“We had a number of names to choose from, and that one seemed to suggest that the human body and brain was a soft machine,” he says, matching the theme of the book. “And the internal textural contrast ...

Mike Ratledge, keyboardist and founding member of Soft Machine, has died. He was 81 years old. The news was confirmed by Ratledge’s former bandmate and current Soft Machine guitarist John Etheridge in ...