Pat Metheny and former Police members Andy Summers and Sting are just a few of the celebrated musicians to sing the praises of English guitar master John Etheridge, who performs in San Diego Thursday with his storied band, Soft Machine.
Following their 1993 BBC TV performance together in England, Metheny declared Etheridge to be “one of the best guitarists in the world.”
Fellow six-string star Summers, who did a duo album and world tour with Etheridge in 1993, is similarly effusive. “John is a great guitar player, a virtuoso who really is a jazz guitar player but can play everything,” Summers told a Let It Rock interviewer in 2021.
And Sting has regarded Etheridge as a role model for decades, telling The Guardian newspaper in 1981: “I never wanted to be a star, just a highly respected musician like John Etheridge.”
Such kudos are not surprising given the dazzling skill, imagination and versatility of this London native.
His past collaborators range from violin legends Stephane Grappelli, Yehudi Menuhin and Nigel Kennedy to bebop trumpet king Dizzy Gillespie and jazz-fusion giant Billy Cobham. Etheridge’s voluminous resume also includes working with Celtic folk-rock champions Fairport Convention, the space-rock band Hawkwind, the prog-rock bands Wolf and Caravan, and former San Diego jazz guitar legends Barney Kessel and Mundell Lowe.
In addition, Etheridge is the leader of Zappatistas, a band he formed in 1998 to honor the music of another former San Diego guitarist, the late Frank Zappa. Since 2000, he has recorded and done multiple tours with John Williams, one of the world’s leading classical guitarists, in a group specializing in African music.
“I’m no specialist or stylist who focuses on one musical area,” Etheridge acknowledged in a recent interview from his London home.
“The great stylists — like Pat Metheny — get better and better and hone what they do,” he continued. “They are self-generated and it all comes from inside them, not outside. I just play the feeling of the music, whatever music it is. I do so many things that, on the face of it, you might think: ‘Why is he doing all that?’ And I’m thinking that, too!”
Etheridge is now on a U.S. tour with the latest iteration of Soft Machine, which will perform at Dizzy’s in Bay Park on Thursday, June 20. The concert was moved to Dizzy’s after the originally announced June 15 date at San Marcos’ TERI Campus of Life had to be rescheduled. Tickets for the San Marcos concert will be honored at the Dizzy’s show.
Remarkably, this will be Soft Machine’s first San Diego concert since 1968, when the inaugural edition of the band opened for the Jimi Hendrix Experience at Balboa Stadium in Balboa Park. Next week’s return gig by the group, which has been led by Etheridge since 2015, may well set a record for the longest gap between San Diego performances by any act from, well, anywhere.
“That’s amazing!” said Etheridge, who joined the band in 1975. “Mike Ratledge, the original keyboardist in Soft Machine, is still one of my closest friends. He occasionally talks about that tour with Hendrix and how grueling it was.”
Launched in 1966, the first edition of Soft Machine featured Ratledge on organ, Robert Wyatt on drums and vocals, and Kevin Ayers on guitar, bass and vocals. With their distinctive mix of psychedelia, jazz, artful pop and proudly skewed proto-progressive-rock, the trio sounded like no other band on either side of the Atlantic.
Named after a 1961 novel by Williams Burroughs, Soft Machine often shared London stages with Hendrix and the early Pink Floyd. While Pink Floyd’s lineup remained constant for its first two decades, Soft Machine underwent multiple personnel changes between 1968 and 1972 alone, with the tenure of future Police guitarist Summers lasting just two months. Many more lineups of the band have followed in subsequent decades.
Ayers, who died in 2013, left in 1968 after the release of the group’s debut album, “The Soft Machine, Vol. 1.” That left drummer Wyatt as the guitar-free group’s sole singer. By the release of “Fourth” in early 1971, Soft Machine was an all-instrumental outfit whose fusion of jazz and rock was distinctive, rewarding and willfully unsuitable for mass appeal. Wyatt left the band that same year.
Wolf at the door
Etheridge, by his own admission, paid little attention to Soft Machine during the 1960s and early 1970s — in large part because of its absence of guitar.
That changed in 1973 when English six-string innovator Allan Holdsworth became a member. Holdsworth, who died in 2017 in Vista, was a San Diego County resident from 1992 on. He made one studio album with Soft Machine, “Bundles.” It was released in 1975, the same year he moved to the U.S. to join former Miles Davis drum dynamo Tony Williams’ New Lifetimeband. Before he left London, Holdsworth recommended Etheridge to replace him.
It was a wise choice.
Etheridge had started to make a name for himself in 1972 as a member of Darryl Way’s Wolf, a progressive-rock band with a pronounced jazz and classical-music edge. His increasingly dazzling guitar playing in Wolf mixed jazz-fueled virtuosity and bristling rock power with an impressive degree of harmonic sophistication and pinpoint dynamic control.
Like only two other guitarists in England at the time — Holdsworth and Ollie Halsall of the sadly obscure band Patto — Etheridge had developed an intricate, blindingly fast legato style. His flowing solos, whether supple and sophisticated or full-throttle and fiery, were carefully constructed and calibrated. He cleanly articulated every note he played, even in the most accelerated musical passages.
Together, these three guitarists formed a tag team of sorts. In 1973, Halsall replaced Holdsworth in the English band Tempest. Two years later, Etheridge replaced Holdsworth in Soft Machine. In 1978, when Etheridge was unavailable because of an international tour with another band, Holdsworth briefly returned to Soft Machine.
“None of this was coincidental — there were very few of us in England who were playing the way we were then,” Etheridge said. “We weren’t imitating each other, but the three of us came up at the same time and we all played Gibson SG Custom guitars.
