COTD returns to St. Stevens

Children of the Drone at St. Stevens Church, Exeter - Tuesday 24th February (Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras)

I almost missed this one, having not read the email announcements carefully enough, thinking it was again at St. Mary Arches. But after a confused phonecall from James S (who I'd mis-directed), things got resolved.

James T - piano, percussion, poetry, slide whistle, xylophone
Henry - Roland SamplePad, vocals
Richard - electric guitar
Tim - electric guitar (bowed and otherwise)
Lucy - alto saxophone
James S - octave mandola, treated vocals
Mick - electric bass guitar
Dominic - double bass (first set)
Pok (briefly) - mandola
me - saz, balalaika, percussion, slidewhistle, facial hair

It was an unusual one in some respects. A rare Keith-less Drone (he was at home with a bad cough), making me the "only original member", and thinking about how the sound has evolved from our tenuous saz/sitar/mandola noodlings of spring 2001. Tim has become more forthright with each session - the first time he Droned, he did so so discretely that no one could hear him...this time he was torturing his guitar in various ingenious ways, pushing the sound closer to a full-on noise jam than we've ever gone. We also had three basses for the first time (I think) - two electric and one acoustic, all very different styles of bass playing. The St. Stevens acoustic is notoriously soupy (everyone prefers the carpeted space at St. Mary Arches, but that was unavailable on this occasion), and with up to ten players, it got a bit sonically claustrophobic. There wasn't really space to inject melody lines, etc. so it ended up having to be a lot more textural than usual.

My recording came out horribly distorted, having set my record levels far too high (and not having anticipated such an unusually loud session). Fortunately, Henry also recorded it on his Zoom H2:

Listen Here
I've just learned that Dominic's mother Wendy was one of the violinists in Centipede, the early 70's free-jazz big band whose album was produced by Robert Fripp, and whose ranks included Robert Wyatt, many of the later Soft Machine players, and quite a few eventual members of King Crimson.

James T read a poem called "Contexts" inspired by Barbara Hepworth's sculpture garden in St. Ives (something I unfortunately missed during my time down in West Penwith)


A few days before, I had bumped into Michael Parker in an Exeter pub, once part of the local postrock trio Appliance. (Actually they were recording their stuff before the term was generally in circulation, so you could say they were 'prepostrock'.) He's now living in Plymouth, no longer playing music, and wishing he were, so I invited him up to the Drone. He'd played with us a couple of times before, once spontaneously on the steps of the Phoenix in 2004, when our set in the bar got cut short 'cos we were too loud(!) for the Suns of Arqa who were playing in the main auditorium. You can even see the back of his head in the last of the photos in this collection. I invited him up to this Drone, and he seemed quite keen, but couldn't make it in the end (probably just as well, as this wasn't the best introduction to the current COTD sound, if you can talk about such a thing).

One amusing thing he mentioned when discussing his time with Appliance: apparently their contract with Mute Records (based on a standard template drawn up in the 60's) explicitly covers recordings they might make on "any of the planets in the Solar System"! This was back in the days when colonies on Mars seemed a likely future possibility.

Cocos Lovers, Mumford & Sons

Friday 13th February, The Farmhouse, Canterbury

Dom got me a ticket to see Mumford & Sons, before the event sold out - they're his latest favourite thing ever, and a lot of other people's too, as far as I can tell.

When I got there, Dom and Miriam were finishing a short set (one acoustic guitar + vocals) which everyone seemed to be enjoying. Three bands played that night. The headliners were undeniably impressive, put a huge amount of energy into it, had the whole place singing along with songs they'd never heard before...The singer's incredibly passionate, and quite a poet. The use of banjo, double-bass, accordion, etc. in this kind of set-up was indeed refreshing - the Guardian review I read the day before described them as "Coldplay reborn as hillbillies", which sounds awful, but if you try to imagine that as a really good thing, it's not too far from the truth. I can imagine that they'll become huge, and everyone in attendance will be able to tell their friends that they saw Mumford & Sons in a little venue in Canterbury for £3 back in '09. Even tho' it wasn't really "my thing" (probably would have been more impressive if I were a bit younger), I was sufficient impressed to put up with being squashed into a room full of mostly sweaty, beery blokes for an hour.

