In 1966, Daevid Allen asked postmodern author William Burroughs for permission to use the title of his novel The Soft Machine for his new band. In 2009 the Gong mastermind (who died in 2015) told Prog why it was such a good match with the Canterbury pioneers’ music.
Surrealist, satirist and beat generation figure William Burroughs has been an inspirational source of ideas for musicians over the years.
But the first time his work was used as a wellspring by a band came in 1966, when his novel The Soft Machine – published five years earlier – became the name for a group of young Canterbury-based talents.
When Robert Wyatt (drums/vocals), Kevin Ayers (guitar/bass/vocals), Daevid Allen (guitar) and Mike Ratledge (organ) united to create challenging music, an important question was what to call themselves. It was Allen who solved the dilemma.
“We had a number of names to choose from, and that one seemed to suggest that the human body and brain was a soft machine,” he says, matching the theme of the book. “And the internal textural contrast between the two words appealed to us as a group.”
Melbourne-born Allen had briefly worked with Burroughs while in Paris, prior to landing in Canterbury; and he’d performed theatrical pieces based on Burroughs’ celebrated novel The Naked Lunch.
Given the connection, it was inevitable that Allen would seek out the author to ask him about using The Soft Machine as a name.
Borroughs’ reaction still makes Allen laugh: “He said, ‘I can’t see why not!’ Then he looked hard at me and added, ‘If I were you I would get a haircut and disappear!’”
He still doesn’t recall many of the alternative suggestions the musicians had considered. “There were many quite good ones, but I can only remember two, neither of which appealed to me particularly. They were Mister Head, and Dingo Virgin And The Four Skins.
“To be honest, I don’t think anything we came up with got the full backing of everyone. Like most names, in the end it was a case of going with something that didn’t offend anyone.
“I’m glad we went the way we did, because I think that name still represents the type of music we made in those early days.”
They were known as The Soft Machine until 1969, before dropping the definite article. Why did they become simply Soft Machine?
“I’d left the band by then; so had Kevin,” Allen says. “I think they did it in order to reaffirm that they were now a very different group.”