VELVET THUNDER

If the much vaunted ‘Canterbury Scene’ can be said to exist – and it’s quite instructive to realise how many of its supposed leading lights claim there’s no such thing!! – then the voice of Richard Sinclair must surely be one of its defining features. His ‘cherry wine’ vocals have lit up albums by Caravan, Hatfield & the North, National Health, Camel as well as Sinclair & the South, alongside appearing on albums by Robert Wyatt and Theo Travis, amongst others. On and off, his career in music now extends to just over sixty years, going back as far as his pre-Caravan band, The Wilde Flowers. I spoke to Richard recently, and asked how did it all begin…

RS: The first band I was in was when I was at school was a band called The Pulsators, and one of the guys in the band eventually went on to become Lady Diana’s Met. Police minder! The Wilde Flowers only happened because my father was the no.1 singer in Canterbury. He used to sing like Nat King Cole but in the Queen’s English, and the Canterbury scene, for me, is my family. The parents of Hugh and Brian Hopper, who’d started the band, used to go see my father sing, and Hugh called me up because he’d heard my father had just bought me a guitar. It was initially weird as I’d never listened to any American music prior to this. The band were all Simon Langton Grammar School (Canterbury) boys who were into jazz and stuff like this, but I was a rock choirboy and at the school I went to, my headmaster was a Mr Ratledge, who was Mike’s father.

When I joined the band, I couldn’t believe the terrible noise they made! I left the Wilde Flowers after six months, mainly because I really wasn’t that interested as they were playing Chuck Berry and stuff like that, so I left to go and study Industrial Design at Canterbury Art College; Roger Dean was also there before he went on to make a name designing album covers. After I left, my place in the band was taken by Pye (Hastings) and he was there when they did their first gig, at the Bear & Key in Whitstable in 1965, and then others gigs around East Kent. Kevin (Ayers) and Robert (Wyatt) joined the band after me. Kevin joined because someone had told Robert, ‘there’s this guy in Herne Bay who’s got long blond hair, just like you, and he’s a bit of a singer.’ At the time, Ayers’ girlfriend was Pye’s sister, Jane, who used to be married to John Aspinall, the zoo owner and gambler, but Kevin took her away from him! When they (Kevin and Robert) left, Richard (Coughlan) joined and Pye became the singer, and they were playing mainly soul music, not this weird stuff! The Soft Machine formed in 1967, the year before us, got a record contract and made an album. Pye then came to see me as they needed a bass player, and we formed Caravan. The Wilde Flowers did some recordings on a two track at a studio in Broadstairs, owned by Wout Steinhaus, who was quite a famous guitarist. The band never released an album but, later, some tracks came out on a CD released by Voiceprint.

The conversation then turned to Caravan, and I asked Richard why he thought their third album, In The Land of Grey And Pink, was still held in such high regard by fans, even after fifty plus years. I mentioned I’d seen Caravan in the summer and they’d performed most of the album, which had been favourably received by the audience.

RS: Yeah, it’s lasted, hasn’t it? I wrote quite a lot of the album. I actually wrote Winter Wine, Golf Girl and Grey & Pink, it’s become quite iconic and people still like to hear Grey & Pink. I mean, personally, I like the first album best, it was more fun. Most of it was originally Pye’s music but we all chipped in and we decided the songs would be credited to all four of us for the publishing side of it. But, why has it lasted? It’s the same with lots of other bands from around the same time, like Yes and Genesis, because we were all making our own kind of pop rock music of the late ’60s. My father had told me, ‘if you wanna be successful, write nursery rhymes for adults,’ and that’s what it is really, isn’t it?

I mentioned Caravan had received a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ from Prog magazine in 2018. What was his take on this?

