Month: July 2023

Readers on the various Canterbury scene Facebook groups will know that its fans are a notoriously fickle bunch when it comes to the legitimacy of bands using names associated with the genre. Are Gong a valid entity without Daevid Allen? Should Soft Machine be allowed to use the name if they have no band members from the Sixties? Should Geoffrey Richardson be considered a new member of Caravan since he only joined in 1972 etc etc…. So, how will fare a project amalgamating the names of two bands of rich Canterbury resonance, put together by clear connoisseurs of their music, performing almost entirely interpretations of Canterbury ‘classics’? Such is the lot of Hatfield and the Health, a band of barely a year or so’s visible presence and veterans of a mere 5 gigs.

Hatfield and the Health, The Piper, St Leonards by the Sea, 5 July 2023. Photo: Phil Howitt

The first thing to say is that the reception since their launch has been universally positive, and the audiences, for a niche enclave of a niche musical movement, relatively buoyant. Conceived in lockdown (and largely facilitated because of it) this band of highly accomplished jazz musicians played two well received gigs last year in London, and have followed it up this year with another three, the last of which I witnessed at the Piper in St Leonard’s On Sea in Sussex. The band’s live performances are perhaps limited less by their appeal than the fact that keyboard player Eric Baumgartner lives over in the States, but the results remain none the less polished for all the band members’ lack of geographical proximity to one another.

Hatfield and the Health, as the name might suggest, play a set largely consisting of Hatfield and the North and National Health tracks alongside those by Matching Mole and Caravan, and consist of the classic instrumentation (bass, guitar, keyboards, drums) of all four bands, here crucially augmented by a variety of wind instruments from Karen Sharp. Bass player Simon Thorpe is the natural frontman, and in addition to replicating effortlessly a whole host of meandering basslines, sings a significantly large number of classic ‘songs’ from the Richard Sinclair canon, including ‘Winter Wine’, ‘Share It’, ‘Golf Girl’ and ‘Halfway Between Heaven and Earth’ as well as National Health’s ‘Binoculars’ and Matching Mole’s ’O Caroline’. A confident enough statement given that Richard Sinclair’s voice is arguably unsurpassable, but these tracks are beautifully and tightly performed and provide an instant hook-in for the Canterbury converted.

Yet lest one think that this the band will be song-led and therefore Canterbury-‘lite’, these tracks provide perhaps just the icing on the cake of a quite virtuosic airing of a wider repertoire of extended pieces, as their set list amply demonstrates. And whilst Hatfield and the North represents for many uberfans the ultimate expression of Canterbury musical values (with the interpretations here receiving a hearty thumbs up from all concerned), it was for me the renditions of National Health material, all of which I was seeing performed live for the first time, which really hit the high notes. What is extraordinary about this band is that they manage to execute the scores impeccably (the litmus test for me was the faultless interplay between keyboard and guitar on some fiendishly complex dual lines), whilst somehow adding an element of freedom. This is personified by the extra ‘voice’ of Karen Sharp, who flits between saxophones, bass clarinet and flute, at times bolstering the themes, but more often soloing fluently; but also the sheer joy of the keyboard performance, with Baumgartner remaining faithful to original scores whilst somehow managing to inject an extra jazzy looseness to proceedings.

If guitarist Ridout and drummer Allum were more hidden from view, that was certainly more representative of their visual impact than a sonic one: Allum confided to me later his deep appreciation of Pip Pyle’s talents, and displays the same tight yet innovative approach: and for all his effortless mastery of the lines, Ridout is quite the most understated guitarist I think I’ve seen – a sort of Miller sans facial histrionics – I was highly impressed. Early tracks at St Leonards’ were dogged by sound problems with a lack of vocal oomph and some ringing bass drum booms beyond the control of the band, but arguably this only served to accentuate quite how good they sounded once the dust settled. And in any case, the audience got an encore of ‘Let’s Eat Real Soon’, the track most affected by the sound imbalance, as a bonus!

Eric Baumgartner – photos Phil Howitt

I was fortunate enough to chat at length to drummer Nick Allum at the end of the St Leonards’ gig and I’ve spoken to him, Simon and Eric since about some of the background to the band.

