Mike Ratledge [the keyboard player] had scored a project for a brass section and hired us en
Mike Ratledge [the keyboard player] had scored a project for a brass section and hired us en masse, plus Lyn Dobson. I remember doing successive weeks at Ronnie Scott's, one with Soft Machine and one with Keith's sextet Ratledge was writing some pretty complex stuff by this time. It was my first experience of unusual time signatures, sevens, nines, elevens. It was all quite challenging.The septet line-up toured the UK and France, and recorded a Top Gear session for John Peel in November 1969, but proved short-lived and soon slimmed down to a quintet and then a quartet of Dean, Hopper, Ratledge and Wyatt (drums) for Fourth:We all realised the chemistry was right. We did the Proms, which was a bit of a novelty, the first pop group to appear.
We played some good stuff during this period, Robert swallowed his unhappiness a lot but the music was moving away from his songs. In the end, there was a sense of relief when he left.Dean began playing a Fender Rhodes piano on stage, because he didn't like the horn sound coming out of the PA systems. The Australian drummer Phil Howard replaced Wyatt for a while in 1971 but John Marshall completed the sessions for Fifth at the beginning of 1972 and Dean did another tour with Soft Machine before making way for the Welsh musician and composer Karl Jenkins from Nucleus.Elton Dean released his first of many solo albums in 1971 and went on to front Just Us and work with a myriad of other jazz-fusion and free jazz groups, often at the cutting edge of a musical movement which, from the mid-Seventies, enjoyed only a modicum of interest in Britain but remains a staple of European festivals.Hardly a prophet in his own country, Dean spent a considerable amount of time in France, where his unparalleled talent for improvisation was greatly appreciated. "Ideally, it's just pure reaction and exchange of energy," explained Dean:It only happens with people who have that knowledge; when it's flowing, it's very powerful but the chemistry has to be right. Immersion in the flow is something that comes through experience, even if the musicality is there. You have to be strong yet sensitive to what others are playing.
The art is to have a distinctive voice within the larger entity."I've been playing free music for decades", he said.Pierre Perrone. Could the cyber chickens be coming home to roost for the pioneers of the internet revolution. First Google (motto: "Do no evil") came in for a barrage of criticism for its decision to censor its new Chinese search engine. And now Wikipedia, the web's "open-source encyclopaedia", is in the firing line due to a number of misleading amendments to pages by mischevious contributors. A question mark has arisen over whether visitors to the site can really believe what they read These are reasonable points of debate.
But we should also bear in mind that we would not even be discussing this were it not for the popularity of such online sources of information. The power and scope of the internet continues to confound predictions. When Wikipedia was launched five years ago, there was no shortage of voices arguing that it would never work. Who, it was asked, would want to post valuable information for free? And who would trust such information if unsanctioned by the hand of an editor? Well, millions of us, it turns out.. We have become worryingly anaesthetised in recent years to reports of British soldiers engaging in acts of disgraceful brutality while serving their country.
The impact of the images that came to light, over the weekend, of British troops viciously beating four Iraqi teenagers is less than it probably would have been had the abuses of Camp Breadbasket and the death of the Iraqi hotel receptionist Baha Mousa not already come to light. This, in itself, is a sad reflection on the present reputation of our armed forces. But we must not lose sight of the enormity of these latest crimes, if they are proven to be the work of British troops. What we are presented with are not common thugs running amok on Britain's streets, but representatives of their Queen and country. Such men are supposed to be highly trained professionals, operating in a tightly disciplined military structure. These images will now become a propaganda gift to nationalist insurgents in Iraq and Islamist fanatics everywhere. They will be cited as an indication of the Western world's contempt for Muslim life.
