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 'Matching Mole : the beginning of an other ear' - Time Out - June 16th-22nd 1972
Matching Mole : the beginning of an other ear
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Few bands have faced such a discrepancy between the enthusiasm of their welcome and the uncertainty of their economics as Matching Mole. Multiply an average music biz melodrama by the number of holes it'd take to fill the Wembley Empire Pool and you'll come up with some semblance of the equipment, transport and pocket-money problems that have continually confronted this merry and determined little combo of Foster's Lager addicts. This, together with a considerable affection for Robert Wyatt's drumming and voicing, Phil Miller's guitaring, Bill MacCormick's bassing and Dave MacRae's keyboarding (and the now-departed David Sinclair's keyboarding on their record), prompted Al Clark to wander along to a rehearsal in Dave's front room, and afterwards talk with Robert across the kitchen table.
Voices and choices
It's been evident from the first Soft Machine album onwards that Robert Wyatt is the possessor of the most notched, rusty and unfailingly empathetic vocal chords in the entire area of music in which they operate. In one version of the Wilde Flowers, that celebrated, ever-changing Canterbury nucleus-for-the-future, he sang for about nine months while Richard Coughlan (subsequently of Caravan) did the drumming. And it's his voice that overshadows the early Soft Machine demos recently released by Byg. But that was an approach styled around straightforward pop singing, and evolving out of the general excitement surrounding pop music in the early and mid-sixties. Also, Kevin Ayers would occasionally write something outside his own range or might need a harmony part added, and Robert would oblige on that score.
However, by the time it came to recording the first album, his voice had extended itself into modulations, instrumentalising, harmonising, echoing, a multilaterally true voice in an arid soundscape of good voices. He even became so horrified at the original lyrics of one of his songs ("I Should've Known") that here-wrote them the night before the recording into something so completely honest, revealing and amusing ("Why Am I So Short ?") that it undoubtedly created the precedent for all his word-games to follow. In this respect the previous influence of Daevid Allen, whou sed to lodge with his parents and was an original member of the group, was probably quite substantial.
"Daevid, not by preaching but by example, was living out all the things he was thinking about. To me activity was reading, looking at paintings and listening to records. Meanwhile, he was writing, painting and playing guitar. What you could do consisted of what you wanted to do. He used to sing and make noises and make tapes. He made tapes with people who could play and tapes with people who couldn't play, and there was no difference in quality between them. Things like that shattered the kind of rubbish that I'd been thinking up until then...".
It's surprising - in view of the beauty of Robert's treatment of Hugh Hopper's "A Certain Kind" on the first Soft Machine LP, his amazing vocal jigsaws on Volume Two, the lengthy lyrical passages of 'Moon in June' on Third and the extent to which much of the commercial success of Matching Mole's album can be attributed to the irresistibility of "O Caroline" and "Signed Curtain", both cracked, barely-sung diary-fragments which are indivisible from what they're about - that he isn't really all that keen on songs, or at least song situations.
"Usually they're just props for making noise. There are certain vowels and consonants that work out and have the right effect, and the people who wrote them will contrive the imitation situation whereby that's what they actually wanted to say. In my case, my pride goes if I find myself lying like that, and I think that if I'm going to use words, I should use them as carefully as possible, bearing in mind that you're talking to somebody, and that if you are trying to say something then be careful what you say. But the thing I really like about music is way outside intelligible conversation, much deeper stronger and more moving than strinding sentences together. So I've generally played in bands which were essentially instrumental. In other words, I've never played with polite, subservient, accompanist-type musicians, and this creates a situation where if you're going to make your voice fit into the context of a set or an album, for the sake of the continuity and mood of the piece, you're just throwing your voice in to the elements, you're dealing with pure music rather than conveying some cute impression of yourself to strangers. So I've always tried to get unsituations where the very fact that I also like singing songs was discouraged. Whether that means I'm totally screwed up I don't know, don't really care either".
