Canterbury Sound: Place, Music and Myth

Saturday 28th October 2017
Augustine House, CCCU, Canterbury

This one-day event was organised by a Bulgarian academic called Asya who's been studying music scenes, and Alan Payne, who's writing a PhD thesis on the Canterbury Scene in particular (I once interviewed him for my Canterbury Sans Frontiéres podcast). There were some short academic papers presented, personal reflections from Brian Hopper (Wilde Flowers, Soft Machine) and Geoffrey Richardson (Caravan), and live performances from The Quartet (doing "Rote-Thru" with Miriam, as I'd seen at Free Range two nights earlier), Koloto (including a new work-in-progress called "Red Fish Blue Fish"), Lapis Lazuli (now a quartet, played a blinding set, just two long pieces from Wrong Meeting) and Soupsongs, the Annie Whitehead curated Robert Wyatt tribute act.

I found the event to be a bit of an uncomfortable fusion of fan convention and academic conference, like it wasn't quite sure what it was trying to be. But that was just me (in a grumpy mood that day?). There's an excellent and enthusiastic description from former Facelift fanzine editor Phil Howitt on his newish Facelift blog here.

I was invited onto a rather large discussion panel which was convened a couple of times during the day, but didn't contribute anything in the end. I was also asked to lead a session involving a GoogleMap I created documenting the geographical connections within the wider "Canterbury Scene". There were a few interesting details that came out of that, including a friend of Dave Sinclair's clarifying where exactly on the Old Dover Road the house was in which he'd written "Nine Feet Underground".

Possibly the highlight of the event for me was getting to meet Phil (who'd sent me a complete set of back issues of Facelift a while back) and Calyx website creator Aymeric Leroy (the ultimate Canterbury Scene expert), whose tireless archiving efforts have been an absolute boon for anyone interested in this stuff — extremely helpful in putting my podcast together. The two of them had met for the first time the day before at Phil Miller's funeral. Also, Aymeric's had a book on the "Canterbury School" (I prefer that to "Scene" or "Sound") published in French, is looking to have it translated into English, so I may end up helping with that. Musically, the highlight was Soupsongs' rendition of Wyatt's "Alifib"/"Alifie" (from Rock Bottom) featuring Geoff Richardson on guest viola.