The Soft Machine is the title of a novel by William S. Burroughs, and a rock band that took its name from the book.

The book

The Soft Machine was first published in 1961 and was Burroughs' first novel after the grandbreaking publication of Naked Lunch.

Title and structure

The title The Soft Machine is a name for the human body, and the main theme of the book (as explicitly written in an appendix) concerns how control mechanisms invade the body. As such it deals a lot with transpersonal experiences and specifically drug abuse, which Burroughs considers an invasion of the body by an alien force.

The book is written in a style close to that of Naked Lunch and as such is quite fragmentary and hard to pin down. A few common themes will however boil up, some of which it has in common with the previous book. Themes and people from Naked Lunch are present in the first chapters, and themes and people from Nova Express are present in the latter chapters of the book, so The Soft Machine could be said to "fade in" from The Naked Lunch and "fade out" into Nova Express. This effect is probably the intent of the author. In the middle of the book is the main plot (described below) which does not refer to either The Naked Lunch or Nova Express.

After the main material follows three appendices, the first explaining the title (as mentioned above) and two accounts of Burroughs' own drug abuse and treatment using apomorphine . Here Burroughs clearly states that he considers drug abuse a metabolic disease and writes about how he finally escaped it.

Plot

The main plot (which is intermingled with other plots) portrays a secret agent (presumably the same Bill Lee who appeared in Naked Lunch) who has the ability to change bodies or metamorphosize his own body using "U.T." (undifferentiated tissue). As such an agent he makes a time travel and takes on a gang of Maya priests who use the Maya calendar to control the minds of slave labourers used for planting corn. The calendar images are written in books and placed on a magnetic tape and transmitted as sounds to control the slaves. The agent manages to infiltrate the slaves and replace the magnetic tape with a totally different message: "burn the books, kill the priests" which cause the downfall of their regime. The techniques used for changing bodies involves several chemical, biological and sexual magic-like practices and many things can go wrong.

The band

The Soft Machine were a pioneering British psychedelic, progressive rock and jazz band from Canterbury, Kent, England. They were one of the central bands in the Canterbury scene.

Soft Machine had emerged out of an earlier band called Wildeflowers (a reference to Oscar Wilde). The Wildeflowers line-up included, at various times: Brian Hopper (guitar, saxophone, flute, vocals), Hugh Hopper (bass), Robert Wyatt (drums, vocals), Richard Sinclair (guitar, vocals), Kevin Ayers (vocals), Pye Hastings (guitar, vocals), Dave Sinclair (keyboards), Richard Sinclair (bass, vocals) and Richard Coughlan (drums). These latter four formed another successful Canterbury band Caravan.

When the band became Soft Machine, its initial lineup featured Kevin Ayers (bass), Robert Wyatt (drums, vocals), Daevid Allen (guitar) and Mike Ratledge (keyboards). Allen left before their first album, and Ayers was replaced by Hugh Hopper by the time of the second. Allen later formed Gong.

The best-known lineup, containing Wyatt, Ratledge, Hopper, and saxophonist Elton Dean , produced the critically-acclaimed album Third and its follow-up Fourth. At that time Soft Machine was playing a form of fusion jazz influenced by Miles Davis and similar to the early work of Weather Report. Wyatt, disagreeing with a direction that left no room for his vocal experiments, left the band in 1971 for a solo career. Later line-up changes left Ratledge the only original member of the band, and by 1976 he was gone too. Karl Jenkins (keyboards and woodwinds), who had joined in 1972, became the band's leader and led it until its disbanding in 1984; guitarist Allan Holdsworth was a member during this period. (Today, Karl Jenkins is better known for classically oriented projects such as Adiemus.)

Bands which have grown out of Soft Machine (or the WildeFlowers) include Caravan, Kevin Ayers and the Whole World , Hatfield and the North, Gong, Matching Mole, Egg, National Health and Robert Wyatt. Henry Cow came out of Canterbury but not out of Soft Machine.

Partial discography

• The Soft Machine (1968)
• Volume Two (1969)
• Third (1970)
• Fourth (1971)
• Face and Place Vol. 7 (1972)
• Fifth (1973)
• Sixth (1973)
• Seven (1973)
• The Soft Machine Collection (1973 compilation of The Soft Machine and Volume Two)
• Bundles (1975)
• Softs (1976)
• Rubber Riff (1976)
• At the beginning (1977)