Soft Machine In Mallorca: Daevid Allen

In the 1960s youthful Australians gravitated to the UK in search of what didn't exist in their homeland - culture - though it is fair to say that not all went in the hope of finding intellectual or creative fulfillment. There was also the type that Barrie Humphries, one of those Aussie culture-seekers, parodied to drunken, boorish perfection in the form of his Barry McKenzie character. But of the more cerebral, there were, among others, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Richard Neville, whose greatest contribution to 1960s' counter-culture, "Oz", resulted in him getting a fifteen-month prison sentence for obscenity.

These "new" Australians had some form of association with each other. James knew Greer at Cambridge and he also knew Humphries. He had also at one time edited the University of Sydney's student newspaper, "Honi Soit". Neville knew a later editor and together they created the original "Oz". In the UK, "Oz" was the voice of revolutionary anti-establishment and thus went much further than the satirical "Private Eye", to which both Humphries and Greer contributed. And Neville was a good friend of Greer's.

But before any of them, a young musician by the name of Christopher David Allen had arrived in England. The gravitational pull that he was to experience was not one of association with his Australian contemporaries. He was drawn to Canterbury and to a musical scene whose alumni included and were to include Robert Wyatt and Mike Oldfield. The group which best represented this Canterbury scene was Soft Machine. Of its four original members, Wyatt was the drummer, and the lead guitarist was the young Australian, whose name had by now adopted a slight affectation: Daevid Allen.

If there was an association between Allen and other Australians like Neville and Greer, it was that of the counter-culture, and for Allen and members of Soft Machine that meant hippydom and psychedelia. The bass guitarist with Soft Machine was Kevin Ayers, and he and Allen were to follow paths that were to bring them into the orbit of a faux-hippy, Richard Branson, and, though not because of Branson, to the village of Deià.

The story of how Ayers and Allen both came to know Deià and eventually live there (Allen not for that long) usually points to a time after they had left Soft Machine. In fact, both Ayers and Allen had come to Deià well before Soft Machine were formed in mid-1966. And so had Robert Wyatt. In Wyatt's biography it says that in the summer of 1964 he came to stay with Robert Graves for a second time. With him on that trip was Kevin Ayers, and they were soon to be joined by Daevid Allen. It was in Deià, however, that they began to lay the foundations for what would eventually become Soft Machine: "the music really began to gel". And someone who helped to make the music gel was Graves' son-in-law, Ramón Farrán, who ran the Indigo jazz club in Palma. Farrán also had to keep an eye on two of the musicians. Wyatt could be trusted, as he refused to take drugs. Ayers and Allen on the other hand ... "Deià is a bit dangerous for a person who hasn't got a strong personality. It's really easy to lose yourself in doing nothing, in just having parties, smoking pot and things like that," Farrán is quoted in the biography.

Allen was to also visit Deià in 1966. He said that during a stay with Graves at Easter of that year he took some particularly strong LSD and had a vision of himself as a rock musician playing at what, he reckoned, was to become the Glastonbury music festival. In 1971, he did indeed appear at Glastonbury, then a very different event to now. He had long left Soft Machine by 1971 and had formed Gong, a band that was a kind of musical collective and one whose experimentation drew on the avant-garde music that had inspired him: by the likes of Terry Riley, who he knew from a time in Paris when he also got to know William Burroughs - hence, the Soft Machine name.

But before that appearance at Glastonbury, Allen had established himself in Deià, and in 1969 it was in Deià that the first Gong record was made. It featured the flautist Dider Malherbe, who supposedly had been living in a cave on the Graves' finca. In 1973 came the Branson connection. Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" was the first album to be released by Virgin; Gong's "Flying Teapot" was the second.

Allen's association with Deià was not as strong as that of Kevin Ayers, who lived there for several years and who died in 2013, but nevertheless his death last week has evoked many a memory of his time there and his role in the story of the hippy colonisation of Deià and of Soft Machine in Mallorca.