Nick: ‘Simon, Eric and I started Hatfield and the Health — probably 10 years after I had the idea for it! In 2010 I was working with Jonathan Coe (author of the novel The Rotters’ Club, and more recently captured in a musical capacity with the release of  ‘Suspended Moment: The Music Of Jonathan Coe’ on the British Progressive Jazz label) on a High Llamas project and told him about the idea, but it took another decade before we found a way to do it.”

Simon: “I didn’t actually meet Eric until a few years ago, though I think we’d spoken on the phone. We hit it off immediately, and when Covid lockdowns came, the three of us decided to have a go at recording some Hatfield songs (file-sharing across the pond). It was such fun, and by the time we’d done four or so, we thought we should try and play them live. Mark (Ridout – guitar) and Karen (Sharp – reeds) are two of my favourite people and musicians, and I thought of them as the first choice for the project, so I was delighted that they both agreed.” Nick: “Mark and Karen didn’t know the music but are established jazz players on the circuit who play with Simon on various projects”. Sharp has won numerous British Jazz Awards and has worked extensively with Nikki Iles and Dave Green amongst others. Ridout also has a wide-ranging jazz pedigree including work alongside Jimmy Smith and Eddie Parker. Nick: “They agreed to take part last year and now love this music too.” On the recent London gigs the band were bolstered further by trombonist Dave Wallace.

So what of the clear Canterbury passion of the main protagonists?

Nick: “Simon was in my class at school and we formed our first band together in 1976. We discovered Canterbury music a year or so later and have always loved it.” Simon: “My relationship with Canterbury (very much in parallel with Nick’s) started when we ‘discovered’ Dave Stewart via the first Bruford album, ‘Feels Good To Me’ with (Allan) Holdsworth of course, whom we’d heard on ‘Bundles’. Nick’s friend Terry Francis (who came to our recent Lexington gig) is a few years older than us and introduced us to a lot of great music including Crimson, Softs, Mahavishnu, and then Hatfield and National Health. There was something about the harmony, the tunes, the rhythms and the lyrics (ie pretty much everything!) about the Hatfield and National Health stuff that we particularly fell in love with.”

Simon Thorpe/Nick Allum – photo: Phil Howitt

Simon: “We were playing in a band between ‘77 and ‘81 which was a kind of a prog project, though we hadn’t really yet got the musical skills… (or keyboards!) to make a success of it, and of course punk and the New Wave cleared prog away for a time.”

Nick: “Our claim to fame as audience members is that we were some of the few people to see Rapid Eye Movement, with Dave Stewart, Pip Pyle, Jakko and Rick Biddulph.” Simon: “They were great while it lasted. A kind of nod to the New Wave. I think that was where I first heard XTC’s ‘Mekkanik Dancing’. We covered that one too. And Dave Stewart had cut his hair by then!”. Nick: “Simon and I have a history of obscure Canterbury related covers. In 1981 we played a gig where we covered two songs by 64 Spoons. I sent the recording to Jakko after I met him at a Hatfield gig at the Borderline in 2006 and he was quite shocked!” These two tracks were the poignant yet hilarious faux-ballad ‘Tails in the Sky’ alongside ‘Ladies Don’t Have Willies’, a lesser known Spoons 7”: Nick: “a friend who had lived in Wembley had seen the Spoons in pub gigs there and he had the single. Dave Stewart also wrote me a reference for my application to Berklee College, on the basis of a very National Health sounding composition I sent him on a cassette in 1980.”

Karen Sharp/Mark Ridout – photo: Phil Howitt

Which takes us on to the connection with Eric Baumgartner. Nick: “I studied with Eric at Berklee. We met in autumn 1981. Eric is a music educator who has written books of piano arrangements for Hal Leonard and others. He does a lot of theatre work and is also in successful tribute bands out of Atlanta GA featuring (the music of) Yacht Rock, Steely Dan and Stevie Wonder, amongst others. Eric: “I am originally from Cleveland, Ohio (but now in Atlanta, Georgia). I met Nick in 1981 at Berklee College of Music in Boston. We became fast friends and eventually roommates. I was already a big fan of progressive rock but it was Nick who turned me on to many of the so-called Canterbury acts. I was particularly struck by Dave Stewart’s projects (Egg, Hatfields, National Health). I had known him through Bruford but had no idea about his earlier works. I loved it all. Post-Berklee Nick moved back to the UK and we would occasionally see each other on my travels there. Although I had heard all about Simon through Nick, we did not meet until 2016 at Nick’s wedding. We, and our spouses, hit it off immediately and we’re all now dear friends. This project is particularly special for me in that after 40 years it’s the first chance Nick and I have had to share the same stage together!”