The second act, Alessi's Ark, sort of passed me by. Alessi's stuff is quite fragile, and didn't quite survive against the audience volume. The real revelation of the evening, tho' was Cocos Lovers from Deal, of all places. An eccentric, vaguely folky bunch of lovable types exuding a rare warmth and playing a succession of gorgeous songs. At one point, someone got up on stage and started toasting (dancehall style) over an instrumental passage. His lyrics weren't brilliant, but it had spirit and lifted the energy right up, everyone loved it (they then explained that he was their producer). The next day I, couldn't remember much about the music, just the warm feeling that went with it. But listening to the tracks on their MySpace profile, I can confirm that they are indeed wonderful. They're playing up at UKC later this month, as well as at the Small World Festival in May. Here they are, exploring Holland last year (makes me wish I'd been with them):

Moonlit Fingertips Folk night

The Syd Arthur crew seem to be behind this - a monthly folk/acoustic night at Canterbury's Orange Street Music Venue.

As far as I know, this (12/02/09) was the first one. It started with SA's Liam doing four songs with Raven accompanying on mandolin (including "The Berber Mountain Song" and a new one). Good stuff - and you could hear Liam's words and guitar technique much more clearly than during an electric SA set.

Next it was "Lord Sydney and Colonel Acland", from Hackney, two members of a band called Morviscous. They played some fairly free acoustic guitar duets, amelioriated by some triggered loops/samples. I was quite impressed by their ultra-relaxed approach to performing and inability to take themselves too seriously. At one point, in the middle of a delicate piece that had been written for a friend's wedding, the voice of Mark E. Smith rose up, incongruously, over the PA, reading football results (I recognised this from here, something I blogged about a few years ago).



The main slot went to Brighton's virtuousic guitarist Lee Westwood, most of his set being accompanied by flautist Phillipe Barnes. Lee's mastered fingerstyle folk guitar, as well as seemingly having a grounding in classical playing. They did mostly his own compositions (including two parts of his elaborate "Nymph Suite") as well as some folkie stuff, including "The Blackthorn Stick". I couldn't fault the music, and they seemed like really nice people, but for whatever reason (my mood probably - looking at these reviews, I think it must have been) it didn't really do anything for me - almost too polished - sort of went through me. But everyone else present seemed to be enraptured, so it was certainly worth their trip down from Brighton.

Looking forward to more of these nights...

In honour of Honor Wyatt

I've just read Graham Bennett's comprehensive Soft Machine biography Out-Bloody-Rageous (SAF, 2005). Well, I read up to the point where Robert Wyatt left, and then skimmed the rest. It's a real labour-of-love, very nicely written, and has inspired me to dig out my hissy bootlegs of the mindblowing Wyatt-Ayers-Ratledge trio playing in Amsterdam '67 and Davenport, Iowa '68 (just about all that exists from that period, sadly...another reason to get on with the time-travel technology research) as well as repeatedly listening to the first three albums.

One of the most striking things that comes across is what extraordinary parents Robert Wyatt had. There are wonderful descriptions of life at Wellington House, Lydden (between Canterbury and Dover) in the late 50's and early 60's. Everyone seems to agree on how good the scene was there (after that, there's no a lot of agreement going on in the narrative), especially once Daevid Allen turned up with a supply of marijuana and a couple of hundred jazz LPs and "turned everyone in Canterbury on to them" (Mike Ratledge) The entire mid-'69 line-up (Wyatt-Hopper-Ratledge-Hopper), all Simon Langton pupils, had made their first clumsy efforts to play jazz there at the end of the 50's (clarinets, pianos, pots-and-pans...)

"If you wanted to pick ideal parents, you'd pick Robert's parents. They were fully supportive of everything Robert did. There was great love in the family, great warmth, support for what we did, interaction. It was really a very open situation and very intellectually stimulating. We had a great friendship and a great time. That was a wonderful experience, living in that house." (American jazz drummer George Neidorf, who paid his rent to Honor and George by teaching Robert the rudiments of jazz drumming)

"There was always a welcome for me there. They were very weird compared to everyone else and well into jazz. But it wasn't just jazz - things were happening, people were talking, people had some education and read books. And they looked at painting and they listened to music, none of which I did. I thought, 'This is fascinating, these are really interesing people'." (Kevin Ayers)


Daevid Allen outside Wellington House (Wyatt-Ellidge family home), Lydden c. 1961

sign on Wellington House gate "This Gate, Like, Shutsville, Ba-aby, for Really!" (presumably painted by Daevid)

Robert, his father George, mother Honor and half-sister Prue, outside Wellington House
After Robert's father died and Honor moved to West Dulwich, she opened her small house to the entire band and their girlfriends (that would include Gilli Smyth, also Robert and Pam's baby son Sam), as well as allowing it to be used as a rehearsal space:

"I listened to what they had to say on their instruments and I thought, 'Well, I don't know, I don't get it at all.' But of course, hearing this day after day, because they'd rehearse and rehearse and rehearse - and fortunately I'm not a very nervy person - so that althought to me it was quite frankly a noise to start with, nevertheless it was a noise with a purpose. They knew what they were doing."

