Soft Machine

Canterbury and the underground

Soft Machine formed in Canterbury in mid-1966. The first line-up was Mike Ratledge on keyboards, Robert Wyatt on drums and vocals, Kevin Ayers on bass and vocals, Daevid Allen on guitar, and Larry Nowlin, who left that September. Ayers suggested the name, taken from William S. Burroughs's 1961 novel The Soft Machine. The band played the UFO Club and the rest of the London underground, and its first single, Love Makes Sweet Music, came out on Polydor in February 1967.

Wyatt and Allen had first played together in 1963 in the Daevid Allen Trio, and Wyatt and Ayers were founding members of the Wilde Flowers in 1964. Wyatt later said the band met hostile reactions outside the underground clubs, which fed its habit of long tracks and segued tunes, since playing without a break gave audiences no gap in which to boo.

Demos made with Giorgio Gomelsky in April 1967 stayed unreleased until 1972. In August 1967 Allen was refused re-entry to Britain and went on to form Gong, so the band carried on as a trio. Andy Summers joined briefly in 1968 and was dismissed, and Ayers left in September 1968 after a tour with Jimi Hendrix.

Probe and the widening line-up

The Soft Machine, recorded in New York in April 1968 at the end of the first Hendrix tour, was released on Probe that December. Hugh Hopper, the group's former road manager, took over from Ayers on bass the same month, and Volume Two was recorded at Olympic Studios in February and March 1969. In May 1969 the band also played, uncredited, on two tracks of Syd Barrett's The Madcap Laughs. In October 1969 the group grew to a septet with the saxophonists Elton Dean and Lyn Dobson, the cornet player Mark Charig and the trombonist Nick Evans. Charig and Evans left after about two months, and Dobson left in March 1970, which made the five-piece of Ratledge, Wyatt, Hopper, Dean and Dobson a short-lived line-up. It toured through the early months of 1970, with dates in Amsterdam on 17 January and Paris on 2 March.

Third

Third was released by CBS in June 1970 as a double album with one piece on each side. It was recorded from January to May 1970, partly at IBC Studios in London, and it opens with Hopper's Facelift. It reached number 18 in the UK, the band's highest chart place up to then, and number 5 in the Netherlands. Paul Stump called it unanimously acclaimed as the band's peak. Aymeric Leroy dissented, judging the production a failure, and Hopper himself said it was not especially well produced but was a classic thing.

On 13 August 1970 the band played the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, in the second half of an evening that began with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and became the first popular-music band to appear at the festival. Rolling Stone later placed Third in its list of the fifty greatest prog rock albums.

Changes and return

Fourth, the band's first all-instrumental album, appeared in 1971, and Wyatt was dismissed that August and went on to form Matching Mole. Fifth followed in 1972 with Karl Jenkins replacing Dean, then Six and Seven in 1973. Hopper left around then, with Roy Babbington taking his place, and the band moved to Harvest. Bundles came out in 1975 as the last full studio album with Ratledge, with Allan Holdsworth's guitar setting it apart from earlier records, and Softs followed in 1976. Ratledge, the last original member, left in March 1976, and the group played its final show in Dortmund on 8 December 1978.

The name was used again for Land of Cockayne in 1981 and for a week at Ronnie Scott's from 30 July to 4 August 1984. Offshoots followed: Soft Heap, Soft Head, Soft Works from 2002 to 2004, and Soft Machine Legacy from 2004 to 2015. The Soft Machine name came back in December 2015, and the band has since released Hidden Details in 2018, Other Doors in 2023 and Thirteen in March 2026. Its current line-up is John Etheridge, Theo Travis, Fred Thelonious Baker and Asaf Sirkis.

Many of the people who made the early records have died: Elton Dean in 2006, Hugh Hopper in 2009, Kevin Ayers in 2013, Daevid Allen in 2015, Allan Holdsworth in 2017, John Marshall in 2023 and Mike Ratledge on 5 February 2025. AllMusic's Dave Lynch called them one of the most influential underground bands of their era.