember, but its roadie, and a former bandmate of Kevin Ayers andRobert Wyatt in the Wilde Flowers) were used, but these were mostlysongs from the Wilde Flowers' repertoire ("Memories", "I Should'veKnown", "A Certain Kind"...). Ayers,Wyatt and Daevid Allen also contributed individual songs. As the musicbecame more instrumentally-orientated, Mike Ratledge became more dominant, as did Hugh Hopper. Later, Karl Jenkins (who joined in 1972) became a major writing force inthe band, and after Ratledge's departure in 1976 he composed almostall of the band's material.

How much, and where, did SoftMachine tour?

A chronology of Soft Machine's tours is available on this site.

What were the reasons formembers departing?

• Daevid Allen left in September 1967. Soft Machine were travelling back from France where they'd spent the Summer playing as part of a production of Picasso's obscure play "Le Désir Attrapé Par La Queue". Peter Frame, in his Family Tree : "When they finally returned to Britain, Allen was refused re-entry on various grounds including passport and appearance deficiencies - so the Softs played the Edinburgh festival as a trio. Allen formally left the band shortly thereafter and stayed in France". Allen : "Mike was a trained classical musician, Robert liked jazz, Kevin was basically a writer of catchy little pop songs, and I was into spacey sounds and electronics. You can imagine what it was like to be in that band with so many bloody directions happening at once... It was definitely to their advantage that I left!".
• Kevin Ayers left in December 1968 to start a solo career. "On the first tour I was completely drunk with the whole thing; I'd never seen anything like it in my life! Girls lining up outside the door, free drink everywhere - so I was drunk every night, with enormous quantities of girls at my disposal. By the second tour, I had changed completely... I went on a very strict macrobiotic diet and I didn't go out partying. I became alienated from everything that was going on around me - because of the violence and extremity of it. At its worst, it was literally plane, hotel, gig, hotel, plane, hotel, gig and so on. Mike Ratledge and I would just stay in... He would ready books, while I used to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling. At the end of 1968 I couldn't take it anymore". But there were other, more musical reasons : "Mike and Robert were far more musically litterate than I was, and I think my simplicity bored them... I never really liked 'fusion music' or whatever it was called. So I took my simplicity elsewhere...". "Soft Machine were going more in the direction of fusion jazz and I didn't like that. They were going more in the direction of jazz, which didn't interest me. I was strictly pop. They were into what I consider really to be incredibly self-indulgent music. It's stuff you play for yourself, and 'fuck the audience'...". Mike Ratledge : "Kevin's departure was entirely amicable". Daevid Allen : "I think Soft Machine's tour with Hendrix in '68 is Kevin's favourite musical memory and he's always been torn between doing something comparable with that and doing what comes naturally to him : write and sing lovely songs in the same drunken way".
• Robert Wyatt left in September 1971 because of growing musical and personal differences between him and the other members of the band. He started his own band, Matching Mole. Hugh Hopper : "Robert's vocals had been elbowed the year before and he was becoming less and less happy with the way Mike, Elton and I were disregarding his ideas". "Mike and I couldn't stand Robert and he couldn't stand us. We were very cool and calculated whereas he was very open and impulsive...". "Robert was definitely pushed out of what he felt was his own group. And he seems as bitter about that now as he has ever been". Mike Ratledge : "Things had polarised between Robert and everybody else. Hugh, myself and Elton were pursuing a vaguely jazz-related direction. Robert was violently opposed to this, which is strange, looking back on it, because he was passionate about jazz. But he had defined ideas about what pop music was and what jazz was... And although the so-called conspiracy between Hugh, myself and Elton covered a lot of actual differences between us, we had sufficient similarity to define ourselves against Robert". Robert Wyatt : "Towards the end, there was no collective identity. The others didn't see the same things as I in the band. I was more interested in absurdity as a liberating element that the others. That's why after several years, they started looking for someone more serious... Well, I actually think absurdity is a very serious thing!". "I would say I left the band, but the truth is, I wouldn't have left if they'd asked me to stay. They wanted someone who was more professional, and I was seen as the ultimate amateur! I was becoming more and more embarrassing for them...".
