A relay, not a sound

The moment

Start with the joke the musicians made themselves. Hugh Hopper, who lived in Whitstable, called the whole thing "a rather artificial label, a journalistic thing," and added that Robert Wyatt "in fact hates that idea." Dave Stewart complained that plenty of the so-called scene "never had anything to do with Canterbury, the place." Wikipedia's overview lists what the bands did share instead: "a certain whimsicality, touches of psychedelia, rather abstruse lyrics, and a use of improvisation derived from jazz." That is a temperament, not a postcode.

What the five-year window catches is the relay in motion. The Wilde Flowers broke up in 1969 and scattered into Soft Machine, Caravan, Gong, Hatfield and the North, Egg and National Health, with overlapping personnel shuffling between them. Matching Mole is the cleanest single lap: Robert Wyatt formed it in October 1971 after leaving Soft Machine, the debut arrived in April 1972 with "O Caroline" on it, Little Red Record followed that November produced by Robert Fripp, and the band folded in September 1972 — a fourteen-month band. Hatfield and the North picked up the baton almost immediately, running from October 1972 to June 1975 on Virgin, built from ex-Delivery, ex-Gong and ex-Caravan hands, and moving toward "pieces based on riffs in odd time signatures and protracted melodies associated with the Canterbury style." Wyatt's June 1973 fall from a window ended his drumming career and, with it, any chance of a third Matching Mole lineup. The scene kept reforming because its members kept being available.

Why this matters for listening: the relay explains the family resemblance without needing a "Canterbury sound." The same improvising habit turns up whether the vehicle is Caravan's pop-grin, Soft Machine's jazz-rock longforms, or the whimsy Kevin Ayers carried out of Soft Machine's earliest lineup. And it explains this week's modern bookend. Syd Arthur — Liam and Joel Magill, Raven Bush, Fred Rother — came out of Canterbury itself, and the Guardian's profile called them the "sons and heirs of those Canterbury musicians," a phrase that only works because the inheritance was people and habits, not a trademark. A band from the actual city could claim it.