Forty Years Of Horror: Tubular Bells

It is arguably the most recognisable introduction to a rock music album ever created. Yet it wasn't really a rock album, while the introduction never ended. It was beautiful in its minimalist simplicity, yet the musical structure of seven-eight and nine-eight time was anything but simple. It was musical structure born out of the "progressive" era of rock music with a minimalism that was reminiscent of Terry Riley and Philip Glass. It was symphonic but not pompous, yet it was classical in its recurring theme and in its developments towards crescendo. It was repetitious and its introduction wove itself into your consciousness and would not let go. On 25 May 1973 it was released. It was "Tubular Bells".

Seven months later, on Boxing Day, a post-Christmas tradition was being maintained. This tradition was one of the film, the movie. The family would settle down to watch a classic and, as tradition came to have it, it would typically be "The Great Escape". Alternatively, the family might escape the confines of the turkey-stuffed, Christmas-light-lit living-room and head to the cinema. 1973 was a good year for films: "Live And Let Die", "The Way We Were", "American Graffiti". In Britain, the cinemas had yet to offer what was to be the second highest-grossing film that was released in 1973; it was not to be seen in British cinemas until the next year. In America, however, Boxing Day cinema-goers could have seen a film that was as far removed from Christmas as it was possible to get. The film was "The Exorcist".

If "Tubular Bells" broke new ground in the world of rock music, then "The Exorcist" ripped up the ground of the horror-movie genre and littered it with bodies defiled by the Devil. It wasn't perhaps entirely new as "Rosemary's Baby", some five years before, had taken a devil theme too, but "The Exorcist" it was which led to "The Omen", "The Sentinel" and "Carrie", and never before had audiences apparently been provoked into vomiting and being emotionally disturbed by a film.

These two iconic statements of entertainment in 1973 had a connection of course. The minimalist beauty of "Tubular Bells" lay in what it did not reveal. It hid the unstated. Its repetitiousness could conjure up whatever images the listener wished. It might never have been intended for these unstated images to be malevolent, haunting or horrific, but that it is what they were to become. Only a few months after its release, the unmistakable symmetry of "Tubular Bells" found its way onto the soundtrack for "The Exorcist". It became the unofficial theme tune for the film.

The story of how "Tubular Bells" came to be recorded has been told many times, and it is a story which raises ifs and buts. If Richard Branson had not heard Mike Oldfield's original tape, Oldfield might never have become the name he was to become. If it hadn't been for "Tubular Bells", would Virgin Records have been started or would it have been the success that it was to be? If it hadn't been for this success, then would The Sex Pistols have ever become as popular as they were to become? If it hadn't been for "Tubular Bells", would there have ever been Virgin Atlantic and all the other Virgin brands and would Richard Branson still be plain Richard and not Sir Richard? And if it hadn't been for "The Exorcist", might "Tubular Bells" have achieved the global sales which it did, especially sales in the US? 

Ultimately, might Mike Oldfield have ever been able to afford a luxury finca in Mallorca and so follow in the affluent footsteps of his Virgin mentor? He didn't tarry that long on the island, only some four years before finding that the Bahamas held a greater attraction, but it was long enough to discover that Mallorca was "an incredibly inspiring place to work"; this work included a remix of "Tubular Bells".

So, for a brief time, the two connected entertainment events of 1973 brought one of its protagonists to Mallorca. And in 2013, he returned if only via the miracle of technology and contributed, thanks to Skype, to the celebration for Kevin Ayers in Deià in August; Oldfield had been the bassist with Ayers' The Whole World band prior to recording "Tubular Bells". The forty years have witnessed unimagined changes, not just in communications technology. Were "Tubular Bells" to be made today, its recording would be totally different. Oldfield's multi-instrumental ability would not be required to anything like the same extent. "The Exorcist" would be an exercise in computer-generated imagery.

They were both extraordinary achievements of their time. But they were products of that time. Technology would dictate that they would now be different. Yet for all the technology, Oldfield and his period in Mallorca serves as a reminder of what stays constant. He found the island inspiring in the twenty-first century. In 1973, and in years leading up to it, Mallorca was inspiring and had been inspiring all manner of artists, a couple of whom in their different fields - art and literature - died this year on the island they had adopted, the American painter Ellis Jacobson and the Australian author Mark McShane. And in a cemetery in Deià, Kevin Ayers, who had lived in the village for some years, was also remembered. A dark place to be remembered maybe but not a dark place as that in "The Exorcist" and one that was brightened by the legacy of 1973. "Introducing ... Tubular Bells."

