Third

Released on 6 June 1970, Third found Soft Machine transforming into something entirely new. Gone were the psych-pop quirks of their debut and the jazzy excursions of Volume Two. In their place: four side-long compositions of spiralling improvisation, tape manipulation, and ensemble interplay that reached for something closer to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew than anything from the UK rock scene. It’s a bold, knotty, often abrasive double album — and the moment where Soft Machine fully severed ties with the past.

“Facelift”, the only live track, opens the album with feral intensity. Recorded at Fairfield Halls and spliced with snippets from other 1969 sessions, it’s a Frankenstein of a performance: part free jazz onslaught, part musique concrète, layered with backward loops, sped-up riffs, and scattered harmonica. It’s a collision of five musicians, the only track to feature flautist Lyn Dobson, surging in and out of sync.

“Slightly All the Time” is gentler by comparison: a studio-stitched suite that floats from mellow jazz to funkier terrain, with saxophonist Elton Dean and flautist Jimmy Hastings carving space around Hugh Hopper’s looping bass. Then comes “Moon in June”, Robert Wyatt’s final lyrical contribution to the band; a dreamy, fragmented piece that nods to Soft Machine’s psychedelic past before slipping into its fractured jazz future. Wyatt plays all instruments in the first third, a bedroom demo stitched into band recordings and a violin drone that dissolves into surreal vocal fragments.

Closing side four is “Out-Bloody-Rageous”, all Terry Riley-inspired keyboard pulses and expansive mood. It’s perhaps the most structured track on the record; a hypnotic, synthesised suite that feels both meditative and alien.

Upon release, Third reached No. 18 in the UK charts, the band’s highest position, and earned near-unanimous acclaim. It has since been reissued with the 1970 Proms concert, where the band infamously followed the BBC Symphony Orchestra, confounding a Royal Albert Hall crowd with tape loops and jazz-rock chaos.

Uncompromising and ambitious, Third is more than a turning point in Soft Machine’s career — it’s one of the most adventurous albums of the 1970s. Not quite rock. Not quite jazz. Not quite like anything else.