01	Share It						03:26
	02	Shipwrecked						13:31
	03	Underdub						05:03
	04	Blott						08:55
	05	Going For A Song						04:23
	06	Cauliflower Ears						07:02
	07	Halfway Between Heaven And Earth						08:19
	08	5-4 Intro						01:47
	09	It Didn't Matter Anyway						05:35

Recorded in Nottingham, 30th March 1990.

Richard Sinclair - bass, vocals
Phil Miller - guitar
Pip Pyle - drums
Sophia Domancich - keyboards

Who is Sophia Domancich ?

Magma (from Calyx)
Christian Vander's band is certainly not just a "Canterbury-related" band, but a musical institution in its own right. There are several excellent websites devoted to Magma, the links to which are on the links page. Magma's main link with the Canterbury scene was Gong. In the seventies, both bands were seen as competitors, each displaying apparently opposite philosophies and musical styles. But they, at least, shared a high level of musicianship, which resulted in musicians from both bands playing together. Original Magma bassist Francis Moze joined Gong for the Flying Teapot sessions in late 1972-early 1973, and rejoined three years later, playing on Gazeuse ! Saxophonist Yochk'o Seffer, also a member of Magma's early line-ups, guested at Daevid Allen's first gigs with New York Gong in 1978, and played on John Greaves' first solo album Accident (1982). Gong's drummer Pierre Moerlen briefly played with Magma in the early eighties. Gong's saxophonist Didier Malherbe and Magma's first pianist Faton Cahen teamed up at Faton Bloom in the early and mid-eighties (Moerlen was the original drummer in the band, too). In the mid-Eighties, Malherbe played in singer Jacques Higelin's band alongside several Magma alumni (Benoit Widemann, Patrick Gauthier...). Magma's longtime bassist Bernard Paganotti, brothers Alain and Yvon Guillard (members of Magma's early Eighties line-ups) and Offering (Vander's post Magma band) mainstay Lydia Domancich have collaborated with Pip Pyle on various projects funded by the Gimini label. Paganotti has also played in singer Renaud's band alongside Francois Ovide and Caravan's Geoffrey Richardson.


=====Hatfield And The North FAQ=====

When was the band formed? When did it split up?

Hatfield and the North was born in October 1972, although its seeds were planted during the preceding months, notably with the reformation of Delivery in the late Summer of 1972 by ex-Caravan members Richard Sinclair and Steve Miller, with Matching Mole guitarist Phil Miller and ex-Gong drummer Pip Pyle. Hatfield's first gig was at Folkestone's Lees Cliffe Hall in November 1972. The band split up in June 1975. It briefly re-formed in March 1990.

What was the band's original line-up? Who was in the final line-up?

The band's original line-up included Phil Miller on guitar, Richard Sinclair on bass and vocals, Pip Pyle on drums and Dave Sinclair on keyboards. The latter was replaced by Dave Stewart in February 1973 and doesn't appear on any recordings.
The last line-up of Hatfield and the North existed for a couple of weeks in March 1990. It included original members Phil Miller, Richard Sinclair and Pip Pyle, and keyboard player Sophia Domancich.

How did the original members meet? Had they worked together previously?

Pip Pyle : "Phil [Miller] and I have known each other since we were kids - I've known Phil since I was six. We'd been playing together in a band called Delivery before. So that was the link with Phil, and we met Richard [Sinclair] via Steve, Phil's brother, who was playing with Caravan, and we were very impressed with him... We'd just heard Dave Stewart from Egg and figured he could play organ, and we were looking for an organist after Dave Sinclair threw his annual wobbler...".

Richard Sinclair : "Hatfield started with Pip Pyle, Phil Miller and I. We were living in East Cheam on the South Circular Road in this flat, and Pip was there with his family and Phil and this bloke Ben, who was a Soft Machine roadie, so lots of Soft Machine gear was around... and old P.A., that sort of thing".

Why did they choose this band name ?

The name was inspired by the first road side on the M1 motorway going North from London. The idea originated from Mike Patto, who was going to use it for his own band, but when he settled for Dick and the Firemen, he passed it on.

How many albums did the band release? On which labels?