Nick: “My background is that I returned from Berklee in 1983 and worked for what was then the National Jazz Centre as a community music educator. I was involved in the jazz scene and started a band ‘Dwarf Steps’ that was Courtney Pine’s first jazz outfit. I then played in indie bands the Apartments, The Triffids and mainly Fatima Mansions. I continued to play with singer songwriter Cathal Coughlan until his untimely death in 2022.”

Simon: “By the mid-late 80s I was getting into jazz more than jazz-rock, and when I started playing (double) bass it all started falling into place for me and I was getting quite a bit of work, so I was very happy to be regularly gigging, and soon was playing with some excellent players, including many of my Canterbury-related idols like Trevor Tomkins, Phil Lee, and a couple of times, Jimmy Hastings. And without all the masses of equipment and the volume of rock gigs!”

One of the more extraordinary moments of the evening was the incursion on stage of a previously unseen figure, dressed all in black, looking threateningly at the audience before launching into a stream of apparently unfathomable dadaesque poetry, which eventually crystallised itself the familiar strains of – ‘Is it numinousness, numinescence or numinosity?’ – Peter Blegvad’s curious paean to the properties of milk on National Health’s ‘Squarer For Maud’. Nick: ‘(this was) Arretta Baumgartner… the Director of Education at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta – (she) is a Jim Henson-trainee puppeteer and thespian.’.

Eric: “My wife’s segment was a little afterthought shortly before the trip. We hadn’t even had time to rehearse it before our first gig. She had just performed a sound poetry piece with a friend of hers and I thought it would be neat to have her do an excerpt. This led me to adding a taste of Slapp Happy ‘Some Questions About Hats’and then into the Blegvad spoken word bit for ‘Squarer for Maud’. The first bit was excerpts from the Ur Sonata (Kurt Schwitters).Fun stuff! The others were quite happy to have her join us which I greatly appreciated

Arretta Baumgartner at The Piper: Photo courtesy of Greg Heath

I was curious as to how Eric had prepared for the gigs, being at such a distance from the other members of the band. Eric: “Collectively this band has only ever had 3 rehearsals! One before last year’s gigs and two this year. We obviously have to carefully plan things out through emails, audio, charts, etc. It is frustrating in that we know there’s no substitute for getting our reps in as a band. We feel ourselves getting tighter (but looser if you know what I mean) in our gigs and can imagine how comfortable it would be if we could perform together regularly. As it is, you saw us all depending on our charts for a good portion of the show. It IS tricky music after all. I programmed the f**k out of my Nord at home! I then upload the programs and download to the hired Nord in the UK. It would be easier with 2 keyboards but we can’t afford to hire two! But I had great fun trying to replicate the sounds. I absolutely adore the sound of Dave Stewart’s Rhodes and was pretty happy with my results. Likewise his fuzz organ on bits like the solo in Let’s Eat. This goes for Dave Sinclair as well. What wonderful sounds he had! I tried to do them justice.”

As for future plans, the band are clearly keen to keep the project moving forward. One of the features of the London gigs has been attendance by various inquisitive associates of the scene such as Amanda Parsons and Neil Murray; whilst down in Sussex I was flanked by Nic Sinclair, marvelling at Baumgartner’s interpretation of his father Dave’s ‘Disassociation’; the godfather of Canterbury music himself, Brian Hopper; and Wizards of Twiddly drummer Andy Delamere who’d trumped my own 600 mile round trip to be there. The band have had contact with Richard Sinclair over in Italy; Nick Allum has expressed an interest in exploring some of Alan Gowen’s composed material; and perhaps most enticingly of all, the band unveiled a composition of their own in St Leonards, ‘Together and Apart’ – a Thorpe-penned, genre-aware ditty, combining musical quirkiness with trademark throwaway lyrics referencing a nearby pub! A knowing but not unappealing glimpse into the future perhaps…