Here's some footage from a 1967 documentary I just found, portraying life in West Dulwich (as well as a bit from a gig at the Speakeasy) Pretty grainy, but worth a look. That's Sam Wyatt playing hi-hat! (and Michelle Heyer, Kevin's girlfriend, later to be Robert's half-brother's wife, running to turn off the kettle). Mrs. W sensibly stays out of the picture:


Some other things I learned:

• The Wilde Flowers (which included, at various times, Ayers, Wyatt, the Hopper brothers and most of what became Caravan) main rehearsal space was a house called Tanglewood, on Giles Lane, Canterbury near what's become the UKC campus. Before that, Mike Ratledge used to cycle over as a schoolboy to play chamber music with Brian Hopper (Brian himself was experimenting with tape loops and listening to whatever jazz and avant-garde sounds he could pick up on a shortwave). Later, Robert Wyatt lived there for a while on returning from Robert Graves place in Majorca. I've walked past that house hundreds, if not thousands of times. It ought to have a plaque on it. As well as Honor Wyatt, fans of the Canterbury sound should give retrospective thanks to Leslie and Billie Hopper for allowing all this to go on. Robert has said "I'd like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Hopper for letting us experiment with noise in the modest space between their front door and the rest of the house, especially as I had not yet come to terms with such bourgeois concepts as keepng time and singing in tune...They never said anything about the music, so that tells you how nice they were."
  
  
• Mike Ratledge and Brian Hopper were choirboys, got to sing in Canterbury Cathedral (Mike soloing on "Oh for the Wings of a Dove")
  
  
• Daevid Allen's original inspiration was seeing a truckload of Irish buskers playing in the streets of Melbourne as a seven-year-old (around 1945)
  
  
• In 1962, returning to Paris, Daevid moved into a room in a beat hotel in Paris, just vacated by Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, with Brion Gysin in the room next door. As well as getting to know William Burroughs (that's quite well known - he was later asked permission to use the name "Soft Machine", as it was borrowed from the title of one of his books), he experimented with tape loops with Terry Riley. Hugh Hopper's interest in tape loops began when he visited Daevid in Paris a couple of years later, met Riley and tried LSD for the first time.
  
  
• The Daevid Allen Trio (Daevid, Robert, Hugh) shared a stage with Burroughs at the ICA in London, in 1963, with a primitive lightshow (well, some slide projections). Robert later worked as a dishwasher there.
  
  
• Kevin, Robert and Hugh got thrown out of the Three Compasses pub in Canterbury for having long hair in 1964.
  
  
• Mike Ratledge went on a trip to New York after graduating from Oxford University, spent some time with William Burroughs there.
  
  
• A wealthy American, Wes Brunson (from Tulsa, Oklahoma), turned up in Dejá, Majorca on Easter Sunday '66, met Daevid and Kevin, dropped acid, had a revelation that God had instructed him to usher in a New Age. Kevin suggested funding a New Age music group, which, even after the trip, he decided was his cosmic mission. He bought the initial gear that the first Soft Machine line up used (apart from Ratledge's Vox Continental organ, which was bought with funds raised by Kevin selling a mink coat he'd been given).
  
  
• A Californian guitarist who'd played with David Lindley, called Larry Nowlin, was part of the original line up (the band was called "Mister Head" initially), but after a few gigs, everyone agreed it would be better if he left.
  
  
• The first gig (August '66) was indirectly organised by the Sufi scholar Idries Shah. It was part of his "Midsummer Revels", celebrating the opening of the Institute for Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences in West London. They played a 45 minute set in a large drawing room and were warmly received.
  
  
  on stage at the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, 1967 (photo by Mark Ellidge)
  
• Robert and Kevin sang backing vocals on a take of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's "Stone Free" (not the take that got used, though).
  
  
• American singer an novelist Marsha Hunt, later to become mother of one of Mick Jagger's kids, rehearsed with the band for a week at the end of '66. It didn't work out, but she ended up marrying Ratledge, largely to avoid immigration problems (they remained friends for years).
  
  
  on stage at the UFO Club, 1967 (photo by Mark Ellidge)
  
• One gig in Saint-Tropez in the summer of '67 consisted solely of a 40 (or possibly even 60) minute version of "We Did it Again" (just that line sung over and over). The French arty crowd loved it. A shorter version of the same thing had almost got them killed in Cheltenham a few months earlier!
  
