Kevin On Earth

Kevin Ayers, experimentalist

The Fairy Tree, Richard ‘Dickey’ Doyle, c 1865

Here's a song for 'clean machine Kevin Majorca'
He's found his own way of 'live in Majorca'
Don't walk, don't drink
Don't talk, just think
Heaven on Earth he'll get there soon

Kevin's highly unlikely to get ill
At least as long as he lies perfectly still
He eats brown rice and fish - how nice
Heaven on Earth, he'll get there soon

Good and bad go so well together in his tunes
He wrote a song and called it the weather - or not
He's Lucky or Pozzo, Estragon and Vladimir
Waiting for something that's already there
Heaven on Earth or is it the moon?

Why, why, why is he sleeping?
Why is the trumpeter weeping?
Kevin maybe asking to get back into my dreams
His voice is so weak now and the customers are screaming
Heavens above, we can't hear what you're saying

We've got something to tell you
Hold on we wanted to thrill you
Reckons it's so nice and it will make you feel better
Something in the nature of a Lullabye Letter

Kevin on Earth there'll be one
Kevin on Earth make room for one
Kevin himself he'll be in
Kevin on Earth, be here
Or you could be now
Or is he found, in Herne Bay...

‘As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still’, Robert Wyatt and Mike Ratledge, Soft Machine 2 (1969)

The Soft Machine were one of only a handful of 60’s acts who first (circa 1966) introduced techniques from serious experimental music into pop song performance and production.¹ In New York, the Velvet Underground, mainly on their first two LPs, overlaid the musically simple pop songs of Lou Reed, influenced as they were by doo wop and R&B (vide the steal from Marvin Gaye’s ‘Hitchhike’ in ‘There She Goes Again’) with effects from Lamont Young’s drone music, Steve Reich and Terry Riley’s minimalism, and musique concrete (the big bottle-and-dustbin smash-up in ‘European Son’), the serious New York music of the day, plus guitar solos inspired by Ornette Coleman’s free jazz playing, which evolved into a layered gritty sound all their own, heard in ‘Sister Ray’ and later on Lou Reed solo albums like Street Hassle.

In England, the Pink Floyd overlaid their jams and songs, based at first on blues songs and R&B riffs, with free-form sonorist improvisation inspired by guitarist Keith Rowe of ensemble AMM, as well as structural concepts and the odd riff (Holst’s ‘Mars’ at the start of ‘Astronomie Dominie’) borrowed from classical music, and experimented in the studio with tape echo, sped up voices, and a looped overlay of the sounds made by found objects at the end of ‘Bike’.


The loose arrangement of friends known as the Soft Machine were initially inspired (like the vastly different MC5) by the music of erstwhile doo wop songwriter Sun Ra, and applied his version of free-form jazz improvisation along with the compositional style derived from bebop and post-bop composers to what at first were simple R&B influenced pop songs (the first song ever recorded by Whitney Houston was ‘Memories’, an early composition by Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper), and later more mathematically complex structures. They also collaborated with and were influenced by English free jazz musicians, especially The Amazing Band, and the French musique concrete composer François Bayle. Ayers, Wyatt and Allen play a version of Pink Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ on Bayles’ Soliotude (1968), and Ayers and Wyatt improvise on their vocal lines from The Softs’ ‘We Did It Again’ on his electronic composition It.²

There are, therefore, examples of avant garde experimentation on Kevin Ayers’ solo albums up until the mid-1970’s, when he half-heartedly tried to reinvent himself as a simpler kind of pop star, beginning with Joy Of A Toy (1969). Its opening track ‘Joy of a Toy Continued’ sounds nothing like the pensive Soft Machine instrumental it’s named after; instead it’s a bumptious little march, almost aggressively childish, and well-written and arranged as a kind of illustration prefacing an album that is in part about childhood. In other words, it’s conceptual.

