The Canterbury Sound in Popular Music

Scene, Identity and Myth

Asya Draganova, Shane Blackman, Andy Bennett, Asya Draganova, Shane Blackman, Andy Bennett

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781787694910
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection is a unique exploration of the heritage and legacy of the Canterbury Sound: a signature style emerging in the 1960s that draws upon psychedelic music, progressive rock, jazz and pop to capture the real and imagined interactions between people, place and music.
The volume recounts the stories, and explores the significance, of the Canterbury Sound as heritage, ongoing legacy and scene. Originating from the experiences and ethnographic research of the three editors, all of whom have lived and worked in Canterbury, the book brings together reflections, stories, and critical insights from well-known musicians, researchers, DIY archivists and fans to explore the Canterbury Sound as an inter-generational phenomenon and a source of cultural identity. Associated with acts like Caravan, Soft Machine, Gong, Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers, this romanticised scene has a special place in popular music culture.
Chapters examine the emergence of the Canterbury Sound and the associated scene, including the legacies of key figures in forming the Canterbury Sound aesthetic, the documentation of the scene (online and off) and contemporary scenes within the city, which continues to attract and inspire young people.

Part I

Emergence, Sound and Scene

Chapter 1

The Canterbury Sound as Local, Trans-local and Virtual Scene

Andy Bennett

The term Canterbury Sound (or interchangeably Canterbury Scene) was first used by UK music journalists, and also to a smaller extent in the local Canterbury press, during the late 1960s and early 1970s to describe a number of groups and individual artists with connections to the city of Canterbury (Bennett, 2004). Among these were Soft Machine and Caravan, whose line-ups included former members of local Canterbury rock group the Wilde Flowers, and Gong (see Stump, 1997). As both a conceptual term and a scene descriptor, the Canterbury Sound was quickly discarded and generally forgotten about (except in a local vernacular context of shared musical memories) for almost 30 years. Then, during the mid-1990s, Calyx, a dedicated Canterbury Sound website, was established by Aymeric Leroy, a French music writer and Canterbury Sound fan (Bennett, 2002; see also Leroy, Chapter 13 in this book). The arrival of Calyx revived a wider interest in the notion of the Canterbury Sound and also created a new generation of fans for those bands and music associated with it. Within this context, and amidst a strengthening of the Canterbury Sound’s digital presence in the era of Web 2.0, it has acquired a heightened resonance as globally networked fans have set about exchanging views and opinions online regarding the defining qualities of the Canterbury Sound, its signature artists and the role of the city of Canterbury in its conception. At the same time, however, with the growing presence of popular music heritage discourses (Bennett, 2009), at both local and trans-local levels, those invested in the Canterbury Sound as bound up with the emotional geography of the city have begun to revisit and rekindle the local spirit of the Canterbury Sound through performance, writing, tours, exhibitions and symposia. The purpose of this chapter is to consider each of these elements and the way in which they play into discursive and creative constructions of the Canterbury Sound as a locally, trans-locally and virtually inflected scene.

Music Scenes – A Conceptual History

In a vernacular sense, the term music scene can be traced back at least as far as the 1940s when it began to be used by music journalists to describe the specific socio-cultural and spatial contexts of jazz music (Peterson & Bennett, 2004). From there, ‘scene’ quickly evolved as a descriptor for use with a successive range of genres, particularly from the 1950s onwards when new popular music styles such as rock and roll, heavy metal, punk, rap, hard core and rave consecutively assumed a deep and often anti-hegemonic resonance for youth (see, e.g., Chambers, 1985; Haenfler, 2006; Redhead, 1990; Rose, 1994). In an academic context, scene was first applied to popular music by Straw (1991) whose use of the term was partly intended to counter the then dominant concept of subculture. From the point of view of subcultural theory, the cultural significance of popular music could be interpreted strongly as a product of class and education (see, e.g., Hall & Jefferson, 1976; Willis, 1978). According to Straw (1991), scene was a more relevant concept for examining clusters of popular music taste in a contemporary sense in that it cut across class and other markers of ‘traditional’ community to bespeak new aesthetic communities based around patterns of music consumption and associated cultural tastes that were frequently trans-local. Peterson and Bennett’s (2004) tripartite model of scenes incorporates an integrated understanding of scenes as comprising elements of the local, trans-local and ‘virtual’. Peterson and Bennett’s model of scenes was offered at a time when the internet was increasingly being used by music fans in forms of online activity that approximated physical, face-to-face scene activity, replicating these in the virtual sphere of the internet. Such activity included swapping knowledge about particular music genres and artists and posting text and music examples for others to share. From this, concluded Peterson and Bennett, it was possible to conceptualise a ‘virtual scene’ as a third tier of activity through which individuals come together to articulate and share their common preferences for particular genres and artists. Thus, according to Peterson and Bennett (2004):