Hatfield and the North released two studio albums, Hatfield And The North (1974) and The Rotters' Club (1975). A single, "Let's Eat (Real Soon)" c/w "Fitter Stoke Has A Bath", was released in 1974. A compilation album, Afters, was released in 1979. Along with various tracks from the first two albums, it incorporates the first single (including a version of "Fitter Stoke..." different to the one found on Rotters' Club), an edit of "Halfway...", and some hitherto unheard live tracks from 1974-75 : "O Len's Nature" (an anagram and re-working of "Nan True's Hole") and "Lything and Gracing" (a.k.a "Righteous Rhumba"), two Miller compositions from his Matching Mole days.
A live CD, Live 1990, was released in 1993 on Demon Records, and includes all the music from the March 30th, 1990 reunion concert for Central TV's "Bedrock" series, plus an additional track, "Underdub". Live 1990 includes versions of compositions that have all since appeared on albums by the Sophia Domancich Trio ("Blott On The Landscape", on 1993's Reve De Singe), Pip Pyle's Equip'Out ("Cauliflower Ears", on 1991's Up!), Richard Sinclair's Caravan Of Dreams ("Going For A Song", an old Hatfield song that had never been recorded before), Phil Miller ("5/4 Intro" is actually the intro from "Speaking For Lydia" on Phil's album Digging In) and Pip Pyle ("Shipwrecked", on his solo album 7 Year Itch).

Have these albums been reissued on CD? On which labels?

Both albums were reissued on CD in 1990 by Virgin in Europe. Both CD's include the additional material found on Afters : both sides from the 1974 single on the Hatfield and the North CD, the live material on The Rotters' Club. The only Hatfield tracks not yet available on CD are the "Your Majesty.../Oh What A Lonely Lifetime" medley from Virgin's V sampler, and the version of "Halfway..." originally found on the Over The Rainbow sampler, which had a slightly longer introduction.

Why were particular titles chosen for albums and compositions?

"The Stubbs Effect" -
"Calyx" - from the dictionary, "a ring of leaves enclosing an unopened flower-bud".
"There's No Place Like Homerton" -
"Rifferama" -
"Fol De Rol" -
"Fitter Stoke Has A Bath" - Pip Pyle : "The title came from my daughter Alice when she was trying to get her mouth round the English language. She came up to me one morning and seemed to be saying 'Fitter Stoke Has A Bath'... She was probably asking me to make her a bit of toast or something! It seemed like a good title for a tune".
"Underdub" - Dave Stewart : "...so called because it was the only track on The Rotters' Club not to be buried under 4,000 overdubs...".
"Mumps" - "a virus disease that causes painful swellings in the neck"
"Your Majesty Is Like A Cream Donut" - "comes from a Monty Python skit from the same time period.... At a party, Oscar Wilde, James McNeil Whistler, and George Bernard Shaw are engaging in a battle of wits (jazz musicians would call it a sort of cutting contest) when England's reigning monarch joins them. In a display of one-upsmanship, they compare him to, variously, a cream donut, a stream of bat's piss, and a dose of the clap" (Rick Mealy submitted this one)
"Going For A Song" - Richard Sinclair : "That means going cheap, which is a joke about singing songs and going cheap and heading off to other countries".
Who were the band's main composers ?

The writing was democratically split between the members. Dave Stewart was the main writer, composing about half of each album and notably the epic "Mumps" on The Rotters' Club. Pip Pyle also wrote a lot, including most of the band's lyrics. Phil Miller mainly wrote short, highly melodic instrumentals. And Richard Sinclair brought sketches of songs, most of which were re-worked by the band, with lyrics added by Pyle in some cases ("Let's Eat", "Share It", "Going For A Song").

How much, and where, did the band tour ?

A chronology of Hatfield's tours is available on this site.
Hatfield and the North toured Europe extensively in 1973-75 : at least three tours of France, and two each of Belgium and the Netherlands, where the Soft Machine family was very popular. After signing with Virgin, Hatfield toured the UK several times, notably with Gong, Stomu Yamash'ta's East Wind and as part of the Virgin/NME tour.

What were the reasons for members departing?