‘Stop This Train (Again Doing It)’ begins at a low pitch and tempo, the tape speed gradually increased - stepwise so that the modulations in the 3-note riff, quite magically, given the hands-on method that’s probably being used, make sense - till the song is at full pace and Ayer’s voice comes in. I’ve recently been listening to just this effect, produced digitally, at the beginning of aprxel’s ‘Planet Hollywood’ (and, reversed, in the middle of Mona Evie’s ‘Justin Bieber’), Mona Evie being an outfit, at times, in the tradition (though “tradition” is quite the wrong word to describe the simultaneous arrival of ideas across the internet) of the R&B-influenced 60’s pop-experimental crossover acts. Mike Ratledge’s organs in ‘Stop This Train’ are so treated that they flutter in and out of the speakers; inventive keyboard treatments are another aspect of Ayers’ experimentalism. At the end of the song, matching its start, tempo and pitch increase, both rising and hurrying out of earshot. The tape-speed arrangement of ‘Stop This Train’, a song about life as a journey by train, may have been inspired by Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1923), the quintessential orchestral transcription of mechanical acceleration and speed.

‘Lady Rachel’, a beautiful exercise in psychedelic whimsy with its soft yet powerful rhythms and repetitive melodica trills, shows a different side of Ayer’s experimentation, being a literary adventure wherein he borrows an idea from the Soft’s poet friend Robert Graves. The surprise narrative of Graves’s poem ‘Advice to Children’ neatly arrives back at its own beginning, to be repeated till infinity, and Ayers’ song presents the same paradox in a fairytale dream narrative. The dream sequence that starts at 3:40 introduces a type of soundscape that will be developed across the most successful production experiments of the next few years and, much later, on his final album.

‘Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong’ is a Malay chant in 7/4 time performed in a minimalist ostinato prog style, interrupted by a fuzz guitar drone, and draped at various times in Moog synth chirps, mysteriously treated organs and slide guitar, and some Moondog-like piano from arranger David Bedford.

Bedford, a classically-trained avant garde composer in his own right, was an official member of Ayer’s band on the next LP, Shooting At The Moon (1970), which is credited to Kevin Ayers and The Whole World, a band which also included 16-year-old wunderkind Mike Oldfield on guitar and bass and free improv saxophonist Lol Coxhill, and helped to create Ayer’s most diversely, and riskily, experimental work.

The sinister ‘Rheinhardt and Geraldine’, which rocks hard due to Oldfield’s piledriving bass, not Ayers’ minimal rhythm guitar, is interrupted by, instead of a guitar solo, a musique concrete collage (the result of hundreds of time-consuming tape splices) incorporating teasing fragments of ‘Rheinhardt & Geraldine’s’ driving riff which gradually re-asserts itself fully to complete the song and introduce ‘Colores Para Dolores’, on which Ayers’ vocal is accompanied by Robert Wyatt’s and the fuzzbox that’s been dropping in and out on the bass stays switched on.

 ‘Pisser Dans un Violon’ is an 8-minute sonorist free improvisation which goes nowhere, ‘Underwater’ is its shorter and more successful, in that its jam goes somewhere and succeeds in taking us with it, reprise. ‘Underwater’ ends with a tape recording of tropical bird sounds, a touch of Bayle that also evokes Ayer’s Malayan childhood.³

Over a quarter of the LP’s running time consists of sounds that most rock fans find unlistenable, yet the songs and performances are so strong, and the experimentalism (neither mode would be repeated on future albums) so assertively modernist, that Shooting At The Moon is one of Ayer’s most enduring albums. It also features ‘Lunatic’s Lament’, a fine example of the proto-punk leanings of the British prog scene (see also both Peter Hammill and Gong).

On Whatevershebringswesing (1971) experimental recording techniques are fully integrated into song arrangement – ‘Song From the Bottom of a Well’ is a maelstrom of treated guitar overdubs, tape effects, and stereo separation, one of Ayer’s masterpieces, with a lyric that shows the influence of Becket and Burroughs.

There's something strange going on down here
A sickening implosion of mistrust and fear.
A vast corruption that's about to boil
A mixture of greed and the smell of oil.

This is a song from the bottom of a well
I didn't move here, I just fell.
But I'm not complaining, I don't even care
Cause if I'm not here, then it's not there.

