Best of the Canterbury Scene

The wittiest, strangest, and most unabashedly British music to emerge from the prog-rock scene all came from Canterbury. Key early bands The Soft Machine, Gong, and Caravan melded avant-garde jazz to psychedelic whimsy. Second-generation acts like Hatfield and the North, as well as solo work by Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt, took the genre into more personal and quirky directions.