SOFT MACHINE - DAEVID'S SPECIAL CUPPA

LISTEN TO IT:

(Theo Travis)

 PART OF THE INTERVIEW OF THEO TRAVIS BY PHIL HOWITT FOR FACELIFT :

The final track on the album is perhaps the most unexpected. Since their resurrection as Soft Machine Legacy in the new millennium, and more recently as simply Soft Machine, the band have resolutely incorporated an interpretation from the 60s and 70s repertoire on each album. ‘Thirteen’ breaks that mould in producing entirely original tracks, albeit that two reference former members (Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen). ‘Daevid’s Special Cuppa’ goes one step further in utilising previously unheard glissando guitar from the latter as the bedrock of a piece which also sees Theo Travis play doudouk, an instrument associated with fellow Gong musician Didier Malherbe.

Theo: this wasn’t particularly about the 60th anniversary (of Soft Machine), but it was definitely an appreciation of Soft Machine’s roots. I knew Daevid well. He had this effect of being a kind of musical catalyst and he was very creative. Basically anyone around him he wanted to encourage them to do stuff and that’s what it was like with Gong. He very much wanted people to bring in compositions and you know it was a cooperative thing. I wasn’t there, but I can just imagine when he arrived from Australia, in the Sixties, this wild Beatnik from planet Saturn with all his crazy ideas and all his creativity and all his love of words and love of jazz and love of improv. The change from the Wilde Flowers into Soft Machine with its old concept, it would have been the combination of Daevid and the others, particularly Robert probably.

I had this unused recording (of glissando guitar) and thought, “wouldn’t it be great to have Daevid on the Soft Machine now”, because he didn’t even make it to the Soft Machine ‘Volume 1’. What a beautiful thing to have him on a Soft Machine album proper.

Sonically his glissando guitar is glorious, so I thought if I can build it up from the glissando guitar using the four of us, and turn it into something that becomes cool, then that’s what I want to do.

The process was: I had a bunch of glissando guitar recordings from Daevid that I then basically put into my Logic software, worked out a kind of broad tempo, thought, “what am I going to do with this?”, this 67/68 psychedelia world. And then I went for the rhythm. I wanted to have a kind of tomtom rhythm (evoking) underground UFO psychedelic all-nighters. So a kind of hypnotic rhythm and a bassline that just went on with that. And then I wanted a focus, and I was very keen on this album to really have melodies that grab you, whether it was that track or a free improv track or whether it’s a long complicated proggy track. I think there’s something essential and of core importance about having strong melodies because that’s the thing that you remember in a way. That’s the thing that focuses a track.

So I wanted to have a good melody. And given that we already had glissando guitar, we weren’t going to have John doing kind of guitar chords. So we’ve got this melody that’s soprano sax and electric guitar in harmony on this whole tune, and it’s just a melody beginning to end. John got that lovely tremolo guitar sound and then I had to get some doudouk in! Again, if you’re just going for a track, you want to hit someone in the solar plexus. You’ve got this gorgeous glissando, you got a strong melodic hypnotic thing, it’s just a little bit of, icingy marzipanny cherry.

I had the whole thing demoed on my studio and then in the studio proper. I think they did it all in one but we replaced guitar, the bass and the drums and it was the original doudouk from my studio.

We don’t know what’s going to happen with the future of Soft Machine albums. No one ever does really. But obviously the fact that Daevid was there right at the beginning and to then have the Daevid track right at the end of this one, you know, there’s a kind of symmetry

FULL INTERVIEW: FACELIFT

"THIRTEEN" is available at:

https://softmachine-moonjune.bandcamp.com/album/thirteen

https://softmachine7.bandcamp.com/

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