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The band at this point was still unnamed and lacked a drummer. He had just come out of Berklee and had brought back a whole pile of music that we played, and from there we started writing our music. I had just arrived in London and was staying with Brian Smith in Gunnersbury Avenue, and Clive rang up one day and said to Brian, ‘Do you know of any bass players ?’, and Brian said, ‘Well, I happen to have one staying here with me !’ So that’s how we met, and we just clicked. After a brief stay in the United States, he arrived in London around the late Summer of 1969, soon getting his first gig playing with saxophonist Don Rendell. He then moved to Sydney where he joined a jazz big band which backed the likes of Liza Minelli, Tony Bennett and Dusty Springfield. His musical career had begun in his native New Zealand, his first notable engagement being a stint with pianist Mike Walker’s trio, which acted as resident rhythm section for visiting foreign musicians, at Auckland’s leading jazz club at the time, the Montmartre, where he remembers first meeting Dave MacRae. Let us first look at Neville Whitehead’s background, which I learned through a long-distance telephone conversation with him. The band’s name referred to the astrological signs of its members – two Capricorn and two Sagittarius. Meanwhile, Stevens joined Manfred Mann’s Chapter III, and around October 1969 formed Caparius with, initially, Whitehead, Howard and Australian guitarist Peter Martin. The pair began holding private improvised sessions on the side. In the summer of 69, he rehearsed for a period with the band Dada led by guitarist Pete Gage, which initially included Neville Whitehead on bass. After a period living in San Francisco, he returned to England in 1968. Aged 26 at the time, Stevens had grown up in Bristol, leaving to the USA in 1962 to spend a year at the Berklee School of Music (a classmate of his was future piano legend Keith Jarrett), followed by two years as army bandsman. I had a good starting point in a Melody Maker feature from April 1971, which I will now sum up. I was able to interview several former members of Caparius, not least the band’s leader and founder, saxophonist Clive Stevens. The best starting point is probably Caparius – especially since that band is itself quite obscure, having left no recorded legacy despite being active for 18 months and boasting at one point a stellar line-up including Howard, Neville Whitehead, Gary Boyle (formerly of Brian Auger’s Trinity and later of Isotope) and Dave MacRae (later of Nucleus, Matching Mole, Mike Gibbs…). To my knowledge, not a single interview of him exists, so we’re left with contemporary press coverage and accounts by his former bandmates to piece the story together. Retracing Howard’s career is, consequently, something of a challenge. In fact during my research he is the one ex-member I never managed to locate, let alone interview (watch this space for an in-depth interview with original Softs guitarist Larry Nowlin !) In fact I am not even entirely sure he is still alive, although our good friend Leonardo at MoonJune told me he’d heard Phil was indeed still with us and living in his native Australia. Soft Machine, September 1971 : Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge, Phil Howard and Elton DeanĪrguably the most obscure, though by no means less talented, member of Soft Machine was Phil Howard, the Australian drummer who replaced Robert Wyatt in September 1971 and was in turn replaced by John Marshall who has more or less retained the position ever since.