This book documents one of the most fascinating stories in rock. It constitutes a checklist of the essential discography for Soft Machine and their offshoots and a selection of albums representing the most relevant of the extracurricular careers of their key personnel. For retrospective live and compilation albums, it lists current best-in-class releases. Around the 19 featured albums it wraps a detailed biographical framework mainly to aid exploration: the available live and session materials by the same line-up, and the solo works you might be interested in.
Before we start, let’s admit it: Soft Machine are a beast of a band. Just on personnel alone, they’re monstrously complicated to assimilate. A decade after their formation in 1966, they had no original members left, and none of those original members have ever re-joined. At that point, the group became a state of mind, and yet defining what made them unique – a centre of gravity that meant they were still a recognizable entity regardless of who was actually performing – had become impossible long before then. With other resilient but constantly churning bands of the period, such as Fairport Convention, Deep Purple, or Yes, the listener can map out the group’s eras, creating a band narrative from each permutation and advance. That’s not possible here. Soft Machine seem somehow to blend together over the years, and their albums – all obstinately numbered up to 1973’sSeven – do not represent a progression in the traditional sense.
Pete Frame’s attempt to organise the band’s history in January 1977, a messy sheet created for theTriple Echo compilation, produced a densely plotted family tree that was as difficult to comprehend as the band themselves, weirdly unfocused, and still only selective. Frame listed 15 line- ups, and his tree omits the various offshoots and diversions that see ever- permeating diffractions of what they made possible. But how could he cram it all on? Soft Machine are an incredibly connective band. You can draw direct lines between them and a wide swathe of British music in the 1960s and beyond.
Some connections are simple enough. Softs member Kevin Ayers leads to Mike Oldfield, Daevid Allen to Steve Hillage, Mark Charig to Robert Fripp. Others are surprising leaps sideways. Ric Sanders went on to become a stalwart of Fairport Convention. Dave MacRae worked with Cass Elliot, Olivia Newton-John, and the Goodies. Alan Wakeman was a long-term sideman for David Essex. Andy Summers, another direct link to Fripp, was of course, a global teen pinup with The Police.
In the incestuous annals of British sessions and fluid band membership, we can also link Soft Machine directly to artists as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon, Jon Lord, Humble Pie, Manfred Mann, Henry Cow, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Brian Eno, Jack Bruce, Elton John, Bert Jansch, Steve Hackett, and Arthur Brown – that’s the pop, blues, folk, prog, and avant-garde scenes right there, and it’s just the start. Want a hotline between Roy Harper and. Uriah Heep? Look no further. Nico and Pink Floyd? One easy step. With 27 official members and a further nine in offshoot bands with a ‘Soft’ in their name, Soft Machine seem to be right in the thick of it. And I haven’t even mentioned the tangled skeins of the Canterbury Scene, the much wider British jazz-fusion scene to which they
