Soft Machine release 7-inch single and hit the road!

Featuring brand new recordings of favourite Brit Jazz tunes from 1960s-70s by contemporary bands – ‘The Dew at Dawn’ / ‘(Slightly) Slightly All the Time’ – this is a tribute to one of the greats of British jazz – trumpeter Harry Beckett – whose ‘The Dew at Dawn’ is paired with a new take on a classic Softs tune on the B side.

The current Softs line-up is led by masterful guitarist John Etheridge, an original Soft Machine member since the mid-70s, and Canterbury scene veteran saxophonist Theo Travis. The band now includes bassist Fred Thelonious Baker (a former Harry Beckett bandmate) who joined for the group’s recent Other Doors album, with drummer Asaf Sirkis making his recorded debut on this single, as he steps in to fill the sizeable shoes of late great British jazz legend, John Marshall who died in September 2023.

Etheridge and Travis’ unique arrangement has upped the tempo of the ‘The Dew at Dawn’ (originally released on Ogun Records in 1975) features a loping Caribbean-infused groove with Beckett’s joyful theme evoking “the sun rising over the misty Hackney marshes and the hope of a better future". ‘Slightly All the Time’, originally from Soft Machine’s seminal 1970 opus Third, gets a clever reworking here with Mike Ratledge’s epic original tune, trimmed down to its essential parts, and still featuring Travis’ sublime 1970s-style flute work to the fore.

The band mark the release with a series of UK gigs, dates are: New Cross Inn, London (2 Feb); Boileroom, Guildford (7 Feb;;Signature Brew, London (8 Feb); Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury (9 Feb); Jazz Club @ Three Swans, Market Harborough (11 Feb); DEYA Brewery, Cheltenham (15 Feb); The Poly, Falmouth (16 Feb); Old Woollen, Farsley (18 Feb); Band on the Wall, Manchester (19 Feb); Robin 2, Wolverhampton (20 Feb); The Chalk, Brighton (21 Feb) and Acapela Studio, Pentyrch, Cardiff (22 Feb).

For more info visit www.softmachine.org and myonlydesirerecords.bandcamp.com