The Man Who Waved At Trains

n the autumn of 1970 Robert Wyatt, Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper and Mike Ratledge were ensconced in Barnes, London at Olympic Studios. The quartet spent six days in the smaller of the two studios, adjacent to the space where pop and rock royalty such as The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones and others had recorded. It was common enough for those acts to be photographed or be interviewed while they were recording at Olympic. While Soft Machine may not have had the kind of visibility of those illustrious acts or able to command of column inches in the music press in their native UK, their reputation and stock was high enough in France that, upon hearing the news that the Softs were busy with a new record, TV executives immediately dispatched a news crew to south-west London in order to document the band as they recorded the follow-up album to their recently released . The already cosy space became a lot more cramped by the time the TV crew arrived to, so-called, it is rumoured, because it was so hard to play that musicians would exclaim “Hell’s teeth!” as they attempted to grapple with dizzying cascade of notes on the page.