Caravan

180g audiophile pressing. The eponymous 1968 debut by Caravan, returning in the Music On Vinyl 180g audiophile pressing. Recorded at Advision Studios in London in October 1968 and released through Verve Forecast, the album is the founding document of the band and a key entry in the genealogy of the so-called Canterbury scene.

Caravan came together earlier that year out of the dissolution of The Wilde Flowers, the Kent-based ensemble that also incubated Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper, who would shortly form Soft Machine. The four members of the new group, Pye Hastings on guitar and vocals, Dave Sinclair on organ and piano, Richard Sinclair on bass and vocals, and Richard Coughlan on drums, rented a house in Whitstable and rehearsed on Soft Machine's borrowed PA while their peers were on the road in the United States supporting Jimi Hendrix. By autumn they had signed with Verve, becoming the first British act on the New York label's short-lived UK division.

Produced by Tony Cox, the record sits on the hinge between late-sixties English psychedelia and what would soon coalesce as progressive rock. Across eight tracks Caravan articulate a sound that is both pastoral and rhythmically intricate, organ-led, lyrically whimsical, threaded with the jazz inflections that would define the Canterbury idiom. The single "Place of My Own" opens the album with a coiled psych-pop economy, "Love Song With Flute" introduces Pye's brother Jimmy Hastings on flute, and the nine-minute closer "Where But For Caravan Would I?" already prefigures the long-form suites of the records to come.

Often eclipsed in the band's catalogue by the Decca / Deram run that followed (If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You in 1970, In the Land of Grey and Pink in 1971), this debut is among the most quietly inventive British albums of its moment, and remains essential listening for anyone tracing the lineage from the Wilde Flowers to Soft Machine, Hatfield and the North and National Health.

180g audiophile pressing. Music On Vinyl.