Soft Machine & related vs. Henry Cow & related - Progressive Rock Music Forum

Choose.

Just a fanboy passin' through.

Soft Machine/Isotope is my choice as well as that of Antoine!

I never post anything anywhere without doing more than basic research, often in depth.

Still have yet to hear side HC member projects.

No vote.

Those 2 combined form a hefty chunk of my music collection. It's got to be Henry Cow for me - Art Bears, Fred Frith, Massacre, News from Babel, Cassiber, Greaves/Blegvad, John Greaves and Lindsay Cooper have all released albums which equalled or exceeded their achievements in Henry Cow; Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper aside, I don't think you could really say the same for Soft Machine (as enjoyable as many of the spin offs are).

'Like so many of you
I've got my doubts about how much to contribute
to the already rich among us...'

Robert Wyatt, Gloria Gloom

Still voted Henry Cow, but it was a lot closer than the Genesis poll. Soft Machine + all the excellent work from Wyatt, Hugh Hopper, and Elton Dean made it a bit of a tough call, but as Syzygy said the list of all the Cow offshoots plus the Cow itself is just too much win.

Edited by NaturalScience - April 06 2009 at 08:37

omri wrote:

I did not vote. Still need to hear a lot more of both sides (but more HC side).

I think there's a live album of HC with Robert Wyatt so it's another mix here.

I must say it seems to me a very interesting comparison but lots of those are very hard to find.

Robert Wyatt performed live with Henry Cow 3 times (which account for 60% of his live appearances since his accident) and there are tracks on both Concerts and the Live box set. Wyatt also appears on 2 John Greaves albums (Songs and Chansons) and is the main vocalist on the 2nd News From Babel album. There has been a fair amount of crossover between Henry Cow and some ex Softs, but they remain two distinct entities with different styles.

I'm not really aware of much crossover between Genesis and Henry Cow (see Logan's other poll) - Fred Frith played on some of the same Eno albums as Phil Collins, but not on the same tracks, and Clive Bell (a sometime member of Ottawa Music Company and Henry Cow fellow traveller) played the shakuhachi intro to Sledgehammer, but I think that's about it.

'Like so many of you
I've got my doubts about how much to contribute
to the already rich among us...'

Robert Wyatt, Gloria Gloom

Poll Question: Which do you prefer?
Poll Choice	Votes	Poll Statistics
Henry Cow & projects that HC members have been involved with	8	[42.11%]
Soft Machine & projects that members have been involved with	11	[57.89%]
This topic is closed, no new votes accepted