Coe on Canterbury

There was a good piece in the Guardian last week about the Canterbury Scene, by Jonathan Coe. Click here for the whole article, or make do with this paragraph:

***

Definitions can be tricky. Perhaps, once the neuropsychologists have had their say, we should then invite the musicologists along to decide what the "Canterbury scene" really is. Roughly speaking, it refers to a loose network of musicians that evolved out of a band called the Wilde Flowers, active in Canterbury in the mid-1960s. Direct offshoots of that outfit included Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers, the Whole World, Gong and Caravan; but gradually other musicians from other parts of the country became involved, from bands such as Egg, Delivery and Henry Cow. Among the many qualities that defined this (largely instrumental) music were compositional brilliance combined with self-deprecating irony, lyricism, an absurd sense of humour and left-leaning politics. Few of the players involved, I can't help noticing, have gone on to become millionaires.

***