This is an odd one. I bought it, I think, in the summer of 1981, in a record shop in Woking that was too sophisticated for the market there, and didn't last long.
This was in the period when I was exploring the history of prog. I'd read about Soft Machine, but couldn't get any of the early albums that I'd read about. So I bought this. I didn't realise — since there are no names on the cover — that this Soft Machine featured none of the original members, and that the music bore little or no relation to late-sixties Soft Machine. (Wikipedia tells me that the only two members of Soft Machine in this incarnation were were Karl Jenkins and John Marshall, who joined the band in the early seventies.)
When I read the inner sleeve (reproduced on this page) I realised the mistake. But having shelled out my cash, and not having that many records at the time, I listened to this one quite a lot. It grew on me. At first I thought it was the kind of music you used to hear accompanying the test card transmission on TV. But this is a superior kind of light jazz-rock, with tight and funky playing, which is not surprising given the involvement of people like Jack Bruce, Allan Holdsworth and Dick Morrissey (who, you remember, we saw in Cambridge, as I mentioned before).
Despite not having listened to the album for about twenty years, each track sounds familiar, which reflects how much I played it early on. The vinyl sounds brilliant as well.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
|
Comments