Whereas a conventional local scene is kept in motion by a series of gigs, club nights, fairs, and similar events, where fans converge, communicate and reinforce their sense of belonging to a particular scene, the virtual scene involves direct net-mediated person-to-person communication between fans …. This may, involve, for example, the creation of chat-rooms or list-serves dedicated to the scene and may involve the trading of music and images on-line. (p. 11)

Pertinent to the focus of this chapter is that Peterson and Bennett’s model builds on an earlier study by Bennett (2002) which focusses specifically on the virtually mediated presence of the Canterbury Sound through fan-based websites such as Calyx (see above) and its impact on the way that the Canterbury Sound and its relationship to the city of Canterbury was perceived by fans, many of whom were geographically dispersed and had never visited the city. As such, argues Bennett, through its virtual representation Canterbury acquired the status of a mythscape, that is to say, a place that could be romantically redesigned through narratives shared online as the unquestioned catalyst for a musical style that, for many, could only be defined as the ‘Canterbury Sound’. As Bennett (2002) observes:

[…] while physically removed from Canterbury, ‘Canterbury Sound’ fans effectively forge a sense of community through their collective construction of the city in musicalized terms, the online discussions of fans being informed by a shared image of Canterbury as an urban space that provided the necessary stimulus for the birth of the Canterbury Sound and which remains central to its ‘spirit’. (p. 91)

Since the publication of this early work on virtual music scenes and the Canterbury Sound, it is evident that significant changes have taken place, both in relation to the concept of the virtual scene and in relation to the Canterbury Sound itself. Although it was never the intention of Peterson and Bennett to suggest that clear lines of distinction could be drawn between the local, trans-local and virtual elements of scenes, more recent work has clearly brought into focus the lines of connection and confluence that exist here (see, e.g., Kruse, 2010). Indeed, in the early twenty-first century many music scenes can be described as multifaceted, in that they express particular modes of scene-ness, local, trans-local and virtual (Peterson & Bennett, 2004). But music scenes are often more than this – they are bound up with and expressive of rich emotional geographies (Davidson, Bondi, & Smith, 2007) that link the past to the present; they bond people together in affective modes of shared memory and belonging. Certainly, all of these scene elements can be found in the Canterbury Sound as it is now perceived among musicians, fans and various other scene intermediaries.

