Soft Machine (GB)
From Canterbury
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Soft Machine has one upcoming show in the Netherlands: on October 16, 2026 at PaRaDoX, Tilburg.
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About
Also known as: The Soft Machine, ザ・ソフト・マシーン
Few bands stretched the definition of rock quite as far as Soft Machine. Formed in Canterbury in 1966 by Mike Ratledge, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen, they started out as one of the first British psychedelic acts, sharing stages with Pink Floyd at the UFO Club and touring North America as support for Jimi Hendrix. From there they pivoted hard toward jazz, and by the time Third and Fourth landed in the early 1970s, they had created something genuinely unlike anything else: a heady mix of psychedelia, symphonic ambition and jazz fusion that still sounds bold today. The classic lineup with saxophonist Elton Dean is probably what most fans picture, but Soft Machine kept mutating long after Wyatt departed. Their roster over the years has taken in Andy Summers, Karl Jenkins, Hugh Hopper and Allan Holdsworth, among others. The band split in 1978, returned briefly for Land of Cockayne in 1981 and a handful of 1984 shows, then resurfaced properly under the Soft Machine Legacy name in 2004. Dropping the Legacy tag in 2015, they released Hidden Details in 2018 and Other Doors in 2023, proving the name still stands for something worth paying attention to.
