Hatfield and the North

From Delivery

Phil Miller and Pip Pyle had played together in Delivery since 1966, and in 1972 that band came back together around them. Pyle had returned from Gong, Miller had been in Matching Mole, and Richard Sinclair and Phil's brother Steve Miller had left Caravan that summer. As Delivery, the quartet played the City of London festival in the moat of the Tower of London on 21 July 1972. Steve Miller left that autumn, Richard's cousin Dave Sinclair came in on organ, and in October the group took a new name from the road signs pointing north out of London to Hatfield & the North.

The first gig under the new name was at Leas Cliff Hall in Folkestone in November 1972. In January 1973 French television filmed them for Rockenstock in Paris, with Robert Wyatt as a guest. Dave Sinclair left that month, finding the band too given to improvisation, and rejoined Caravan. After an audition with Alan Gowen of Gilgamesh came to nothing, Dave Stewart, formerly of Egg, took over the keyboards, and the classic line-up was set: Miller on guitar, Sinclair on bass and lead vocals, Pyle on drums and most of the lyrics, Stewart on organ, electric piano and synthesizer.

The first album

Virgin signed the band in 1973. A BBC Top Gear session that July already included Lobster in Cleavage Probe, and work on the debut at The Manor in Oxfordshire, produced by the band with Tom Newman, ran through the second half of the year and into January 1974. Hatfield and the North came out on 1 March 1974. It was mostly instrumental, Stewart wrote nearly half of it, and the guests included Wyatt, Geoff Leigh of Henry Cow and the Northettes, the vocal trio of Barbara Gaskin, Amanda Parsons and Ann Rosenthal, who sang on both albums.

Late in 1973 they shared stages with Gilgamesh, including a double quartet set at Leeds Art College that pointed toward National Health. At the Roundhouse in April 1974 their second set swelled with guests including Wyatt, Gowen and Lol Coxhill. They toured Europe hard, with at least three tours of France and two each of Belgium and the Netherlands, and in Britain played with Gong, with Stomu Yamash'ta's East Wind, and on Virgin's Crisis Tour with the Kevin Coyne Band. A single, Let's Eat (Real Soon) backed with Fitter Stoke Has a Bath, came out in November 1974 and was a flop.

The Rotters' Club

The Rotters' Club was recorded and mixed at Saturn Studios in Worthing in January and February 1975, released on 7 March and reached 43 in the UK. Jimmy Hastings played flute and saxophones, and Stewart's twenty-minute Mumps closed the record. Sinclair wrote some of the band's best-loved songs in this period. Nine days after the release they played the Rainbow Theatre's closing concert in London, introduced by John Peel, and their Halfway Between Heaven and Earth from that night went onto the live album Over the Rainbow.

The last gig was at The Winning Post in Twickenham on 1 June 1975. The band split and cancelled the shows it had booked, chiefly because Sinclair left, saying later that the music had become too extreme for him. Stewart formed National Health with Gowen, with Miller throughout and Pyle from 1977, and Sinclair joined Camel. Virgin's compilation Afters followed in 1980.

Reunions

Miller, Sinclair and Pyle played together again in Miller's In Cahoots from 1982 to 1985. In March 1990 the band re-formed for one filmed concert for Central TV's Bedrock series in Nottingham, with Sophia Domancich on keyboards because Stewart declined. It was issued as Live 1990 in 1993 and on DVD in 2002. In January 2005 they re-formed again with Alex Maguire on keyboards, made their official return at the Mean Fiddler in London that March, and released the first of two archive collections, Hatwise Choice. They went on to play Japan, Mexico, Germany and Canada, and gave their first American shows, at NEARfest and New York's Bowery Poetry Club in June 2006.

Pyle played his last gig near Groningen on 26 August 2006 and died in Paris two days later. The second archive set, Hattitude, was dedicated to him, and Mark Fletcher drummed for the remaining dates, ending at the Canterbury Festival on 20 October 2006. Miller died in 2017, and in 2022 Sinclair launched the HAT Band in Palermo in tribute to them both. Jonathan Coe, whose 2001 novel The Rotters' Club takes its title from the second album, wrote liner notes for Hatwise Choice.

Probably the best-loved of the so-called 'Canterbury' bands.

Jonathan Coe