The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Soft Machine
- Released
- 1972
- Recorded
- Advision Studios, London
- First-side drummer
- Phil Howard
- Second-side drummer
- John Marshall
- Producer
- Soft Machine
Why it matters
A personnel fracture becomes the album's form
Fifth matters because it documents change without disguising it as seamless progress. The original first side was recorded with Phil Howard, whose drumming favours free momentum and abrupt displacement. After he left, John Marshall completed the second side with a more centred, economical attack. The side break is therefore a genuine change of rhythmic philosophy.
The album is Soft Machine's first without Wyatt. There is no longer tension between a singer-songwriter identity and instrumental jazz because the singer has gone; instead, the central question is how Ratledge, Hopper and Dean can organise space after losing the drummer whose looseness had shaped them for years.
Their answer is unusually spare. Fifth avoids the massed guest writing of Fourth and rarely reaches for the monumental structures of Third. Themes may be reduced to a bass line, scale, rhythmic cell or clear melody. The listener hears the band testing how little material is needed to create a complete environment.
1971–72
Wyatt leaves, Howard records, Marshall completes
Wyatt left Soft Machine in August 1971 and formed Matching Mole. Australian drummer Phil Howard, already associated with Elton Dean's Just Us, joined the group and toured Europe during the autumn. The lineup entered Advision Studios on 22–24 November and 7 December to record All White, Drop and M.C.
Howard departed after those sessions. Ratledge, Hopper and Dean then recruited former Nucleus drummer John Marshall. The second album side—As If, L.B.O., Pigling Bland and Bone—was recorded at Advision from 21 to 25 February 1972. Gary Martin engineered and the band produced both phases.
The finished album preserves rather than erases that chronology. Dean would leave later in 1972 and Karl Jenkins would enter for Six, while Marshall remained. Fifth is therefore the sole studio album to contain Howard and the final Soft Machine studio appearance by Dean.
Two session line-ups
Three continuing players and two incompatible drummers
Howard treats time as something that can be broken open. His accents arrive in clusters, his cymbals produce weather around the reeds and his forward motion can become deliberately unstable. That approach gives All White, Drop and M.C. a restless edge even when their written materials are economical.
Marshall makes the second side feel heavier without necessarily making it louder. He defines pulse and form more firmly, leaving Ratledge and Dean to create ambiguity above him. L.B.O. reveals his identity in miniature; Pigling Bland shows how his control can support one of Ratledge's most melodic themes.
Hopper is the continuity between the two approaches. His electric bass can establish a minimal frame for improvisation or lock closely with Marshall. Dean increasingly adds electric piano to his reeds, while the recorder colour on Bone makes his departure quiet rather than spectacular.
Sound and construction
Skeletal themes with radically different kinds of motion
The first side has a live-wire surface. Howard's drums continually threaten to detach from the apparent centre, and Dean responds with lines that treat instability as invitation. Ratledge's electric piano and organ supply shapes without enclosing the improvisers.
All White states enough theme to be memorable, then lets the quartet pull it apart. Drop gives Howard an even more open field, while M.C. reduces the environment toward scale, colour and pulse. The three pieces feel related by behaviour rather than by a suite title.
As If changes the room immediately. Marshall and guest double bassist Babbington deepen the floor, making Hopper's electric bass part of a layered low register. The piece's opening and closing bass material frames a middle that can range without losing its boundary.
L.B.O. is a short Marshall composition built around drums. It cleans the ear before Pigling Bland, whose strong melody dates from the Volume Two era and contrasts sharply with Fifth's prevailing austerity.
Bone ends without a full-band climax. Dean's reed-centred miniature narrows the perspective, allowing timbre and breath to close an album whose biggest story has been the changing organisation of rhythm.
Track guide
Seven pieces divided by a side break and a drummer change
All White
Ratledge's theme offers a clear entrance without dictating what must follow. The title's blankness suits music that begins with an outline and lets performance fill the space.
Howard's drums make the written material feel provisional. Dean moves between statement and escape while Hopper keeps enough centre for the quartet to reconvene.
Drop
The title describes both sudden descent and the removal of support. Ratledge's composition gives the group points of contact, but much of the drama comes from how quickly those points can disappear.
Dean adds electric piano as well as reeds, complicating the usual keyboard-wind division. Howard makes every re-entry feel risky, turning openness into the track's principal energy.
M.C.
Hopper's compact piece is less a tune to develop than a scale-shaped atmosphere to inhabit. Its initials refuse narrative guidance and direct attention back to sound.
Bass establishes the field while Dean and Ratledge test its edges. Howard's final studio appearance with the band ends the side in suspension rather than farewell.