The Soft Machine Of Deià

When music acts have named themselves after books, characters in books or just ideas in books, they have typically erred on the side of the macabre, the bizarre or the violent. Belle & Sebastian are an example of "nice" naming (a French story for children) but are unusual. As for others: Heaven 17 came from Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange"; Joy Division was described in the "House of Dolls" by Ka-tzetnik 135633 (Yehiel Feiner), a story of Jewish women kept for prostitution in Nazi concentration camps; The Velvet Underground took their name from Michael Leigh's book about paraphilia (sadomasochism, zoophilia, paedophilia).

William Burroughs didn't inspire the name of only one significant band. Two, at least, stand out. The Soft Machine and Steely Dan. The latter was a strap-on dildo in the drug-influenced and addled "Naked Lunch". "The Soft Machine" referred to the human body. The book was as weird as its naked predecessor. Drug abuse as a disease, secret agents, Mayan calendars, it was a bad trip of a novel, one that had been written some years before tripping became de rigueur for hippy culture but one, as a consequence of its tripped-out and hallucinatory imagery and peculiar structure that bordered on incoherence, became as identifiable with psychedelia as did the group that named itself after the book.

Kevin Ayers was a founder of The Soft Machine. He was with the band for two years. He left and, in the opinion of many, squandered a career that, with a talent as great as his, should have been stellar. But stellar, as in star, i.e. being a star, was an alien concept to Ayers. He didn't turn his back on fame and wealth through going mad, as was the case with contemporaries Peter Green and Syd Barrett, so much as he couldn't really be bothered. He wasn't interested in being a huge name, but equally he often displayed a lack of interest in what was his chosen career. Instead, he made a career out of remaining a hippy, disregarding convention in the pursuit of hedonism, much of it to be enjoyed in sunny Mediterranean climes, notably that of Mallorca.

Ayers' association with Deià helped to give this small town in the Tramuntana a reputation that it has never shed. Nowadays, this reputation is hippy-chic, a magnet for dippy chicks like Kate Moss. It was a reputation for faux-hippydom, capitalist-sell-out-to-the-man hippydom, that was enhanced when the fakest of fake hippies and so therefore the greatest of all fake-hippy entrepreneurs, Richard Branson, established La Residencia. Branson, despite the beard and very much longer locks that he sported at the turn of the 1970s, was a hippy exploiter supreme. He was never a hippy himself or anything remotely like one, other than in appearance, but he knew that the "heads" would hand over good money for "sounds" that were far removed from The Archies, Lulu or The Tremeloes, even if these sounds should never have been allowed near a recording studio, let alone the headphones of the original Virgin store above the shoe shop on Oxford Street. And among these sounds, of course, was Kevin Ayers and The Soft Machine.

Ayers left The Soft Machine, and he was right to have done so. This was a time, 1968, of enormous musical experimentation and the revisionist view of this period tends to eulogise the output of many of its exponents. Some deserve the praise, as they deserved it at the time. Pink Floyd were groundbreaking but also never anything other than interesting, engaging and simply good. The Soft Machine, on the other hand, were turgid, self-indulgent and tedious. Ayers had more to offer than hour-long, organ-led dirges. He was, to use a cliché, a musician's musician, who could surround himself with the likes of Brian Eno and The Velvet Undeground's John Cale, but he only ever did so much. He was hippy personified and he always kept his integrity. He was, in a way, "The Soft Machine" personified; the taking over of the body by outside controlling influences.

There was a ceremony in Deià the other evening to honour Ayers, who died earlier this year. It was a charming, gentle and rather lovely event. Here was a tribute to a musician who eschewed the trappings of fame and appeared to do everything he could in order to ensure that he did but who, probably because of this rejection, enjoyed an affection reserved for few others. Ayers' music world was not the thrusting dominance of an industry brandishing a brazen steely dan. It was a world far removed from this machine and the demands of its production line and of its manufacture. His world was one made from an altogether different machine, a very much softer one.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.