Soft Machine
The Soft Machine were a pioneering British psychedelic, progressive rock and jazz band from Canterbury, Kent, England. They were one of the central bands in the Canterbury scene.
Soft Machine had emerged out of an earlier band called Wildeflowers (a reference to Oscar Wilde). The lineup of Wildeflowers included, at various times: Brian Hopper (guitar,saxophone,flute, vocals), Hugh Hopper (bass), Robert Wyatt (drums, vocals), Richard Sinclair (guitar, vocals), Kevin Ayers (vocals), Pye Hastings (guitar/ vocals), Dave Sinclair (keyboards), Richard Sinclair (bass/ vocals) and Richard Coughlan (drums). These latter four formed another successful Canterbury band Caravan.
When the band became Soft Machine, its initial lineup featured Kevin Ayers (bass), Robert Wyatt (drums and vocals), Daevid Allen (guitar, later of Gong) and Mike Ratledge (keyboards). Allen left before their first album, and Ayers was replaced by Hugh Hopper by the time of the second.
The best-known lineup, containing Wyatt, Ratledge, Hopper, and saxophonist Elton Dean, produced the critically-acclaimed album "Third" and its followup "Fourth". At that time Soft Machine was playing a form of fusion jazz influenced by Miles Davis and similar to the early work of Weather Report. Wyatt, disagreeing with a direction that left no room for his vocal experiments, left the band in 1971 for a solo career. Later lineup changes left Ratledge the only original member of the band, and by 1976 he was gone too. Karl Jenkins (keyboards and woodwinds), who had joined in 1972, became the band's leader and led it until its disbanding in 1984; guitarist Allan Holdsworth was a member during this period. (Today, Karl Jenkins is better known for classically-oriented projects like Adiemus.)
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