As If
Ratledge frames the longest track with a bass idea that appears at the beginning and end. The middle can open widely because the listener retains that memory of boundary.
Marshall's firmer pulse and Babbington's double bass immediately distinguish the second session lineup. Electric and acoustic low voices create depth beneath Dean's exploratory reeds.
L.B.O.
Marshall's ninety-second composition makes percussion the event rather than accompaniment. Its compact scale functions as a signature placed inside his first Soft Machine album side.
After the breadth of As If, the drum feature resets proportion. It also prepares Pigling Bland without trying to bridge the two pieces melodically.
Pigling Bland
Ratledge had composed this theme in 1969 as a coda associated with Esther's Nose Job. Removed from that earlier setting, its broad melody arrives on Fifth like a recovered memory from a more exuberant Soft Machine.
Marshall gives the tune a firm, unhurried platform. Organ and reeds can state the line with unusual openness, making melody itself feel dramatic after the preceding austerity.
Bone
Dean's closing piece reduces the album to reed colour and a small, exposed form. The title suggests structure stripped of flesh, an apt image for Fifth's economy.
Recorder adds a fragile edge to Dean's wind palette. Rather than announcing his coming departure, the album lets his final studio contribution recede through breath and timbre.
Not one unified concept
Space, instability and the problem of continuity
Fifth is not a narrative concept album. Its unity comes from austerity and from the contrast between two recording lineups. Titles such as Drop, As If and Bone encourage interpretation, but no shared character or plot connects them.
Space is the record's most consistent concern. Themes are often small enough that silence, sustain and instrumental distance become active parts of the music. Howard fills and fractures that space; Marshall measures and stabilises it.
Continuity is therefore a practical question rather than a slogan. Hopper, Ratledge and Dean remain across both sides, but the drummer change alters their behaviour. The album asks whether identity resides in personnel, composition, sound or the method of responding to change.
The numeral five
A bare five conceals a complicated interior
The front cover reduces the album to a large numeral 5. Like Fourth, it offers catalogue order instead of a scene, portrait or explanatory concept.
That graphic simplicity conceals the record's most important division. Nothing in the numeral announces that one drummer occupies side one and another side two; the listener discovers the fracture through performance and credits.
The title appears in both word and numeral forms across different catalogue contexts. Treating Fifth and 5 as the same album avoids inventing separate identities while respecting the cover's blunt visual choice.
The 1972 release
A transition album that refuses to smooth the transition
Fifth appeared in 1972 with seven original tracks. It continued the fully instrumental direction of Fourth but exchanged that album's many guests and dense writing for a smaller, more exposed sound.
The personnel split made it difficult to hear the record as a settled new era. Howard's side captured a short-lived touring band; Marshall's side introduced the drummer who would become central to Soft Machine's later history.
Later listeners have often valued the album precisely for that instability. Its two halves allow a rare direct comparison: the same three continuing musicians reorganise themselves around radically different drumming within one studio programme.
Toward Six
Elton Dean's final studio chapter
Fifth is the only Soft Machine studio album with Howard and the last with Dean. That makes it a narrow but crucial corridor between the Wyatt quartet and the Marshall-Jenkins period.
Marshall's arrival proved durable. His precision, power and experience in Nucleus helped support the more riff-oriented fusion language that emerged on Six and later records. Fifth captures the change before that style is fully established.
The album also preserves Pigling Bland, an older Ratledge composition whose melody connects 1969 writing to the sparer 1972 context. Its survival demonstrates that catalogue development was not a clean rejection of the past.
Which edition?
The alternate All White is context, not an eighth original track
Do not mistake the alternate All White on the 2007 edition for part of the original LP. The historical album ends with Bone after seven tracks.
The 1999 pairing makes the personnel transition unusually clear. Hear Wyatt close Fourth, then Howard destabilise Fifth's first side and Marshall rebuild its second.
The 2008 archival release Drop documents the Howard lineup in German concerts from October and November 1971. It supplies the live behaviour behind the first-side studio recordings without rewriting the album.
A listening path
Compare the drummers before comparing the compositions
- First pass: Pause at the original side break and register the immediate change from Howard to Marshall.
- Second pass: Follow Hopper's bass to hear what remains constant across both recording lineups.
- Third pass: Compare the minimal frames of M.C. and As If with the recovered melody of Pigling Bland.
- Then continue: Move to Six for Marshall's first complete Soft Machine album and Karl Jenkins's arrival after Dean.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Soft Machine official history — Soft Machine
- Soft Machine studio discography and credits — Calyx: The Canterbury Discography
- Fourth and Fifth catalogue analysis — Calyx
- Fifth track and composition record — MusicBrainz
- Fifth catalogue and reissue record — AllMusic