IN MEMORY OF MIKE RATLEDGE
Soft Machine’s co-founder and driving force, Mike Ratledge played a key role in helping to lay a firm foundation for what would become the Canterbury scene. The organist’s clever compositions and creative sound – he was encouraged by Jimi Hendrix to add a fuzz pedal to his kit – enhanced the Softs’ psychedelic, and later free-jazz, style. We pay tribute to the influential musician, who died after a short illness in February.
Words: Sid Smith
Guitarist John Etheridge recalls doing a little sightseeing in Venice while Soft Machine were touring Italy, not long after he’d joined the group in spring 1975: “We were on a day off and I was wandering around St Mark’s Square and happened to see Mike Ratledge sitting in the corner having a coffee.”
Previously a member of Darryl Way’s Wolf and Global Village Trucking Company, Etheridge’s experience of band life on the road and in the studio had been the usual mixed bag of ups and downs, but mostly it had been an enthusiastic and supportive environment wherein bandmembers encouraged each other’s musical endeavours. In Soft Machine Etheridge discovered that such interactions were generally rather more cordial and circumspect.
“When I joined, Mike was friendly enough, but we had hardly spoken. So, I went and sat with him. He told me, ‘You probably think I’ve been a bit off with you but I’m just really depressed and not enjoying this, and I really want to leave.’ He told me he’d been wanting to leave for a while but had been persuaded to stay on for a bit. By the time I had joined the band, he was more or less at the end of it.”
Ratledge’s eventual withdrawal from the band he had helped found in 1966, and whose distinctive fuzz organ sound quickly became a defining feature of Soft Machine’s music, happened quietly and without fuss during the recording sessions for Softs, the group’s ninth studio album recorded in 1976. Contributing just two highly textured sequencer patches via his AKS suitcase synth, the notes bubble and percolate before eventually fading away, forming something of a musical metaphor if ever there was. The following year’s retrospective three-LP box set, Triple Echo, perhaps put it best. Underneath a photograph of a tired-looking Ratledge forlornly staring down at his keyboards, the caption simply read, “Mike Ratledge for whom 10 years became enough.”