Steve Miller, Phil's brother, was involved in the preliminary stages of Hatfield, but left before the name was actually chosen. Richard Sinclair : "Phil couldn't get on with Steve, who decided he wasn't going to be in the band". The Miller-Miller-Pyle-Sinclair quartet did play one gig, billed as Delivery (with Lol Coxhill guesting) at the City Of London festival on July 21st 1972.
David Sinclair left in February 1973 to rejoin Caravan. Richard Sinclair : "He couldn't handle Phil Miller's guitar playing, he just doesn't like the sounds Phil comes up with. This is why he wasn't considered when Dave Stewart didn't want to do the Bedrock TV show in 1990". "Dave decided that he'd got other things to do. It was too stressful to keep coming up and down to London to play with Phil, Pip and I, and he wanted to do other stuff anyway...".
The main factor in Hatfield's split was Richard Sinclair, whose difficulties in his daily life (he lived in a squat with his wife and baby at the time) made it too hard for him to cope with the constraints of band life. This led to tension within the band, and its eventual breakup. Sinclair : "I'd had enough cause it was so extreme with that band. The other three had a lot of music and although I did too, theirs was much stronger than mine, so I didn't really take part anymore. I had trouble at home, with my family, not having enough money to play music. It's always money things that stop people playing their music together cause they can't find the time to get enough money to eat and play music... So I decided to leave". Sinclair elaborates further on his problems at the time : "I wasn't actually homeless at that time. I was living at Sheen with Pip and Phil, and that meant there were two families, sometimes three, in quite a small flat. Dave Stewart lived just around the corner, and we used to play music every day, wherever we could. Then we moved out of Sheen, and I remember having to squat down at Croydon, and my wife having to go to hospital before we'd actually moved into the squat... There wasn't a lot of money about. We were living off Social Security or assistance money. In the end I'd definitely had enough and was finding that my actual concentration had gone. The last three months of Hatfield were pretty stressful for me, travelling around with everybody where you can't really take part... Our last gig was at the Winning Post. They decided not to use the name. It was all pretty stressful for them too, that I'd decided to leave the band at the time, because I think that we were just about to get bigger concerts and more money. Of course we'd been signed to Virgin and Virgin weren't particularly interested [in National Health] because it had lost some of that human element - it had gone more instrumental than the vocal type thing...".
Phil Miller and Dave Stewart kept on playing together in National Health, of which Pip Pyle was almost a founding member. In 1977, Miller, Stewart and Pyle were re-united, and Richard Sinclair guested on vocals with National Health at a few gigs and radio sessions in London that year.
Regarding the brief reformation of Hatfield in 1990, he's what Richard Sinclair had to say : "Hatfield reformed for a couple of weeks [to do the Central TV show in March 1990]... I was up sleeping in Phil's shed for two weeks, at the bottom of the garden, and we did some very intense rehearsals, musically really extreme, with Pip playing very loudly in very small rooms... The show itself worked out quite well, apart from the mistake that I didn't actually notice what they were going to do with this music. And of course they picked on quite a lot of my music, quite a lot of Pip's, and none of Phil's. And even though I was out there I didn't register on that at all, that it was nothing to do with what Phil's actually written, cause that was all Hatfield music, cause Hatfield music was a bit like that. Apart from that, Pip for the show had written a lot of new music, and it wasn't any old Hatfield music from Pip at all. And there was only old Hatfield music from Phil and I. So since then we folled them out a little bit, Phil and I, which is a bit of a shame. Cause they stole my favourite writer. I think he writes the best music. He is not my favourite performer and favourite arranger, but he definitely writes my favourite music. You know, Phil and I aren't in close contact anymore which is a shame...".

Where are they now?

Dave Stewart formed National Health with Alan Gowen in 1975. After leaving in 1978, he joined Bruford, then in 1980 the shortlived Rapid Eye Movement. In 1981, he started a solo career which evolved into a duo with his partner, former Northette Barbara Gaskin.

Phil Miller joined National Health in 1975. He stayed until the band's demise in 1980. In 1982, he formed his own band In Cahoots, which is still going. He has also been playing with Short Wave and in a duo with Fred Baker both since 1991.

Richard Sinclair formed a series of Canterbury-based, informal, gigging-only line-ups in the late 70's. In 1977 he joined Camel for a couple of years. In the early 80's and 90's, he was involved in reformations of the original Caravan line-up. Between 1991-94, he led his own band Caravan Of Dreams, and between 1994-96 the more unstable RSVP. In 1996 he moved to Harlingen (Netherlands) for several years, returning to Canterbury in 2000. He has kept quiet for some time but will return to gigging in 2002, beginning with Japanese dates in March.

Pip Pyle joined National Health in 1977 after freelancing for a couple of years on the British jazz scene. He stayed until the band's demise in 1980. In the meantime, he was a founding member of Soft Heap in 1978, a band which occasionally toured until 1988 and is now in limbo. Since 1982 he has been a fixture in Phil Miller's band In Cahoots. In 1984 he formed his own jazz band, L'Equip'Out, which gigged occasionally until it ground to a halt in the mid-1990's. He moved to France in the mid-1980's and in the last decade has worked with Patrice Meyer, Emmanuel Bex, John Greaves and Gong. He was also a member of the occasional all-star band Short Wave from 1991 to 1996. In 1998 he finally released his long-awaited solo album Seven Year Itch, which featured all ex-Hatfield members. He has also toured and recorded with the American avant-prog trio Absolute Zero.

Last updated : December 2001