RS: Yes, I was aware of this, and I’ve said to Pye, I’ll always go back and help out if asked. In fact it was my cousin (David Sinclair) who started the band again, in 1990, when the original band got back together again for some TV show called Bedrock, 26 shows focussing on bands who’d not quite made it, and I did the show twice, with Caravan and The Hatfields, but all they wanted was just the old music of the seventies. After this we did another album called Back To Front, which I wanted to be called ‘Back To Herne Bay Front,’ and I wrote a tune about it. The original band went to Italy, as Caravan hadn’t played there before, and people just wanted to hear the original band playing the old stuff. At the time, Geoffrey Richardson was in the band, and I asked him to come, but he didn’t want to do it. I stayed six months and did some recordings, but I didn’t want to stay. I left to form my own band, Caravan Of Dreams, which still exists and occasionally I take it out, with lots of musicians from Canterbury playing in it.
Everything I write relates to Canterbury in some way, and to my Sinclair family, which dates back to 1800 and, for me, is my Canterbury scene. I’ve always had a base in Canterbury but I’ve always been moving away from it, and I now live in Perugia, Italy. But the Canterbury scene history is a really long story. Personally, the albums I like most from this are the first albums by Caravan and Soft Machine, as they both seemed to be the most natural.

Caravan had a 37-disc box set released in 2022, featuring studio albums, studio sessions and live gigs, some recorded by fans. Did he have any involvement in this, I wondered?

RS: Not really, though I was asked to sign two and a half thousand photographs so there wasn’t much money for any of us really. Ian Crocket, from Snapper Music, got in touch and said they’d like me to write something, and I got a small amount for doing this. I think I’m on about ten of the discs, including the albums I played on, though a couple of them are DVDs.

David Sinclair left Caravan (just after Grey And Pink) and the sound of the band changed, didn’t it?

RS: Well, it had to really, didn’t it? Not all keyboards sound the same. I was already playing with some of the musicians I’d form Hatfield & the North with. I’d already met Steve Miller, whose brother Phil was in the Hatfields, and he joined Caravan and we recorded another album, Waterloo Lily, with Phil Miller and Lol Coxhill. We did a number of gigs, went to Austria and other places, as well as lots of universities, but then after this I left, as did Steve, because I wanted to move on, and not keep playing the same songs all the time, because that’s what people expect if you’re in a band. I mean, I enjoyed it all about the Canterbury Scene, which started with Wilde Flowers and Soft Machine, but, after Caravan, I moved up to London with Steve to meet up with other players I’d got to know.

I put to Richard the fact that so many bands and musicians, people like Pye and Robert Wyatt, closely associated with the Canterbury Scene, deny any such thing exists….

RS: Exactly, yes. Henry Cow came from Cambridge, and the current Soft Machine are all London musicians, but I think it’s all to do with south east England, particularly Canterbury, as it has a certain sound in the way it uses its language. I mean, for me, the Canterbury Scene is the music which came in church. The Canterbury musician whose work I enjoy most is from Jimmy Hastings, Pye’s older brother, who’s a fantastic player and who sadly died a couple of years back. Tony Coe also died a couple of years back, another fantastic jazz musician, but sadly not many people now follow jazz, they tend to follow rock, bands like Gentle Giant and King Crimson, and they call it Progressive music, but it isn’t very progressive really, is it ? For me, the Sergeant Pepper album was the most interesting move forward progressively. In fact, the first jazz music I heard changed the whole way I thought about what music was, from an album Hugh Hopper gave me to learn some songs from. They were doing stuff from Chuck Berry and Mose Allison. I remember Kevin singing Parchman Farm, and it was terrible (laughs), so I learnt all this new stuff.

Somehow the conversation moved sideways, towards Robert Wyatt, and Richard engaged in a little reminiscing.