• Elton Dean left in May 1972. Hugh Hopper : "Elton was, is and always has been at heart a free improviser and after a year and a half of playing Mike's songs and my pieces constructed largely on riffs in strange signatures, he dearly wanted the band to become looser... He left after bringing monster Australian drummer Phil Howard in for a short series of gigs that left Mike and me gobsmacked, feeling musically superfluous to the tempest of sound and rhythm whipped up by [them]".
• Hugh Hopper left in May 1973. "By 1972 Soft Machine had become a rather ordinary British jazz-rock outfit. Not enough quirks or weirdness!". "I was very influenced by Uncle Meat and Hot Rats-period Zappa, but that whole jazz-rock territory subsequently became very devalued. For me, the best stuff was a mixture of real weirdness and good wiriting. Zappa was a great writer. But what you ended up with was lots of good technical players who didn't have that weirdness that could lift it". "I really wasn't interested in the music Jenkins, Ratledge and Marshall were interested in. And they weren't particularly friends of mine anyway. So the two reasons for being in a band had disappeared. I mean, you can play great music with people and you can put up with not being friends with them... or not liking someone. Or vice versa. If you're a great friend of someone you can put up with the fact that he and you aren't playing the same way. Or maybe, they aren't the greatest musician or you're not interested in the same music. For me the two reasons had dropped out... I wasn't interested in those people and I wasn't interested in the music they were". "When I was in Soft Machine, I was playing a lot more than I am now, but I probably wasn't enjoying it as much, because when you're playing in a band like that, you're actually there really because you've been booked up eighteen months beforehand to do that. So you don't necessarily want to do it that particular night. I wasn't particularly happy in the Soft Machine : it was not my happiest time musically. I've been much happier since from the point of view of music". "Most of the time that that I spent in Soft Machine, I had the feeling that I only played because the band had started one year before and not because I really wanted to play. My real prides as musician, I had them after I left Soft Machine. Only since then can I play with musicians I really want to play with, or leave a band without problems, when it doesn't work as well as I'd hoped. The band I've been playing with since 1985 in Holland is the one that brought me the most pleasure".
• Mike Ratledge left in March 1976. In an interview with an Italian fanzine called Gong, Ratledge said at the time : "To be the only original member is horrible : this probably is the main reason for quitting and losing interest in it. When people want to identify you with an entity called Soft Machine and to consider you responsible for what's happening, your first reaction is to get away...". "I never felt part of that English jazz scene, and the more we included those kind of players in the band, the more difference I felt between me and them, mainly because writing was very important to me and jazz at the time was very improvised and anti-writing". "[So] in a way I stopped composing music for five elements to concentrate on something more personal. You see, after Sixth I felt like I should develop something that was really mine. After that record, I became more and more involved in things which had nothing to do with the group and I became less and less interested in composing. I think that, compared to the prior period when I was forced to compose since no other did it, now Karl is able to do it, and I've obviously stopped. The present line-up will go on as Soft Machine - I'm unmoved about that...". In another source, he is quoted as saying : "It had stayed static for some time. It had become a gig". Hugh Hopper offers an alternative explanation : "I think he ended up playing rock and jazz purely by chance, because he'd studied classical piano from about age 17, and only became interested in jazz - Cecil Taylor, Bill Evans... - while studying in Oxford. Like most classically-trained keyboard players, he liked music that strictly followed the rules of harmony, and most of the players in Soft Machine were intuitive chaotic players. It was Robert's idea to ask him if he wanted to play with Soft Machine, but after a while Mike hated playing with Robert, and they didn't get along personally either. By the time I joined, Mike was already bored with it, he didn't want to do it any longer. It was just going to be one album - they had a contractual obligation to do one more - and that's it. But then of course we had to play a few gigs for promotion, and it started all over again... So, in the four years when I was in the band, Mike was unhappy. There was a short period after Elton joined when Mike seemed to enjoy playing live with him, but it didn't last long... He just wasn't at the right place being in this band. Which doesn't mean we didn't play some excellent music together - conflictual situations sometimes generate interesting things...".

