Soft Machine, la "Scène de Canterbury" et le rock progressif italien : concerts, échanges et influences au cours des années 1970

The reception of British progressive rock in Italy is a complex and multifarious phenomenon. Since the end of the 1960s, British progressive rock has encountered a considerable success in Italy. At the same time, several Italian bands (like Premiata Forneria Marconi) have managed to gain international recognition. In this context, the Canterbury Scene played an important role, which has not been fully explored in the scholarly literature. After providing a general overview of the Italian progressive rock scene of the early 1970s, this article seeks to analyze the reception of the Canterbury Scene in Italy and tries to grasp its influence on Italian bands (such as Perigeo and Picchio dal Pozzo). The band Soft Machine will be used as a privileged case study because of the availability of numerous historical data on their Italian reception as well as because of the association between this band and its ‘Canterburian’ origins, despite several changes in the line-up. In the final section, the article provides a brief overview of the politicization of Italian progressive music, particularly in the second half of the 1970s, without losing sight of its relationship with the universe of the Canterbury Scene.