Feeling the Vibes – Soft Localism and its Play of Seduction

It is an interesting aspect of music’s evolution that the more ‘trans-local’ particular genres and styles have become, the more emphasis has been placed on the local roots and origins of music. By its very definition, popular music in its more contemporary idiom cannot literally be described as ‘local’ music. Rather, while this music continues to be made in local spaces at the same time it frequently draws on a characteristically scattered range of trans-local influences. This applies to pretty much all styles of music that are now regarded as popular, and indeed to other musical styles including folk and jazz. And yet, the lure and appeal of the local in the way that musicians, fans and various cultural intermediaries describe music and its cultural significance remains incredibly strong. As noted above, in this context, the concept of ‘scene’ is a particularly apt and frequently used metaphor for describing a cluster of local practices and what is deemed to be local distinctiveness (Peterson & Bennett, 2004; Stahl, 2004). Also, frequently used in this context is the concept of sound or rather ‘a’ sound, well-known examples here including the Liverpool Sound (Cohen, 1991), the Seattle Sound (Strong, 2011), the Dunedin Sound (Bannister, 2006) and, of course, the Canterbury Sound (Bennett, 2002, 2004; Draganova & Blackman, 2018). In many ways, the discursive sleight of hand that is working here to produce a discourse of local distinctiveness is a natural reaction among musicians, fans and those who speak for them in enacting and preserving a sense of something ‘real’ in the face of what they consider to be pop plasticity of the mainstream, itself a problematic and highly contested term (see Thornton, 1995). And still, the Canterbury Sound remains something of an unusual contender in this respect – essentially an ‘outlier’ when compared with other local scenes and ‘sounds’ whose legacy is often part of genres of a more hegemonically opposed nature (an obvious example here being the aforementioned Seattle Sound whose signature ‘grunge’ style reacted against the corporate rock of the 1980s and became a voice for post-industrial, disenfranchised youth). Of course, when considered in its historical context, the Canterbury Sound can also be cast as part of an oppositional movement – or rather two inter-related movements, psychedelic rock and progressive rock music. Indeed, part of the reason that the Canterbury Sound remained half buried in the sands of popular music time and history for so many years relates directly to the trajectory or rock, and more specifically progressive rock, between the early 1970s and mid-1990s. Thus, if progressive rock began life as a relatively fringe, avant garde and commercially disinterested musical style of the late 1960s, by the early 1970s it had cystallised into a highly lucrative genre, particularly in the USA where a handful of bands, specifically Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, came to define a new, arty brand of British (and actually English) rock (Macan, 1997). Touring consistently across the USA and performing to increasingly large stadium audiences, these artists (for better or for worse) shaped the progressive rock cannon, separating it to a large extent from its counter-cultural origins and severing the connection with localism (see Bennett, 2020). This connection was occasionally to resurface in particular journalistic representations, such as those referring to the English pastoralism evident in the music and lyrics of Genesis, but these were vague and indeterminate references that clumsily attempted to plug the increasingly placeless character of progressive rock back into some kind of lived ‘English’ reality, while at the time positioning this narrative as another means of feeding the commercial prowess of ‘prog’, as the genre was now increasingly referred to.

Back in the UK those bands, including those associated with the Canterbury Sound, who were not grouped under the trans-Atlantic ‘prog’ banner, either broke up, changed musical direction or soldiered on performing their music to an increasingly disinterested audience, many of whose attention was now increasingly focussed on the burgeoning punk scene (Laing, 1985). The decline of progressive rock in the late 1970s was largely considered to be a decline of those bands who had shaped its trans-Atlantic stadium-orientated version and little or no attention was given to the more diverse and oppositional nature of progressive rock as this had continued to exist in the UK and increasingly throughout continental Europe during the 1970s and, in some cases beyond (see Anderton, 2010). It was not until the mid-1990s and the increasing emphasis at this point on the importance of popular music as cultural heritage (see Bennett, 2009) that fuller, retrospective accounts of progressive rock began to emerge (see, e.g., Stump, 1997). It was in this context that a renewed interest in the Canterbury Sound emerged. At a distance of almost 30 years, however, the scene was set for the crafting of a ‘city of origin story’. This represented the Canterbury Sound not as a journalistically termed part of the wider progressive rock scene across Europe and North America, but as a distinctive local scene with roots organically woven into the urban landscape of Canterbury and its leafy environs. Within a short period of time this discursively constructed connection between the Canterbury Sound and its alleged city of origin became a centrally defining feature in the musical discourse of ‘Canterburyism’ and led to a fascination among a growing, globally dispersed body of fans. Over time, the Canterbury Sound has been reintroduced back into the history of progressive rock, but in a way that preserves its refashioned aura as a local scene whose sonic and literary qualities are considered seeped in the history, landscape and socio-cultural make up of Canterbury itself. Indeed, it is not merely fans and cultural intermediaries who make such claims. Rather, and as chapters elsewhere in this book serve to illustrate, armed with a now common rhetoric that charts a connection between music and place, a number of Canterbury Sound musicians have also taken this line, often suggesting in an unproblematic and matter of fact way that the music comprising the Canterbury Sound could not have happened anywhere else. This point is returned to later in this chapter with reference to an observation by Richard Sinclair (a founding member of pivotal Canterbury Sound band Caravan) who has claimed that the essence of the Canterbury Sound is ine...