Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Date:         Wed, 7 Oct 1992 13:42:39 EDT
From:         "Michael H. Bloom" <MHB@MITVMA.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Progressive

On Wed, 7 Oct 1992 13:16:05 EST Ilia said:
>I heard some Camel and Gong, but it was too little to make any opinion
>of. What would you recommend as a starting point/album? Also, could you
>please elaborate on 'Canterburry school'?

The Canterbury School is basically everybody that was ever in Soft Machine,
and everybody that ever played with everybody who was ever in Soft Machine,
and so forth. Canterbury was where the original musicians all lived, and they
used to get together at Robert Wyatt's parents' house to play, drink, try out
some of the interesting new drugs of the day (those fabulous '60s), etc. The
Soft Machine gradually codified as Wyatt (drums, vocals), Kevin Ayers (bass,
vocals), Daevid Allen (guitar, vocals), and Mike Ratledge (organ & piano).
They split for the Riviera, and many of the musicians who were still there
started a new band called Caravan: Pye Hastings (guitar, vocals), Richard
Sinclair (bass, vocals), David Sinclair (organ & piano), and Richard Coughlan
(drums but no vocals). These were original lineups only and went through many
substantial changes over the careers of these groups, as did the styles of
music the Softs in particular played, but I contend there is a continuous
commitment in Canterbury music to compositions of a playful, humorous nature,
as well as a bebop-like melodic complexity. They also exhibited progressive
rock traits like odd time signatures, early adoption of synthesizers, etc.

Gong was Daevid Allen's main area of activity after he left the Softs. He'd
gotten entranced by gamelan music (whence the "Gong" concept), and learned how
to do tape loops directly from the master, Terry Riley (in Paris during the '68
student upheavals). All this stuff, plus a weird space mythology, became the
musical and philosophical underpinnings of the Gong band, which at its peak
included a Coltrane-inspired saxophonist named Didier Malherbe, a guitarist
with great echoplex technique named Steve Hillage, an ambient synthesizer
noodler named Tim Blake, and a rotating cast of rhythm section and female
vocalists. There were three albums that comprise the "Radio Gnome Invisible"
trilogy, though they have never to my knowledge been made available as a set.
Individually they are known as _Flying Teapot_, _Angel's Egg_, and _You_.
To me, they are the essence of Gong: interesting melodies, hot solos, mystic
intimations, spacey sound. _Camembert Electrique_ is pretty good too, albeit
without Hillage or Blake.

Camel is close to the Canterbury school-- they had Richard Sinclair on bass
for a couple of pretty good records-- but IMHO would rank below the average of
the actual Canterbury bands. Their most ambitious album was probably _The Snow
Goose_, an instrumental suite based on what I think was a Norse bedtime story.

My favorite Canterbury band was Hatfield and the North, consisting of Sinclair
(he was the better songwriter in Caravan and achieved his pataphysical peak in
Hatfield), Pip Pyle on drums and loops (he played with Gong, and appears on
_Camembert Electrique_), Phil Miller on guitar (played with Wyatt in Matching
Mole), and "the Other" Dave Stewart (ex-Egg, later with National Health, now
doing okay overproduced intellectual pop albums with singer Barbara Gaskin).
The complexity level and the humor level were both intense, with song titles
like "Shaving is Boring," "Lobster in Cleavage Probe," and "(Big) John Wayne
Socks Psychology in the Jaw." (Note that these are instrumentals.) If you
like progressive rock for musical reasons rather than for all the mythology
that goes along with them (cf. Genesis, especially the Peter Gabriel era),
then Hatfield is hot stuff, not to be missed.

Remind me to talk about Gentle Giant some other time. They were in some ways
the only comparable band. In other ways they sounded nothing alike.

Boston had nothing to do with progressive rock IMHO. Kansas is as plebeian as
I'm prepared to go.
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