Band and musician links

Hatfield and the Health – http://www.hatfieldandthehealth.co.uk

Simon Thorpe – http://www.simonthorpemusic.com

Nick Allum – https://www.a-change-of-light.com/site/nick_allum.htm

Eric Baumgartner – https://www.troubadourband.com – also author at https://www.halleonard.com/search/search.action?keywords=ERIC%20BAUMGARTNER&dt=item#products

Mark Ridout – http://www.markridoutguitar.wordpress.com

Karen Sharp – https://www.karensharp.co.uk/

This somewhat unexpected musical pairing brought Porcupine Tree and Magma to Manchester’s Castlefield Bowl on a blindingly bright Thursday evening for what appears to be each band’s sole UK gig of the summer, despite having both played on bills previously in Switzerland. It was part of Manchester’s ‘Sounds of the City’ season, an increasingly popular summer diversion in a number of UK cities, and here located in an area steeped in history. The temporary stage is literally placed above the end of a terminal canal lock and looked down upon by the old Roman fort which was excavated in the late Eighties, ironically around the time that Porcupine Tree were emerging at the forefront of that era’s new wave of psychedelia. Much has happened since to their sound, their style and their audience since then, before arriving at today’s semi-stadial extravaganza, but more of that later…

For me at least, this was very much an equal double header, with an opportunity to see an astonishingly vibrant Magma band a year or so on from an intimate Band on the Wall gig in the same city which I’d rate somewhere towards the top of my gigging experiences of the last 40 years. This unique French ensemble were often compared and contrasted to Gong in the early Seventies, both in terms of musician origin, their peddling of an often unfathomable mythology, and a rich juxtaposition of musical styles, but Magma’s was always a more self-consciously serious approach than Gong, and Britain saw little of them between the mid Seventies and relatively recently.

Magma

The current line-up is an extraordinary 11-strong posse, with the emphasis very much on a communal vocal element (8 of the band sing, 6 exclusively so), and their very carefully manicured arrangements of classics from the Magma canon is quite something to behold. The band had an hour to perform, and that of course, that meant just 3 tracks – the last starting almost 40 minutes out. It’s something of a statement of intent when your opener is the gorgeous ‘Hhai!’, a vehicle for drummer and band leader Christian Vander’s impassioned vocal lines, with drumsticks temporarily set aside, delivered in pure Kobaian, Vander’s patent language which he uses to embellish and propel the music.

Christian Vander

Second up was ‘KA1’ from the  K​ö​hntark​ö​sz Anteria  album, ideally suited for this line-up, an upbeat and mesmeric invocation with wafer thin guitar themes accentuating the mass vocal lines. And then onto ‘Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh’, the band’s trademark 1973 composition. Connoisseurs of the band’s original studio piece, or Seventies’ Youtube performances will identify with this track as a heavy, hypnotic, imploring groove – in the hands of its mass choral airing here it takes on a different lifeform.

Jimmy Top/Stella Vander

Simon Goubert, who I spoke to in research for the Hugh Hopper biography in his role as Soft Bounds’ drummer, is one of two keyboard players for the band and provides the iconic backdrop throughout;  Jimmy Top, son of Magma stalwart Jannik, the rumbling bass; and Vander himself the tight, expressive drumming, but centrepiece is that all-consuming choir. This is mesmeric, trance-like  music – one might focus on lead singer Hervé Aknin’s  deep-voiced gesturing, or Vander himself once again taking vocal centrestage with minimal backdrop, but a special word for Lora Yma Perso, the diminutive singer who stands somewhere stage right in amongst the ensemble. Magma run a notoriously tight ship, with apparently nothing left unscored, but as the atmosphere builds later on in the piece, live performances of MDK have seen her given increasing licence to release the tension with an extraordinary passage of diva-ish exclamations, none more so than tonight – this is goosebump material for sure.

Lora Yma Perso/Caroline Indjein/Simon Goubert

Given the estimated capacity of this outdoor arena is 8000, and a 6:30pm start meaning that gig-goers continued to filter in until around 8pm, Magma certainly didn’t get the best of the crowd, nor perhaps the sound (there are so many individual components to throw into the sound mix, which echoed sometimes hollowly around the amphitheater), but the atmosphere in front of stage was clearly electric – Simon Goubert later described it as ‘intense’.