Moon of an ear
"Moon in June" on Third is a collage of fragments assembled during the life of the group, mostly during his time in the States after the two tours they did with Jimi Hendrix. Some of it is a lament for being away from home. All of it is his own work. Mike Ratledge came in to play his organ solo and provide a drone with Hugh Hopper. Rab Spall contributed violin, but it wouldn't be unfair to call Robert 'Mr Moon In June', especially in the five-minute one-manaural orgy at the end. In common with most things, it came to represent something not originally intended... Like wanting to hold on to the reins of the Soft Machine he liked while it was beginning to become one he wasn't having so much fun with. With no reflection on Elton Dean, who Robert himself after all had gone out to find, he feels it was at that stage that compromise entered the whole business.
"Moon in June" for me was the last chance I had to use all the things we'd done without being a jazz band, which was what was developing. I thought that before that we'd done something quite special that had nothing to do with being a jazz band and I wanted to get twenty minutes of it down somewhere. At the same time, I was excited about the new developments and wanted a change too. I don't know if I'll always be in this position, but I really only do those things in studios in the end because, however much I go on about co-operativeness and that, there comes a point when I know exactly what I want something to sound like and the only way to get it is to do nearly everything yourself, I can't write complex enough scores to get other people to do it. When people ask why I don't necessarily do on stage what I do on record, the only answer is that I could not subject other musicians to the rigorous detail and discipline that I have to impose on myself to get those things right. I just don't have that kind of personality".
How did The End of an Ear come about ? Well, partly because CBS probably thought when they gave their okay that, as he was the singer in a primarily instrumental group, he'd come busting out all over with a long-frustrated headful of commercial pop songs. For Robert though, the motivation was slightly different...
"That was a direct result of wishing that I'd had more than five minutes to meander at the end of "Moon in June". I was just so fucking happy adding layer after layer. Mike had gone, so I made all the little noises on the Lowrey organ that I'd wanted him to make. Christ, for the first time I wasn't just planning and dreaming and hoping, I was actually doing what I wanted to do, and I suddenly thought how silly to stick it on the end of a bunch of songs. So The End Of an Ear came about once I'd decided to continue the ecstasy of charging about in the studio pissed out of me head for forty minutes instead of five".
Were the title, and the 'out-of-work pop singer currently on drums with the Soft Machine' clause on the sleeve a pretty fair indication of how he felt at the time, and a nudge in the direction of his comrades ?
"I seem to have inspired a certain amount of sympathy and personal enthusiasm amongst people about my own particular loneliness and battle within the Soft Machine. But the fact is that I was drunk and arrogant and didn't take them seriously enough when they didn't want to do the kind of things I wanted to. I put Mike and Hugh through ghastly emotional scenes, and the mind boggles at how they've stuck it all that long... I've had a lot of time to think about that and - sorry, I know public confession boxes is the best trend and all that - but it is worth saying because I'm getting vaguely sheepish and embarrassed about the sympathy for me within that context since they were simply trying to play what they wanted. If the Soft Machine was a prison, then it was a prison I built for myself out of my own indecision and lack of sense of direction. So the record isn't anti-Soft Machine, it's anti-me for not being able to think clearly what I wanted to do. The dedications on the cover are no-pride-left, anybody-out-there-help-help type ones, claiming people by writing down their names. It was absurd. I look back on it as being a feast for some second-rate psychiatrist".
The longest dedication of all was to Gil Evans whose Wyatt-styled "Las Vegas Tango" came to take up about a third of the record's playing time.
"He's one of the few people who've come across an endless musical thing to do. This is what the blues is, but it's not any one particular person's invention, it's just thousands of people eventually agreeing on a format that's endlessly satisfying. And Gil Evans, almost single-handedly, got a link going in my head between Spanish cante jondo and blues singing in "Las Vegas Tango", it's just a beautifully shifting seesaw of Spanish-influenced blues chords. That struck me as endlessly satisfying".
