The Book Cooks Legends In Their Own Lunchtime:
1970 Negotiations were now underway between Sean Murphy and several labels including Deram, CBS and Harvest, the EMI sub-label that had distributed Volume Two in the UK and already had Kevin Ayers in its stable. “They are still not an attraction in the very top bracket, so it was a pleasant surprise to see major companies throwing in genuinely massive bids earlier this year when the group was looking for a recording deal,” Richard Williams revealed. Ultimately, Soft Machine signed with CBS, but Third was self-financed, taken partly from studio sessions, but also from live recordings (“Facelift”) and edits and loops of tapes made by Mike Ratledge and Hugh Hopper at the home of Bob Woolford, who had let them use his Brenell and Stellavox tape recorders. Such infringements of accepted professional practices were only possible because CBS, having acquired a finished album, were no longer in a position to force the band to comply with them. The benefit for Soft Machine in terms of artistic freedom is easy to measure. But this has to be balanced against the fact that the production on Third is, to put it bluntly, an unmitigated disaster. IBC, at the time the studio of choice for such notorious perfectionists as The Who and the Bee Gees, are probably less to blame than the band themselves who, in spite of the issues with Volume Two, are again credited as sole producers. The sound suffers from almost constantly saturated low frequencies and extremely vague mediums, the drums are much too low in the mix, as if played behind a closed door; and the organ is deprived of much of its biting impact through overwhelming equalization. Unfortunately the 2007 remaster, while an improvement, fails to rectify this. What is problematic is that, as well as making the album an uncomfortable listen, its sub-par production lessens the claim, widely held at the time of its release, that Third represented musical state-of-the-art. This claim was based on Soft Machine’s ability, unparalleled among their contemporaries, to draw from and amalgamate an exceptionally wide range of influences. Starting out as a rock band, and then gradually moving towards jazz to invent a uniquely personal, and absolutely valid, British answer to American fusion, Soft Machine went even further, incorporating the influence of Stockhausen’s avant-garde and Terry Riley’s repetitive minimalism. Third’s ‘total’ vision, encompassing the entire spectrum of known musical genres, placed Soft Machine at the forefront of musical “progress” in 1970. However, horizons have since expanded to such an extent, beyond the Western tradition in particular, that this concept of universality has aged considerably. In his insightful review of Third for Actuel, Paul Alessandrini wrote of “music to really listen to, no longer aiming for a purely physical vibration, more interiorized. Soft Machine have re-thought their musical influences – Riley, Cecil Taylor, Coltrane – to really make them their own, abandoning their aesthetics of random explosion in favor of a much more thought-out approach.” There are still occasional reminders of these sonic excesses that, as Alessandrini noted, had now largely disappeared from their music. Mike Ratledge's lengthy solo introduction to “Facelift” almost sounds like an electric exorcism, as if to rid Soft Machine of what still remains of that violence in order to reinvent their music in a more controlled manner, setting formal perfection as their new objective. Considered as a whole, Hugh Hopper's piece represents the last remnant of Soft Machine’s early days, when they still favored spirit over form - here found lacking in both sound quality and performance, with a few train wrecks along the way - and were intent on disregarding the accepted rules. “Facelift” includes free sections increasingly at odds with Ratledge’s preoccupation with structure – and while as a keyboard player, he still embodies the band’s more radical leanings, Ratledge’s own compositions reveal a much less iconoclastic temperament. Hopper described his own approach at the time as “halfway between” that of Dean, “whose thing is really total improvisation, without any structure, and on the other extreme, [that of Ratledge] who's into entirely formalized musical forms.
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“Moon in June” completes Robert Wyatt’s donation to Soft Machine of the material originally intended for his first solo album in 1968. It is interesting to note that Wyatt does this at the exact point where Soft Machine had shed any remaining reference to pop in their live repertoire. Looking back, Wyatt was certainly justified in saying that his side of Third was “the last chance I had to use all the things we'd done without being a jazz band. I wanted to get twenty minutes of it down somewhere.” And since his colleagues, reluctant to act as mere accompanists, had made no secret of their lack of interest in his songs, he recorded most of “Moon in June” on his own, repeating the modus operandi of the 1968-69 demo. Hugh Hopper and Mike Ratledge’s participation is again limited to the organ solo halfway through (Hopper also plays a short melodic theme earlier in the piece). Elton Dean wasn’t asked to contribute anything – Wyatt’s unconvincing justification being that he “hadn’t yet worked out how to work on [his] stuff with the added wind instruments.” As there was no mention of this breach of band discipline in the sleeve notes, only the most astute listeners noticed that the organ heard during the first ten minutes was a Hammond rather than Ratledge’s signature Lowrey, that the playing clearly wasn’t Ratledge’s, and that most of the ‘bass’ parts were played on an electric piano. When the truth was finally revealed, Wyatt gave contradictory versions of what had happened – in one interview claiming that Ratledge and Hopper had “refused to play [on “Moon in June”] and I had to play it all myself,” in another that he’d “almost had to force them to get them to play on it, which I thought was rather unfair as I’d done my best to get into the music they were writing.” Probably the most objective and believable of Wyatt’s rationales was that he was “terrified it’d be played wrong” if he didn’t perform it all himself.
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To approach “Moon in June” as a ‘message’ song would misrepresent Wyatt’s more mundane intent, insofar as the phonetic qualities of the words often seem to matter more to him than their meaning. In other words, “Moon in June” is above all a musical composition, a suite of instrumental sections, some of which are adorned with melodies and lyrics, and others not. The singing accompanies the music rather than vice-versa. In this respect, outside of a possible rivalry with Elton Dean and Wyatt’s inability to sing while drumming, there was no theoretical incompatibility between Soft Machine’s move towards jazz and the continued presence of Wyatt’s voice (even if limited to the Echoplexed scat singing of his solitary interludes during the band’s concerts). Dispensing with vocals was the single most questionable move in Soft Machine’s entire musical evolution, not to mention one whose commercial consequences cannot be underestimated. In different circumstances, Hugh Hopper would surely have joined Wyatt in lobbying for having at least some vocals, but in addition to his increasingly strained personal relationship with Wyatt, Hopper had at this point completely lost interest in non-instrumental music. “I find that using the human voice means asserting limitations to your music right from the start”, he explained in 1972. “I am more interested in the sounds generated by instruments, or electronic devices, because the possibilities offered by songs are much more limited than when experimenting with sounds.” Even if there was no future for singing in Soft Machine, “Moon in June” at least offers evidence that Robert Wyatt, in a voice-free context, could still be more than “a session drummer for an interesting new species of jazz groups,” as long as he contributed to the writing. When it came to extended pieces, he could stand comparison with Mike Ratledge, even though he lacked any comparable academic background. In addition to its constant melodic inspiration, “Moon in June” is very skillfully constructed (indeed, its instrumental architecture had remained intact since 1968), and confirms Wyatt’s seemingly innate talent for making a coherent whole out of ill-assorted musical ideas.
© 2026 Aymeric Leroy
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