1 post tagged “robert wyatt”
Cranking up The Mars Volta's Frances the Mute album the first time was revelatory, and it had me jumping around for days. I caught up with their other albums afterwards, but none of them quite did it for me the way Frances did. And now they have a new one out, as you may have heard, The Bedlam in Goliath. They have also released five cover songs as bonus tracks. One of them is "Memories"--
Listening to that the first time I recognized the tune; it took me a minute but I placed it as a song from Material's 1982 album, One Down. It's a nice breather from the electronic funk of the rest of the album, and significant for being sung by a pre-solo-career Whitney Houston:
I had always assumed this "Memories" was either original to Material or an obscure R&B cover, but The Mars Volta listed it as a Soft Machine cover. And sure enough, the first version of The Soft Machine--Robert Wyatt, Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, and Mike Ratledge--recorded it in 1967 with producer Giorgio Gomelsky. It never got beyond the demo stage, but has been released several times on "Soft Machine early years" albums:
But wait, there's more! It wasn't actually a Soft Machine song originally, but a song written by bassist Hugh Hopper in the pre-Soft Machine band The Wilde Flowers. The Wilde Flowers first recorded it as an instrumental, then added lyrics for a 1966 recording, with Robert Wyatt singing but not drumming:
Hugh Hopper joined The Soft Machine after their first (demo) recording of "Memories," and in 1969 the new SM lineup --Hopper, Wyatt, and Mike Ratledge--recorded "Memories" once again... but as The Wilde Flowers!
And that's only a part of the rather amazing history of this little song. Luna Kafé has the definitive article on "Memories," the Dutch Progressive Rock Page has a complete Wilde Flowers chronology, and Richie Unterberger gets some interesting tidbits from Daevid Allen himself about the early Soft Machine. I obviously still have a lot to learn about the swiftly-shifting alliances of those nascent prog rock years.