The evolving mole
And then there was Matching Mole, or Machine Molle as some prophetic bilingual punsters would insist. Bill MacCormick was a civil servant at the time of joining but before that was in a group called Quiet Sun who did unusual time signature things. Phil Miller was in Delivery but also worked with people like Roy Babbington, and spent long amounts of time learning his way around his instrument. Or as Robert put it, "His main background is sitting around playing guitar without any money". Robert met Dave MacRae through Nucleus who were looking for a new drummer after John Marshall went to join Jack Bruce and, ultimately and ironically, the Soft Machine. Dave still plays piano for them as well as making his considerable contribution to the Mole.
"Dave MacRae is an antipodean from another planet, and my life started out with them. He's such a total musician, equally happy in Australian jazz groups, knowing his Cecil Taylor, doing a Coca Cola ad or grooving behind Buddy Rich or Sarah Vaughan. The most important contribution he made to the record was being there, tuning up his piano and talking and putting on little odd plinking noises through all the instrumental things, and just creating the atmosphere of being in a room with all he can do but not doing it. It's not so much what he plays, but of how different the record would've been if he hadn't been there".
The man who did play most of the keyboard parts on the record, David Sinclair, is now late of Caravan, late of Matching Mole and currently working on some songs with a friend, and drummer Pip Pyle. Why late of Matching Mole ?
"Well, although he joined to play and rave as well as do the songs, the only thing that really worked compatibly was the songwriting. He's a great freaker-outer on organ. A keyboardman with a sense of madness is very rare, keyboard people are usually very schooled and can wreck musical madness with their knowledge of what should be happening. Dave can lose himself in wonderful ways,but when you're trying to build a tune that you're going to be playing night after night, it's not enough to have a few things in common. You've really got to have so much in common. Yon can afford casual relationships on a record which you can't afford in a working group".
Was there any track on the record particularly representative of the further-evolved Mole?
"Hopefully I'm now becoming a quarter of whatever gets said or played. So for me "Part of the Dance" is the most useful pointer to the group because it was written by Phil and I'm just doing my quarter on it, like I'm doing now and like I hope to be doing on the next album".
Does that necessarily exclude any more "O Caroline" or "Signed Curtain"'?
"Those things are like cutting off malignant parts of a diseased body. I really don't need them anymore. To be able to write and sing those, without sounding too precious I hope, relieves some of the thing that goes into producing them. However, there's no way of making plans about that. I suppose I shall sit around pianos and sing and think up word games at certain times for the rest of my life. And if I'm in the studio, I'll do it".
Afterpiece
A few days later, with the group having gone off to France on the Gallic Leg of their John Mayall tour I put my brain cells in a small cardboard box and take them down to an armchair in front of a television screen in South London's ETV studios. Resting in the certain knowledge that the Mole won't be bothering with any of the right-ones and rock'n'roll medleys that might make them rich tax exiles before they get to Avignon, I settle back and watch the playback of a broadcast they taped a few days earlier.
Dave, like an electronic Gandalf with impossibly long fingers, guides the smoky, shifting rhythms over Bill's obsessive Focal Timekeeper bass line and curls elegantly up and down whatever part of the keyboard he fancies. Phil, hunched and Grecian-God-Curled, is the ideal group guitarist, waiting for the moment to contribute effectively and knowing what an effective contribution amounts to. Bill and Phil, like Bill and Ben, have a very special binding language and don't even have to say anything. Robert doing his voice bits isn't a pretty sight but makes a remarkable sound, like a man sobbing his heart out inside an echo chamber. Matching Mole seems to be the sum total of all their lives so far.
It really is a quartet now. And I only talked to Robert. Aw shucks. See them soon. Nice boys every one of them, even if they don't go for smart casuals and fast cars. They're probably the most coherent and adventurous British band that's still accessible these days, equally balancing strong themes and inspired deviations. And they're not doing much, apart from rehearsing. Music-Music never did go down all that well. Still, it's always a new pigeon-hole and there's plenty of money and support in them. In Mole-holes there's only music.
Al Clark
PS : All of which having been said, done and typeset, it turns out that Matching Mole are playing in Saturday's Midnight-to-six gig at Kings Cross Cinema with the Soft Machine (now with Karl Jenkins in place of Elton Dean) and Just Us (Elton Dean's group-on-the-side gone full-time). The wheel goes round and it should be a right old skull fucker of a night...
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