Canterbury Scene

You're asking about a family tree that got mistaken for a genre. A couple of dozen musicians from one cathedral town in Kent kept swapping bands for fifteen years, and the label stuck to the lineage rather than to any one sound.

What they shared: jazz chops played on rock gear, Hammond run through fuzz, lyrics that are absurd on purpose, and an English politeness laid over music in 7/8.

Canterbury, Kent, 1964. The Wilde Flowers form around Robert Wyatt, Hugh and Brian Hopper, Kevin Ayers, Richard Sinclair, Pye Hastings and Richard Coughlan.

They release nothing at the time; the tapes only surface decades later on compilation. The band splits two ways: Soft Machine (1966, London, the UFO club, Burroughs-derived name) and Caravan (1968).

Daevid Allen, an Australian, is refused re-entry to Britain after Soft Machine's 1967 French tour, stays in Paris and builds Gong there. The second wave runs through Delivery, Egg, Matching Mole and Khan into Hatfield and the North (1973) and National Health (1975).

Virgin Records becomes the scene's home in its Manor Studios years — Gong's Flying Teapot was the second record in the Virgin catalogue, V2002, issued the same day as Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells.

By 1978 the scene has dissolved into fusion and into Japan's reissue market, where it never stopped selling.

Who: Wyatt, Ayers, the Hoppers, the Sinclair cousins, Pye and Jimmy Hastings, Dave Stewart, Phil Miller, Pip Pyle, Daevid Allen, Steve Hillage. Places: Canterbury's Simon Langton school, Wellington House in Lydden, the UFO club, later The Manor in Oxfordshire.

What: Hammond or Rhodes carrying the harmony, bass playing melody, drums unhurried behind the beat, vocals sung flat and English rather than belted. Jazz heads and group improvisation, but the tunes stay tuneful.

How a record gets in: by personnel. If Jimmy Hastings plays flute on it, or Dave Stewart's fuzz organ is on it, collectors file it here regardless of where it was cut.