Wow, we're celebrating our first birthday! Thanks for sticking with us. Hope you enjoy this issue which features my tribute to the lovely Kevin Ayers...
WINE! WOMEN! OH, AND IF YOU INSIST, SONG!
May day in 2007 - I found myself at The Barbican for an
all-star celebration of the songs of Syd Barrett, the shiny diamond geezer from
Pink Floyd who had screamed his last scream some 10 months earlier. Captain
Sensible of The Damned blew the roof off with a stratospheric rendering of 'Astronomy
Domine', Damon Albarn made the floor sink with a brave-but-boring 'Word
Song', and in-between we had Robyn Hitchcock, Chrissie Hynde, Vashti Bunyan
and, yes, even Pink Floyd found time to stop counting their money and play a
song. At some point during the show, a tall, gangly old man with straggly hair
strolled onstage. "Ooh, look," I sotto-voced to my pal, "It's
David St. Hubbins from Spinal Tap." But it wasn't. This beanpole with the
biggest whitest pair of trainers I've ever seen crooned in a surprisingly deep
voice the Barrett ditty 'Here I Go' ("She's kind of cute, don't you
know?/ And after a while/ Of seeing her smile/ I knew we could make it/ And
make it in sty-y-y-yle"). The performance was shy and sweet and tender and
tuneful. There were many jokers in the pack that night but this was the ace.
"Who was that guy?" - "Oh, that's Kevin Ayers. Syd played on one
of his songs - 'Religious Experience'. You know it." - "Nope.
How does it go?" - "'I'm singing a song in the morning, I'm singing
it again at night, I don't even know what I'm singing about but it makes me
kind of feel all right, yeah yeah, it makes me kind of feel all right'."
Judging by the level of applause he received, which was pretty tumultuous, he
must be A Significant Artist. So how come I knew next to nothing about him? Why
has he been on a different planet all this time? And why is he now entering my
orbit? Plainly, my theory that the culture you deserve will eventually find you
was being tested. And so, with a few quid at my disposal, I went and bought a
few of his records, most of which had just been released on CD…
Ayers' most musically-productive period
was the first half of the 1970s and to hear them in context - as they were
intended to be heard - you should try and travel back in time, back before
Kanye West and Beiber and Gaga and The X Factor and post-feminism and
Generation Like and iPods and Smartphones and WMD and digital software and
Spice Girls and Oasis and Grunge and Damien Hirst and J-Lo and Pet Shop Boys
and Thatcher and CDs and Viz and Live Aid and Brookside and Frankie Say and
Channel 4 and Two-Tone and female bass guitarists and The Fall. Back, back,
back to a time where you would be thrown out of a pub for not smoking, where
music was recorded on tape (and a singer's performances could not be 'improved'
by Autotune corrective technology), where you could find socialists in the Labour
Party, where jogging and yoga were viewed with suspicion (no-one saw anything
wrong with the copious imbibing of 'gold watch' by the perma-puffing Regan and
Carter, anti-heroic stars of cop show 'The Sweeney'). It was neither a better
time or a worse time; it was just a different time. In 30 years, our children
will look back at us and point and laugh at the quaint way we talk and the huge
cumbersome phones we talk quaintly into and all the silly things we think are
so vital that we have to tell the world about it with our primitive forms of
social networking media. Back in 1972, it wouldn't have been out of the
ordinary for a government minister to appear on one of the three TV channels
and inform viewers that he can foresee a day where there will be a telephone
installed in almost half the homes in Britain.
His debut solo album, 'Joy Of A Toy',
arrived in December 1969 - an early Christmas present for the fast-approaching
Seventies - and it's a morning-after burp following an evening spent smoking Beatles'
'Magical Mystery Tour' and sipping Nilsson's 'Aerial Ballet'.
