Quote:
Originally Posted by Lisnaholic
Just caught up with the fact that Allan Holdsworth has died, which is sad news. He was clearly quite an extraordinary guitar player, a real guitarists' guitarist, though he was usually too fast and technical for my liking.
With Bundles he turned Soft Machine into a different sounding band, but this is not the time or place to gripe that. For instance, I wouldn't dream of suggesting that he hijacked the band's reputation to use it as a personal showcase, as some long-standing SM fans might. Instead I'll post Allan's hard-rockin' composition from Gong's Gazeuse album, recorded a couple of years later...
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I play that
Gazeuse! album (or later,
Expresso) often in Plug. Nice example of
Holdsworth in a more worthy setting.
One of the other nice things about this album, from a
Holdsworth perspective, is that it occurs during the 4 or so years
of his acoustic period in the late '70s which you can hear being played in the last segment of "
Shadows Of"
(the improved, re-worked version of the tune
"Velvet Darkness") and the cut dedicated to
Mireille Bauer, "
Mireille."
Speaking of his acoustic playing, there are only two recorded examples of him soloing on 12-string acoustic:
one is the 1 minute "
Gone Sailing" from
Bundles and the other is from 4 years later on "
Jools Toon"
which I couldn't find on YouTube, so I uploaded it. It's from that era when he did those great albums
with more adventurous and perceptive musicians like
John Stevens,
Gordon Beck, a.o.
As for
Soft Machine, after the first two
Probe albums, the band went through continual changes that
easily slid into what they became at the time of "
Bundles," so there really wasn't a sudden turning into
this band with
Ratledge,
Jenkins,
Babbington,
Marshall, etc. It was more of a natural progression.