Matching Mole (A Jet-Propelled Soft Machine)

Matching Mole is the seventh studio album by the English rock band Soft Machine. The album was produced by Soft Machine members, and released in 22 June 1972 by Harvest in the United Kingdom and CBS Records in the United States. It is their last album with bassist Hugh Hopper until All Aboard the Ghost Train!.

As the previous album, the album was produced by Soft Machine themselves, but using a lot of outtakes and demos of Kings and Queens and Immediate Curtain, mainly written by Robert Wyatt, and finishing them to the point to create new songs. The final sessions lasted near a month, to overdub and add vocals to the tracks.

The album topped the UK Album Charts, and reached number 31 in Billboard 200. The song chosen to be the lead single was Oh, Caroline!, a romantic song written by Wyatt, a progressive pop-oriented song, stretched to three minutes instead of five, backed by a live version of Singing a Song in the Morning. Oh, Caroline! reached number 3 on Billboard Hot 100. Three months later, Ayers released Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes as a solo sing, that despite being a solo record, it was a hit in Europe, mainly in France and West Germany.

Matching Mole is considered a step-back on the wide experimentation of Soft Machine on music. In Matching Mole, the band tries to record less experimental music, and more progressive rock-to-pop turned songs with Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers, still with a bitter jazz experimentation influence on Hugh Hopper and Mike Ratledge pieces. The album is widely acclaimed from both parts of the fans as one of their best works.

Soft Machine

 * Kevin Ayers - lead guitar, lead and backing vocals [3; 6; 8; 10]
 * Robert Wyatt - drums and percussion; lead and backing vocals [1; 5-7], piano [5], mellotron
 * Mike Ratledge - Lowrey Holiday De Luxe organ, Fender Rhodes piano
 * Hugh Hopper - bass guitar

Additional personnel

 * David Bedford - organ, orchestral arrangements
 * Elton Dean - alto saxophone, saxello
 * Mike Oldfield - electric guitar
 * Bruce Malamut - incidental brass
 * Peter Mews - engineer
 * John Barrett - engineer
 * Adrian Boot - design
 * Adrian Lyne - photography