>>Oh yes, the band... Hatfield And The North.<<
good shout, per. the name comes from a motorway sign seen when leaving london towards the north. the humour lies in that hatfield is some twenty miles outside of london, & so the interpretation is likely to be that the rest of "the north" is relatively simple to deal with &/or insignificant. band names of the form "somebody & the somethings" were quite common then too.
that whole "canterbury" scene actually overlaps with soft machine & by some convoluted personnel exchanges, the whole gong/hillage axis too.
& of course, the softs were themselves influenced by AAM & keith rowe in particular, as were (the) pink floyd. of course, there are links with caravan & camel too. & henry cow.
the association of prog-rock with high-intellect &/or capitalism is unfortunate.
both gong & the hatfields lost their original drummers last year; pip pyle's relatives decided to decorate his going-home-suit (coffin) with stickers, in the manner of a flight-case. I was able to furnish them with an old hatfields logo from a flight-case I bought a while back, that had once been the property of a touring sound engineer, who kept a revox in it. & at the gong unconvention in amsterdam, pierre moerlen's memory was honoured with the auctioning of a specially commissioned painting.
d.