RS: I can remember Robert sitting at a piano, with just one drum and one cymbal, saying ‘we don’t actually play songs.’ He fell from a fourth floor window at a party and broke his back, and was in a coma for quite some time. But he carried on and recorded Rock Bottom, which he invited Hugh and I to do the bass on, and I played on three tracks. It was very enjoyable, and Nick Mason’s an amazing engineer and producer, which he probably got from Pink Floyd spending such a long time in the studio. I had to go to Barcelona last year as a girl there, from Valencia, had made a cartoon about Robert’s history to do with Rock Bottom, which was the title of the movie. But a lot of the musicians who appeared on the original Rock Bottom are now dead, though Mike (Oldfield) and Nick Mason are still around but they didn’t wanna go down there and take part with the movie. I went down and enjoyed it because they used the music with me playing bass on it, a bit louder but it sounded great in a big theatre. Rock Bottom’s nice music, a bit sad but then that’s the state the music was in.

I asked Richard, in the context of an almost sixty-year career making music, what are the things he’s done which he’s most proud of?

RS: I started when I was fifteen and I’m 77 now, so yeah, 60 years. But it’s always been about moving forward for me. I mean, I play with everybody, basically, anybody who’s got ears and who listens to things I enjoy. Everybody likes the whole deal of the Canterbury Scene, and everybody I play with seems to become part of the scene. I suppose I was lucky to be able to play with all those people, really. I really enjoyed Caravan and Hatfield & the North, but I left the Hatfields because it’d all got one way, the keyboard part. Initially everybody took an equal part of it but the two brothers (Phil and Steve Miller) didn’t get on, and I’d asked David (Sinclair) to join, as he’d been playing in Robert’s band, Matching Mole, but he’d moved away because he didn’t enjoy their album. Robert actually took one of David’s tune’s and wrote the lyrics to Oh Caroline, about Caroline Coon (founder of Release) who was his girlfriend at the time.

I’d already reformed Caravan and I’d reformed the Hatfields. It took a long time to reform the Hatfields, after Pip (Pyle) had done it first time for the TV show, because Dave (Stewart) had said he never wanted to play this music ‘live’ ever again, which is a shame but, just like David (Sinclair) they both decided to play more ‘ballad music.’ My cousin now lives in Japan and makes power ballads from the 1980s, which is such a shame, and Dave Stewart … well, it’s his party and he can cry if he wants to (laughs), and he’s never moved back to the music of the 1970s. The name Hatfield And The North, actually comes from Mike Patto, who had a great band. He said it as a joke name for a band, but Pip liked it and we used it. But after this, I’d had enough and formed my own band, which became Sinclair & The South. I mentioned to Dave Stewart, who’d been playing with Bill Bruford, about wanting musicians and he said I should talk to Alan Holdsworth, who’d been playing with Jack Bruce, and I did but he wasn’t keen on it. Dave then said, why not ask Bill to play? So I did, saying we had a gig lined up, and he came along and played well. We had David Sinclair in the band, and also Dave Arbus, from East Of Eden, who played violin and sax. There’s a recording of this gig at Kent University somewhere.

You’ve had quite the career, haven’t you?

RS: Yeah. I’ve done some other things as well. I also got invited to play in Camel (Richard played on their Rain Dances and Breathless albums, plus A Live Record) and before this I did a day’s playing with Peter Gabriel when he did two weeks of rehearsal in England for his debut album and, to be honest with you, I really didn’t enjoy it very much. And after this came Caravan Of Dreams and all the other bands I’ve played in. As mentioned, I’d reformed Caravan and the Hatfields, and there’s a box set coming out on November 26th, being released by Burning Shed, after a Japanese firm contacted me and asked if I minded their releasing an album of the Hatfields from 2005, which’d come from my band, as the Hatfields hadn’t existed after 1975, and there’ll be two shows in Tokyo. All this music now, I’m in control of it. I’ve now got to do an archive series, and I’m just waiting to see if they come up with the right contract. I’ve also got a presence on Bandcamp, ‘Richard Sinclair songs on Bandcamp’, and a lot of my archive series is on there. I’ve done lots of solo shows in places like the US, and I’m destined to return to Japan to do solo shows next year. I went solo when I realised it’s more fun being able to play with different people and, everywhere I go, there are musicians who are able to play my music. I play with a lot of bands in Italy as well, which is nice!