Soft Machine – Band on the Wall, Manchester 19 February 2024 – The Canterbury scene(zine) continued….

Manchester’s iconic Band on the Wall is a familiar stomping ground for the musicians who make up Soft Machine. John Etheridge and Fred Baker can trace their collaborations together back to 1981 (when Baker must have been a mere slip of a thing) whilst Theo Travis attended many of the same Thursday night jazz gigs as myself in the mid Eighties as a Manchester music student. These days the venue is restored, expanded and spruced up rather, but retains the intimacy and high quality sound, and seems to spark an elevated quality of performance from most bands whose tours pass through here.

This is the first UK tour since the release of the second studio album of the re-incarnated Soft Machine, Other Doors, and drummer Asaf Sirkis, installed at a time when the late John Marshall’s health was in serious decline, is now fully integrated – few have Marshall’s sheer dominance of the drum kit, but Sirkis is precision personified, subtle too, and if you’ve watched the reels online of him playing, eyes closed, in a state of trance, then tonight he gave a different impression, a heads-up embodiment of enjoyment from a man, who, in a nice twist, was playing the John Marshall kit which has passed on to Softs tour manager Nick Utteridge. He excelled particularly on the duo with Etheridge, ‘Tales of Taliesin’ whilst the later solo ‘Middlebrow’ saw him in full flow.

Fred Baker on bass is a colossus – navigating effortlessly through the Softs disparate repertoire new and old, but finding time to fit in a number of displays of virtuosity: his recreation of Kevin Ayers’ ‘Joy of a Toy’ and the preposterous fuzz-bass intro (complete with kickstart) of ‘Gesolreut’, possibly this band’s calling card.

Theo Travis cuts an authoritative figure front and centre stage. He is the glue that binds the band together these days, providing ballast and subtlety on the keyboard, sharp intrusions on tenor (his solo on Hidden Details was outstanding), ethereal loopery on flute (Kings and Queens was once again heartstopping) and remains amongst my favourite performers on the soprano.

As for Etheridge, time does not diminish his skillset. Seated as we were on the front row, slightly stage right, we got the full impact of his guitar work both visually and sonically. I’ve talked before about his contrasting modes of breakneck fluidity and simple emotive themes, but that does him an injustice. Sometimes he takes a Soft Machine tune from pre-1974 and makes you forget it never had a guitar line, so adept are his arrangements, either thematically or as a backdrop to bass, sax or flute. Elsewhere his tones are skillfully corrosive – a manicured chaos of effects and flying fingerwork.

I’ll include the setlist below, but one thing that struck me was the sheer extent of this performance – the band could have been well justified downing tools at the end of a first set which was notable for both its length and intensity. New pieces were aired: Harry Beckett’s ‘Dew At Dawn’, a lighter, most un-Softs-like piece with reggae inflections, an extraordinary improvised piece called ‘Visitor at the Window’ – with mellotron sounds and serpentine sleazy jazz touches; ‘Fell To Earth’, a hugely enjoyable mélange of Sixties cacophony, complete with quotes from, I think, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ and ‘Purple Haze’; whilst the truncated version of ‘Slightly All the Time’ was a joy (and was later augmented by ‘Backwards/Noisette’ for the encore). This version of Soft Machine liberally sprinkle in new and old material, and there are no dud moments here (one of the highlights for me was an unexpected reappearance of ‘Burden of Proof’ from the ‘Legacy’ days, for example). But there is a certain pride in drawing on reinterpretations from each of the previous albums. Tonight’s surprise was a brief but welcome outing for ‘1030 Returns to Bedroom’, the first time I believe ‘Volume 2’ has been revisited. An extended version of this would be most welcome. And I haven’t even mentioned Etheridge’s solo guitar piece, which I sincerely hope someone captured, a very loose ‘Hazard Profile’ or this band’s sublime version of ‘Penny Hitch’. Or that the fact that the whole evening started with a certain track called ‘Facelift’.

There are hopes that a live performance from this tour might get recorded for future consumption – in the meantime I satisfied myself with my first Soft Machine vinyl for around 40 years, a T-shirt, and a heady chat with bandmembers clearly buzzing from the rarified atmosphere. Things are alive and well in Soft Machine land…