Soft Machine: Third (2LP) [SONY MUSIC UK]

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set keeps the original layout of one composition per side. Third was Soft Machine's highest-charting album, reaching No. 18 in the UK and No. 5 in the Netherlands.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Most bands in 1970 were still working out what to do with a whole side of an LP. Soft Machine filled four of them with one piece each and moved from the psychedelic scene they came out of into jazz rock and electronics. Mike Ratledge on keyboards, Robert Wyatt on drums and voice, Elton Dean on saxophone and Hugh Hopper on bass produced it themselves, partly at IBC Studios in London, between January and May.

"Facelift" opens with a live recording from Fairfield Halls in Croydon on January 4, 1970, the band's first gig of the decade, with Lyn Dobson on sax and flute. "Slightly All the Time" is the smoothest ride on the album, with Jimmy Hastings, brother of Caravan's Pye Hastings, on flute and clarinet and Nick Evans on trombone. Then comes "Moon in June," Wyatt's long, wandering song suite, with free-jazz violinist Rab Spall on the coda, and side four brings the band's most driving jazz-rock workout.

It was the first of two albums from the four-piece lineup, and the template for a great deal of the Canterbury jazz rock that followed. Side one of a fusion landmark was recorded live in Croydon, a sentence you don't get to write very often.

Also at Kops: more Soft Machine on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On CBS / Sony Music (cat# 19802954771), a reissue of the 1970 album.