And so back to Porcupine Tree. My own relationship with the band’s music has been somewhat inconsistent. Facelift was lucky enough to receive mailouts from the much-missed Delerium label in the early 90s, when the band sat somewhat incongruously alongside the likes of Kava Kava, Dead Flowers and Nukli. I say incongruously because whilst Delerium pushed hard the sounds of the psychedelic underground, Porcupine Tree always seemed to be destined for higher things. For all later accusations of them producing almost psychedelia by numbers (witness the epic ‘Voyage 34’, sampling Pink Floyd guitar riffs and Van der Graaf flute loops), blessed with Steven Wilson’s clear knowledge of what had gone before, and a certain amount of production polish, it was nonetheless high class music, and even delvings into ‘Dark Side’ type proggy fluff circa ‘The Sky Moves Sideways’ was often saved by the inclusion of at least one classy guitar ballad (such as ‘Stars Die’), per album… Facelift reviewed a number of further albums, which were often saved by those ballads as well as some memorably spiky riffs such as on ‘Signify’, but then as the magazine folded, so did my exposure to their music.

It took ‘In Absentia’, a near faultless album based lyrically on a questionable obsession with serial murder as well as a revitalisation of Wilson’s guitar approach underpinned by some gloriously chugging riffs to spark my interest again, as the band upgraded  various venue sizes to leave them well beyond the tiny lecture theatre I saw them with in Salford University in the very early days, or even Megadog co-billings later that in the Nineties, as the band positioned themselves as advanced progressive musicians railing in a seemingly post-adolescent manner against the system. A few more albums, then a hiatus whilst Wilson pursued solo projects and an increasingly lucrative position as the go-to remasterer of classic prog albums, including ‘In The Land Of Grey and Pink’ before this slightly surprising re-emergence with a new album ‘Closure/Continuation’ last year.

Porcupine Tree

So, how would Porcupine Tree re-emerge? Firstly, the unfortunate withdrawal of bass player Nate Navarro meant that existing bass lines were piped through the mix, leaving the overall sound lacking a little clarity, and, presumably a physical void on stage as Gavin Harrison set up with a preposterously large kit stage right. Richard Barbieri was seated back left, providing largely textured keyboards, leaving the main visual and musical impact both to Wilson and fellow guitarist John Wesley who takes backing vocals as well as often impressively taking Wilson’s studio lines, be they solo or rhythmic . The band command the space well and as the natural light faded, the startling dystopian images of the film show behind them were brought more sharply into focus. Wilson admitted that this two hour set would be something of a more mellow diversion than normal, and that was reflected in several new numbers I didn’t recognise, as well as elements of ones I did such as ‘Mellotron Scratch’ and ‘I Drive the Hearse’.

What I can tell you is that new track ‘Culling the Herd’, with its grinding guitar riff against the visual backdrop of rabid wolves, was right up to standard, and that the band worked through a number of staples including a rousing opener of ‘Blackest Eyes’, an upbeat ‘Sound of Muzak’ or dipping into slightly unexpected territory such as the otherworldly metronomic strumming of ‘Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled’.

Steven Wilson

But, soporific as the summer evening might have been, there was always a sense of waiting for the performance to explode with some stellar classics and that finally arrived with two tracks – firstly ‘Anaesthesize’, the hymn-like opus from ‘Fear of a Blank Planet’ which flits in and out of all-out sonic assault; and ‘Sleep Together’ from the same album, a track I neither particularly rated or remembered beyond its slightly turgid album outing, tonight unexpectedly transformed into the disturbing, menacing highpoint of their performance – a deserving set ender. Which only left what turned out to be 3 encores: a mellow one (‘Collapse the Light Into Earth’), a rocky crowdpleaser (‘Halo’) and perhaps, inevitably, the band’s calling card ‘Trains’. The Castlefield Basin is uniquely placed with a railway viaduct towering over stage left and, whether by design or otherwise this brief rendition of the track coincided with the loudest cheers of the night as a series of trains passed in either direction as band and audience turned their heads to acclaim them – a moment of joyful synchronicity to end the night…