  
• Daevid reckons he was barred from re-entry to the UK after the French trip because he was on an Interpol list of suspected drug traffickers (he was a friend of John Esam, who's LSD possession trial was the first high-profile one in the UK).
  
  
• They played twice at the 1967 Edinburgh festival - once with the experimental Argentinian ballet dancer Graziella Martinez performing "Lullaby for Catatonics", and once playing incidental music for a performance of Jarry's Ubu Unchained.
  
  
• In Paris, they were awarded the Orde de la Grande Gidouille by the College of 'Pataphysics.
  
  
• San Francisco promoter Bill Graham removed them from the bill of two of his Winterland concerts in '68 after Wyatt called him a "fascist" (unaware that his family had fled Nazi Germany). Oops.
  
  
• Andy Summers, later to be the guitarist in The Police, was part of the band for a couple of months in summer '68, played a few gigs in the US (even he got invited to live at Mrs. Wyatt's house in West Dulwich). Kevin wasn't into this and so he left. Somehow it was a bit disappointing to discover this (I'm really not into The Police at all), but to be fair, he did do an interesting album with Robert Fripp in '82.
  
  
• Before their appearance at the 1970 Proms, Robert stepped outside the back of the Albert Hall for a cigarette. The doorman didn't want to let him back in. When he explained that he was about to play in there, the reply was something like "Come off it son, they only have proper music in there!" ("Not that night they didn't!" sez Bob).
  
  
• That odd little track at the end of the first album, "Box 25/4 Lid" features Hugh playing bass (something he'd made up in a hotel room with Ratledge during his stint as Softs roadie). A lot of the compositions on that album were at least partly written by one of the Hopper brothers.
  
  
• Apparently, you can hear Robert reciting the chorus to Kevin's "Singing a Song in the Morning" at the end of "Moon in June" on Third. I can't, despite repeated attempts - can you? And can anyone work out what Kev's mumbling at 3:15 in "Why Are We Sleeping?"?

Time travel with Jon Woode and Syd Arthur

Friday 6th February - Rutherford College bar, Kent University, Canterbury

I'd decided that local psych/prog outfit Syd Arthur just didn't do it for me, so very nearly skipped this one. But I thought I'd at least find out who Jon Woode was - checked out his MySpace profile earlier in the day and liked what I heard enough to go along.

The whole experience was quite odd. I lived in this place exactly twenty years ago (my first home after leaving my family home), and hadn't set foot inside it for probably fifteen. Back when I was a student there we were lucky enough to get the Television Personalities, Cardiacs, Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3 and various 'shoegazing' bands playing in the common room. These days, the campus has a nightclub pushing populist Radio 1 style stuff. Back in the late 80's, the members of Syd Arthur (I'm guessing) would have been about the same age I was when the sorts of bands they've modeled themselves on were playing at the University in the early 70's (this happy crew, for example...I've just been checking out what I'm guessing was their magnum opus). On this occasion, I rather enjoyed their set. Still can't make out any of Liam's words, but I could dig the overall sound (I take back my comments below about inappropriate funkiness). Raven's mandolin and fiddle playing through a great bank of effects brings a touch of Ratledge/D. Sinclair Canterbury keyboard sound and it was interesting to watch them in action in a sparsely populated bar (no stage or anything, just set up in a corner...not much of an audience either, but respectable applause). Overall, a cleaner, crisper sound and more relaxed atmosphere. Liam and Raven are playing an acoustic set at Orange Street this week, so I'll drop in and see what that's like.


They encored with "Secrets of the Planet Soul", which has really grown on me after a few listens (at first I thought the overt Soft Machine "Hope for Happiness" and Canterbury lyrical references were a bit forced, but I'll forgive them, just cos it's nice to know that there are some people their age 'round here who have even heard of the Softs).

Now I can't resist embedding this (check the insanely brilliant Ratledge organ playing)!


oh, and this (before Daevid Allen left!)...


OK, enough time travel - now back to 2009...

Jon Woode's support set was just gorgeous. I'd heard some of the songs once before (that afternoon) and on second hearing, some sounded remarkably familiar. Nick Drake's the nearest point of reference (he's even got a song called "East from the City", referring both to ND's "Three Hours" and where he lives, out in the country, relative to Canterbury). We had a little chat about yew trees, Nick Drake and Syd Arthur before he started. And he gave me copies of both his CDs (Into the Wildness and Country Roads). Very kind. Thanks Jon!

Very little student interest in such things, it seems, but thanks to the Fine Art Society (!) for at least making the effort to put a decent gig on in what's become something of a cultural desert (at least on a musical front...even the Patti Smith film Dream of Life got cancelled at the last minute the other week).