Hatfield And The North - Biography
Hatfield And The North lasted for three short years, from October 1972 to June of 1975, but the Canterbury-based band was at the center of the British progressive and art rock scene. In the late 60s and early 70s, Canterbury was home base to bands like The Wilde Flowers, The Soft Machine, Caravan, Henry Cow, Camel, Gong, Egg, and Kevin Ayres And The Whole World and musical mavericks like Richard Sinclair, Hugh Hopper, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, Pye Hastings, Richard Coughlan, David Sinclair, and Graham Flight.
Hatfield evolved out of Delivery, a band Richard Sinclair put together after leaving Caravan. After a series of personnel shifts, the band settled down to Sinclair on bass and vocals, guitarist Phil Miller, drummer Pip Pyle, and Dave Stewart on keys. They took their name from a road sign on the highway out of London that directed people to the A1 North. The band’s music blended surreal lyrics, jazzy melodies, and complex instrumental passages that drew from psychedelic rock, 20th Century avant garde music, Anglican hymns, British folk, blues, and rock, all marked by the band’s odd sense of humor and spoken word asides.
The band had a small, but devoted following from the start and soon signed with Virgin to deliver Hatfield and the North (1974 Virgin/1990 Virgin). Everyone in the band wrote, so the compositions moved in many directions, seemingly all at the same time. The music was marked by Stewart’s Fender Rhodes and the peculiar sounds he got out of his organ and Pyle’s complex and ever shifting time keeping. Robert Wyatt, Henry Cow’s sax man Geoff Leigh and The Northettes. The album veered between progressive and pop with titles like “Gigantic Land Crabs in Earth takeover Bid” and “Going Up to People and Tinkling.”
The band gigged regularly throughout Europe, America and Japan and became legendary for their live shows, which combined tunes from the album played in a fairly straightforward manner with lengthy improvisations that took listeners into outer (or inner) space. Hatwise Choice: Archive Recordings 1973-1975 ( 2005 Hatco) has over an hour of music from the band’s early gigs.
In an attempt to find a mainstream audience Hatfield recorded a single in 1974, “Let's Eat (Real Soon),” with music by Sinclair, lyrics by Pyle and Pyle’s “Fitter Stoke Has A Bath.” The disc was not a hit and is extremely rare today. They went back into the studio for The Rotters’ Club (1975 Virgin/1990 Virgin), still one of the greatest British progressive rock albums ever made. It includes Sinclair’s masterpiece “Mumps,” a 20-minute plus outing full of shifting tempos and timbres that contains what many feel is the ultimate rock organ solo from Dave Stewart, “Underdub” a slightly Brazilian flavored bit of whimsy and an extended exploration of Pyle’s loony “Fitter Stoke Has A Bath.” The band compiled Hattitude: Archive Recordings 1973-1975 (2006 Hatco) shortly before the unexpected death of Pip Pyle on August 28th 2006. It includes portions of a psychedelic evening from Amsterdam’s Paradiso club and some frenzied playing from the ensemble on compositions nobody remembers recording.
When The Rotters’ Club tanked, the North broke up, but band members continued working together in National Health, Rapid Eye Movement, Equip’Out and In Cahoots. The band reunited for a one off concert in 1990 with Dave Stewart opting out. He was replaced by Pyle’s girl friend Sophia Domancich and the results are available on Live 1990 (1993 Demon). Thanks to the magic of multi-tracking, the band reunited again on Pip Pyle’s 7 Year Itch (1998 Blueprint).
In 2005 the band reformed again for a Japanese tour with Alex Maguire from Pip Pyle’s Bash! sitting in the keyboard chair. The played sporadically until Pyle’s death in 2006.