Despite his previous band (Soft Machine) providing musical back-up throughout,
'Joy…' sounds not a jot like the Softs. Their 1968 LP is an uneasy, unresolved
tug-of-war between Ayers' pure pop sensibility and the freeform extemporaneous
jazzeroo clattering of Robert Wyatt's uber-walloped drum kit and Mike
Ratledge's grinding organ workouts. Yes, 'The Soft Machine' is
undoubtedly Worthy and Of Historical Interest and all that, but it's not necessarily
enjoyable. 'Joy…' sounds like a pinker, perkier Nick Drake. (Drake is the sound
of summer's fading into autumn; Ayers is the spring into summer.)
The happiest Ayers/Wyatt collaboration
could be their harmonising on the title song of the 1972 album 'Whatevershebringswesing',
Kevin's 8-minute hymn to dipsomaniac dissipation and wasting time getting
wasted: 'So let's drink some wine and have a good time but if you really come
through, let the good time have you'. The tempo is (appropriately) sluggish and
the lyric continually pulls the rug from under the shoes of the blues, each
attempt at serious point-making and philosophising rendered silly and
inconsequential by verbal pratfalls. It's exactly like a boozed conversation,
full of tangential wanderings and what-was-I-sayings. (And on a tangent, I
remember some Bob Dylan fanatic years ago compiling a concordance of Dylan's
lyrics, noting how many times and in what songs chief words appear. If one were
to do the same with the Ayers songbook, the overwhelming percentage would be
taken up by references to wines and good times. The grape was pretty much the
making of him creatively and the undoing of him personally. As far back as late
1974, his interview with Nick Kent in the NME was headlined 'Is This Man A
Dipso?' If he were born a bit later and arrived on the Punk scene, he might
have been called Johnny Sodden. Time to close this parenthesis and get back to
the story…)
I'm not going to waffle on about his
so-called privileged background, or his louche, libertine loafstyle, or parp on
about possible reasons for his disappearances from the public eye for years at
a time (why he would rather catch the sun than have The Sun catch him). Nor am
I going to do that elitist rawk critic move - what we call 'The Greil' - and
make claims that his essential recordings are only available on a
limited-edition-of-one C30 cassette tape made available on a remote Peruvian
village market stall for three minutes in 1987. And I'm certainly not going to
burble about his embracing of what-we-now-call-World-music years before Talking
Heads or Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel or Damian Albarn were there with butterfly
net and solar topee. (Or maybe I will: His attraction to Spanish music,
calypso, reggae could be part-way attributed to his xenophilia; he had that air
of Toff Gone Native which is no bad thing. 'Caribbean Moon' - for which
the 1973 promo video must be seen and savoured in all its silly glory - is no
hack piece of cultural tourism.) Such matters are dealt with elsewhere online
if you can bothered to look for them. But I will say this: Kevin Ayers knew
that the purpose of Art is not about impressing everyone with virtuoso
technique and the depth of their intelligence, creating some obscurum per
obscurius deep and meaningless artefact to be gawped at like the
slab that travels through Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Rather,
it's about opening a door to a garden of delights and inviting us in and
sharing the wonders, picking at the surface of the familiar to reveal the magic
and mystery lurking beneath. This attitude can be found at work and play right
at the beginning of his solo career all the way, hiccups and occasional
creative droughts aside, to his final release, the time-bomb treasure 'The
Unfairground' in 2007.
'Ambition is the last refuge of the
failure,' aphorised Oscar Wilde, and we can dwell on whether Ayers' cult status
(polite way of saying 'unsuccessful') was due to his refusing to play the fame
game or not knowing how to. Kevin Ayers was a lotus eater, a grounded angel, a
tasty wastrel, and his death in 2013 was especially saddening for me. Not that
I felt cheated from further songs that might have flowed from him, but more
that it felt grand to think that he was boozily snoozing in a hammock somewhere
whilst the rest of the world suffered fresh crises in Capitalism. He has gone
but his buccaneer spirit lives on in those records. I should at this point
exhort you to find them and play them this instant and transport yourself to a
better place, but that would be hypocritical. Instead, do absolutely nothing.
Let him come to you. In the meantime, have a good time and let the good time
have you.
