I MAY HAVE TOLD YOU THIS BEFORE BUT:
Summer holidays were spent on the south coast or north Wales,
both in caravans. Though north Wales had originally been with
the family we’d gone up market & relocated to Bournemouth, towing
our own four berth. The North Wales location had moved from
Black Rock Sands outside of Porthmadog to a site with it’s
own club house & bingo on the cliffs just south of Aberystwyth.
The trip north was with favourite Aunty in one of Uncle’s strange
Eastern European vehicles that smelled of dog & leaf mould.
Life on the caravan site was never dull, we dipped in rock pools,
walked into town along the cliffs, played football until we’d hit
all the caravans once too often & told ghost stories before bed.
In the evening we played bingo, pinball & table football at the
clubhouse, flirting with girls high on Vimto & crisps. Most evenings
Uncle’s little black & white portable tele would flicker, arial
adjusted, perched precariously on a chair, turned exclusively to BBC,
(there was, no doubt, some cultural snobbery at work), but it hooked
me on a world beyond ‘Crossroads’ & ‘Corry’ – a posh world of
award winning dramas & middle class comedy, weird, exotic.
Unfortunately, we also had to endure the BBC Proms, live from the
Royal Albert Hall!, not exactly Top of the Pops, not even ‘that was
the week that was’, it made dish water seem like champagne.
The night of August 13th, 1970, I remember started with fish, dark,
& raining. No Bingo tonight for us, the thrilling girls would be
flirting with future husbands & we would have to settle for the
drone of another BBC orchestra, imprisoned with painfully hormonal
urges to be off posing with pinball machines.
The orchestra did their thing, ‘Triple Music II’ (world premiere)
David Atherton conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the will to live
ebbing away. Suddenly, something shifted, a rip in the fabric of
time through which jumped an ensemble so unlikely, so raw, that my Uncle
was caught by surprise & it was too late for him to turn it off before
he’d realised it had all gone horribly wrong.
The picture tilted, froze, jag-jumped, dynamic angles, angular sounds.
A box van careering round the outside of the Hallowed Hall like a
Beatles film on steroids. It was bringing change, delivering revolution.
‘Soft Machine’, Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper, Mike Rattledge, Robert Wyatt
unleashed their irreverent cacophony upon my Uncle’s ears as I relaxed
back against the matching cushions on the caravan bunk, cocoa in hand &
whispering,
“Don’t touch that dial!”
Soft Machine 4 has & will always remain one of my most cherished albums.
(K)
Karl Hyde 
Now I got you! 🙂
By the way, it would be nice to hear about Rick´s ambient influences too.