Track Listing

1. That's How Much I Need You Now
2. Save Yourself
3. I Should've Known
4. Jet Propelled Photograph
5. When I Don't Want You
6. Memories
7. You Don't Remember
8. She's Gone/I'd Rather Be With You

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73572 in Music
• Released on: 2003-04-07
• Number of discs: 1

CD Description
Though British beard-rock giants Soft Machine are famous for their combination of jazz rock and the post-psychedelic avant garde, and have achieved godhead status as fathers of the Canterbury school of prog, their beginnings were another matter entirely. JET PROPELLED PHOTOGRAPHS, whose contents have been released elsewhere under various titles, collects the band's earliest recordings. These 1967 demos are the only Soft Machine tracks to feature original guitarist Daevid Allen, who went on to form psych/prog legends Gong. While subsequent Soft Machine work points to the influence of everyone from tour-mate Jimi
Hendrix to electric-era Miles Davis, the songs on JET PROPELLED
PHOTOGRAPHS are firmly in the mid-'60s rock & roll mode, paying obeisance to the moody British Invasion sound of the Zombies and to American NUGGETS-style garage psych. Nevertheless, however stylistically unexpected, the material is of uniformly high quality, and some of these songs were reprised years later by some of the original participants (Allen and drummer/singer Robert Wyatt).

Customer Reviews

Good one.
Anyone who's a fan of Third, the first 2, and Triple Echo (I am), will dig this. Top stuff - raw, real. 1966 demos. Wyatt as serious as your life (on both vocals and drums), Allen far better than his (by his own admission) bad playing on the previously released Memories (btw check out the version by Material, with a young Witney Huston). I can't get over how good this is actually. Recommended defo. Ratledge the thinking man's Emerson, Ayers solid on bass (and thankfully singing only minor backing). There's been so much new Soft Machine stuff over the last few years, and I love all the extended 3rd type jam material that has come out, but these are the (mostly) original 3 minute songs, and are an essential addition.

A glimps of the embryonic Soft Machine.
This album could be the start of a 60s music buffs plot for a time travel Sci Fi novel; what if Daevid Allen had got himself a new visa and wasn't forced to quit the band? How would they have developed then? Would Kevin Ayers have stayed longer? Would Robert Wyatt have held on to the balance of power and not been edged out?

We would probably have missed out on Gong and if any of the above scenarios had changed the length of tenure of any of the band members then we might have missed out on some great albums by Ayers, Wyatt and so on.

Although many of the number on this were reworked for the first Soft Machine album, or elsewhere, this is still worth having. The band have the sound of a really very cool underground club band, which they were, but these here there is alive feel unlike the first two albums proper where there is a strong sense of a deal of studio manipulation going on. This is an essential companion to Soft Machine Vols 1&2