“Ollie was amazing for a period of about two years, starting in 1971 with the album, ‘Hold Your Fire.’ He had kind of a rock sound but with jazz fluency. That was what I always wanted to do. And it’s what I do now with Soft Machine, which is not a jazz band, per se, but features a lot of individual and group improvisation. Each of our albums has several improvised songs.
“I remember a guitarist friend and I saying, in the early 1970s, that we wanted to combine (the guitar styles of) Jeff Beck and Django Reinhardt. Everyone else in England then was doing the Clapton/Hendrix thing. If you’re lucky there’s one period in life where you are in the front guard and that’s why Allan, Ollie and I were interchangeable in Tempest and Soft Machine.”
In 1976, a year after he joined Soft Machine, Etheridge accepted an invitation to join the jazz quartet led by Stephane Grappelli. The French violin icon had risen to fame in the 1930s playing with Belgian gypsy guitar phenom Django Reinhardt in the band the Quintette du Hot Club de France.
“I got that gig with Stephane out of the blue and I thought: ‘I can’t possibly do that!’ But I worshiped Django, so I couldn’t possibly turn it down,” Etheridge recalled.
“I’d never played acoustic guitar exclusively, but it’s what I played with Stephane and it worked really well. He was so complimentary and perfectly happy that I didn’t play like Django. He said: ‘I like what you do. I do not understand it sometimes, but it’s great.’
“Playing with Stephane, I was suddenly in another (musical) world. I enjoyed that world, just as I enjoyed being in Soft Machine. But it put me in two different camps. That has gone on all my life.”
Etheridge toured from 1976 to 1981 with Grappelli. They performed memorably together in San Diego in 1980 at The Catamaran. The guitarist’s only other area appearance was a 1993 duo gig at the Belly Up with Andy Summers, formerly of The Police.
“That was the first date of the world tour I did with Andy,” Etheridge recalled. “I remember that someone came in the dressing room, and said: ‘We’re doing a Police tribute show down the road. Are you doing one, too?’ Ha ha ha!
“Since that 1993 Belly Up date, I’ve done three or four tours of the U.S. with John Williams, but we didn’t come to San Diego.”
New edition
Soft Machine’s most recent North American tours were last year and in 2019, when the band recorded its “Live at the Baked Potato” in Los Angeles.
The group’s Thursday, June 20 performance in San Diego opens a three-city California mini-tour that also includes Friday and Saturday shows at the Baked Potato and a Monday concert at Yoshi’s in Oakland.
The original tour itinerary also included additional dates in California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Canada. But on Wednesday, June 12 nearly two weeks after this interview with Etheridge was conducted — Soft Machine’s management announced it had cut back the itinerary to only the four California concerts as a result of “circumstances beyond our control.”
This follows the recent announcements that acts as disparate as Jennifer Lopez and Black Keys have canceled their 2024 arena tours outright, while tickets sales have been lagging for Justin Timberlake, Billie Eilish and the joint concert trek by The Future & Metro Boomin’.
Soft Machine’s four California dates come in between the band’s European tour earlier this year and an East Coast U.S. tour set for this fall. The performances are timed to promote the group’s 2023 studio album, the absorbing “Other Doors.” It is the final Soft Machine album to feature drummer John Marshall, who joined in 1972, retired in 2022, and died last year.
The band known as Soft Machine was dormant between 1988 and 2015, when the name was reactivated. But different permutations of the group were active between 1999 and 2014 under an array of monikers, including Soft Ware, Soft Works, Soft Bounds and Soft Mountains.
In 2002, guitarist Holdsworth joined Soft Works, only to be replaced by Etheridge in 2004 when the band changed its name to Soft Machine Legacy. The lineup featured him alongside bassist Hugh Hopper and saxophonist Elton Dean, both of who began playing in Soft Machine in 1969, and drummer John Marshall, a member since 1972.
If this shifting array of band names and members sounds confusing, it is.
“We picked the name Soft Machine Legacy, which was really unnecessary because we could legitimately have been (billed as) Soft Machine,” Etheridge said.
“But Hugh was worried (Soft Machine co-founder) Robert Wyatt wouldn’t like it. We did okay, but the ‘Legacy’ name was a problem because people thought we were a tribute band, and we weren’t.”
The group’s current lineup teams Ethridge with bassist Fred Baker, drummer Asif Sirkis and keyboardist Theo Travis, who doubles on flute and saxophone. Its repertoire mixes recent and older band compositions with updated versions of such early Soft Machine favorites as “Bloody Well Right” and “Joy of a Toy.”
“We don’t sound like anyone else,” Etheridge said. “The band has its own vibe, which Soft Machine has always had, a spirit we have carried forward. I’ll turn 77 in January, so who knows? Maybe Soft Machine will continue (after I’m gone).
“If I’m remembered for anything, perhaps it would be as a guy who didn’t pay heed to boundaries. Hopefully, without boasting, I would say not many people have traversed the musical landscape from John Williams to Caravan, from Stephane Grappelli to Soft Machine, from Nigel Kennedy to Hawkwind — hopefully without losing musical integrity or my own voice, which I feel is there all the way through.”
Soft Machine, with CC Blues Factory
When: 8 p.m. Thursday, June 20
Where: Dizzy’s, 1717 Morena Blvd. (behind the Musicians Association Building), Bay Park
Tickets: $25 (cash only at the door; advance tickets available online. Tickets for the originally scheduled June 15 Soft Machine concert at San Marcos’ TERI Campus of Life will be valid at the Dizzy’s show.
Phone: (858) 270-7467
Online: concerts.cafe/soft-machine