What have the former bandmembers been doing since leaving Soft Machine?

• Daevid Allen stayed in France and formed Gong, originally a loose group of musicians which progressively became a band. In 1975, he left Gong and started a solo career. In the late 1970's, he also fronted Planet Gong and New York Gong. He was musically inactive for most of the 1980's, then formed Gongmaison, the Invisible Opera Company of Tibet, the Magick Brothers, and reformed Classic Gong for several successful tours in the late 1990s. Recently he has concentrated on University Of Errors (recent tours were based on the early Soft Machine repertoire), Brainville 3 and Acid Mothers Gong, and having renewed his collaboration with Steve Hillage, is also working on a new Gong album.
• Kevin Ayers started a solo career, releasing a string of albums in the 1970's, before slowing his pace down quite a bit. His latest studio album is 2006's The Unfairground, which followed a 15-year silence. He still performs live occasionally.
• Roy Babbington resumed his jazz career, playing mostly with pianist Stan Tracey and the BBC Orchestra. His Softs past finally caught up with him the summer of 2008 when he depped for Hugh Hopper on a few Soft Machine Legacy gigs.
• Paul Carmichael was only very briefly a member of Soft Machine, and his main claim to fame is as bass player in Allan Holdsworth's band IOU in the early 80's. In the last fifteen years, he has gigged with lots of musicians, but recently concentrated on more lucrative work such as private parties, and software training.
• Mark Charig resumed his career in the jazz field, playing with such musicians as Chris McGregor, Fred van Hove, Radu Malfatti, Paul Rutherford, Gunter Sommer, Phil Wachsmann, Didier Levallet...
• Steve Cook mainly played with Mike Westbrook's Orchestra in the 1980s, but is no longer active as a performing musician.
• Elton Dean had a very varied career, playing in very different styles, from straight jazz to progressive rock or fusion bands like Supersister or In Cahoots. He died in February 2006; among his last projects were the début CD by the Soft Machine Legacy, and a live CD in partnership with Belgian group The Wrong Object.
• Lyn Dobson has mostly been involved in healing and new-age music, performing on wind instruments and synthesizers.
• John Etheridge formed his own band, Second Vision, with fellow Softs member Ric Sanders. In the 1980's, he moved on to a jazz career, leading his own bands and playing with Danny Thompson, Harry Beckett and Nigel Kennedy. He rejoined Soft Machine for its brief reformation in 1984, and is currently a member of the Soft Machine Legacy, in addition to his hectic performance schedule with a myriad of musicians, notably fellow guitarist John Williams.
• Nick Evans has kept playing on the jazz scene (notably in Elton Dean and Keith Tippett's ensembles), but his main occupation now is teaching.
• Allan Holdsworth left Soft Machine to join Tony Williams' Lifetime. He subsequently joined Gong, Jean-Luc Ponty's band, UK and Bruford. In the late 1970's he started a successful solo career. He briefly rejoined Soft Machine for a tour of Portugal in June 1977 and guested on the later studio album Land Of Cockayne. In addition to his continued solo career he is currently a member of SoftWorks alongside Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper and John Marshall.
• Hugh Hopper joined the band of Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamash'ta where he met guitarist Gary Boyle, whose band Isotope he subsequently joined. In the mid-1970's, he worked with Carla Bley, then in a quartet with Keith Tippett and Elton Dean. He also recorded and toured under his own name. In 1978, he was a founding member of Soft Heap. Between 1979 and 1984 he more or less stopped playing music, but then became very active again, forming a new Hugh Hopper Band with mainly Dutch musicians (which still exists to this day, now with only French musicians), joining Phil Miller's In Cahoots and Pip Pyle's Equip'Out, and later forming Short Wave with Miller, Pyle and Didier Malherbe, and Mashu with Mark Hewins and Shyamal Maïtra. More recently, his Soft Machine past caught up with him and he played in the PolySoft project reviving the classic Softs repertoire and formed SoftWorks with Elton Dean, Allan Holdsworth and John Marshall, which has since become the Soft Machine Legacy, with Marshall, John Etheridge and Theo Travis.
• Phil Howard left Elton Dean's band Just Us in late 1972. Not much has been heard of him since, apart from playing in Richard Sinclair and Lol Coxhill's pickup group at the Reims Jazz Festival in 1975. On the 1979 CBS reissue of 5, liner notes contributor Linnet Evans mentions that Howard "was last heard of on a North Sea oil rig".
• Karl Jenkins became involved in advertising music, running a very successful studio with Mike Ratledge. In the 1990's, he launched the Adiemus project which brought him unprecedented success following the use of some of its music in a Delta Airlines TV ad.
• Dave MacRae was only very briefly involved in Soft Machine. Soon after his stint with the group, he went back to his native Australia, where he has resided and worked ever since.
• John Marshall has kept busy on the jazz scene, most notably playing with John Surman's quartet and brass project and Eberhard Weber's Colours. He is currently playing in the Soft Machine Legacy group, and with bassist Arild Andersen among others.
• Mike Ratledge set up his own studio in the mid/late 1970's and until 1993 worked with Karl Jenkins in the field of library and advertisement music, albeit more as producer and managing director than composer or player. He has now retired from music and little is known of his current activities.
• Ric Sanders formed Second Vision with John Etheridge in the late 1970's. He subsequently joined Fairport Convention when that band reformed in 1985, and is still playing with them. He also has a folk trio with Vicki Clayton and Fred T. Baker.
• Alan Wakeman, cousin of well-known progrock keyboard player Rick Wakeman, has remained active as a session musician, in both jazz and pop, most notably as a fixture of Mike Westbrook's various bands.
• Robert Wyatt formed Matching Mole immediately upon leaving Soft Machine. In 1973, an accident left him paralyzed from the waist down, and he has since concentrated on solo work, releasing several critically acclaimed albums - most memorably Rock Bottom (1974) - at a very slow pace.

Last updated : October 2008