With a couple of interruptions I’m trying to go through the earliest album of artists I’ve enjoyed enough to buy multiple albums, and given my love of the ‘Canterbury Sound’, Soft Machine’s debut is next on the list. I suspect this was an EBay purchase intending to find out where it had all started.
I’d bought (and sold) the compilation Triple Echo back in the 1970s, before I appreciated the more jazz influenced Softs after Robert Wyatt’s departure.
The album opens strongly with Hope For Happiness, with Kevin Ayers’ Joy Of A Toy (nothing like the title track on his later solo album of the same name) sandwiched in, before the lovely Wyatt song Why Am I So Short leads us into the longer fuzz organ (by Mike Ratledge) piece So Boot If At All. This contains a superb jousting of Ayers’ bass and Wyatt’s drum, which sadly degenerates into an unnecessary drum solo, before emerging from the chaos into a musical box-like piano. Then it’s a gentler ending to the first half, A Certain Kind being a simple love song with a Bach like organ middle section.
The second half kicks off with Save Yourself, sounding very dated, with Wyatt’s drums very high in the mix, almost obtrusive at times, before a quieter instrumental, Priscilla, which segues into Lullabye Letter, a very 60s sounding Ayers song. But things step up with the wonderfully repetitive We Did It Again, only four minutes of Ayers repeating the title, but legend has it that in live performance (no doubt stimulant enhanced) could stretch to ten times that. Ayers continues on vocal with the eerie Why Are We Sleeping, parts of which would re-emerge on his Confessions Of Dr Dream album. And this would make a fine ending to the album, which bizarrely finishes with a short, disposable 49 second instrumental Box 25/4 Lid.
The 40 minutes has flown by, and despite one or two irritations, I’ve really enjoyed revisiting this album.
4* - a strong debut, experimental enough to be interesting, conventional enough that it doesn’t lose the listener.
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