The beats under ‘Champagne Cowboy Blues’, created independently by Oldfield, seem to be built on the looping technique, inspired in part by Terry Riley’s Rainbow In Curved Air (1969), which Oldfield would later perfect on his hit LP Tubular Bells (1973).

Oldfield complained later that Ayers took over his track without crediting him, and this may be a key to understanding Ayers as an experimentalist – he could imagine new sounds, and worked with innovative musicians whose ideas he was unusually open to, but I can’t imagine him splicing tape himself for as long as that break in ‘Rheinhardt & Geraldine/Colores Para Dolores’ must have taken.

Whatevershebringswesing also contained the Lou Reed-influenced rocker ‘Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes’, and while the single off the subsequent Bananamour (1972) was ‘O What A Dream’, an innocent memoir of Ayer’s friendship with Syd Barret, its centerpiece, ‘Decadence’, is a portrait of Nico, and another studio concoction of layered instruments and effects, over a 1-4 chord change which likely references the Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’. Up till now the women in Ayer’s songs are Alice-like figures of storybook wonder – the mind’s eye sees their flowing hair and 70’s frocks (even Miss Clarietta, riding her Lambretta, seems of this sort). Nico is a more complex, Hans Christian Andersen character, but Ayers does her justice.

Lovers wrap her mist in furs
And tell her what she has is hers

And Nico sings a duet with Ayers on ‘The Confessions of Doctor Dream, Part 1: Irreversible Neural Damage’, from his subsequent LP The Confessions of Doctor Dream (1974). Part of a suite that takes up most of the album’s side 2, the track features Ayers’ treated piano and organ, and the suite uses many of the techniques from earlier recordings, such as looping and reversed effects and minimalist guitar patterns, to create its “Doctor Dream” mood of busy stasis and submerged delirium.

In 1974 Ayers played a concert at the Rainbow theatre in London alongside Nico, John Cale and Brian Eno, released on LP as June 1, 1974 a month later, giving valuable exposure to the most important avant garde rock musician of the day, and one he’d influenced greatly, as well as two former members of the Velvet Underground, then not nearly as well-known a band as they are today. Though Ayer’s own set is more-or-less conventional, the direction in which his career would be heading, the line-up is highly significant of the tradition he saw himself part of.

Sweet Deceiver (1975) is a strong collection of Ayers’ songs; while the experimentation is absent, there’s a proto-punk gesture in the title track’s intense riffing, and a spectacular piano solo from one Elton John on ‘Circular Letter’ that’s more avant garde and jazzy than anything else he’s done (I suspect he may have been responding to Mike Garson’s solo on Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’, which had raised the bar for pianists as soloists a few years earlier).
The lyric translates well into the internet age;

Some people sent me a circular letter
Explaining how their ideas were better
And asking me to join their gang

So many different kinds of club to join
So many versions of the same old coin
Do what you like with your convictions
I believe them all
But if I don`t answer when you call

It`s hallo sparrow paradoxical
Oh so auto tautological
Maybe vaguely ecological too, oo poop pee do
Home brewed, half nude terminology
Private, drive it yourself mythology
Everybody needs some ology now...

Ayers, like those other fantasists of childhood Kipling and Saki, grew up as an unhappy exile from Empire, having spent most of his childhood in Malaya, and I can’t do better than quote the Wikipedia editor’s paraphrase of Nick Kent: “The tropical climate and unpressured lifestyle had an impact, and one of the frustrating and endearing aspects of Ayers' career is that every time he seemed on the point of success, he would depart for some sunny spot where good wine and food were easily found”. He had an interest in Caribbean music, calypso and reggae, reflecting this love of the sun, much like Kirsty MacColl, but I feel the island-themed songs of the fastidious MacColl are much more successful – unlike her, Ayers often sounds like he’s taking a shortcut and slacking off, lyrically as well as musically, when the Caribbean sound comes in.

As it so happened, Elton John played piano on Sweet Deceiver because Ayers had signed with Elton’s manager and then-boyfriend John Reid, who proceeded to market him as a sort of matinee idol like Bryan Ferry.⁴ This wasn’t appreciated by fans and critics in the alternative rock scene, and saw him awkwardly placed when punk broke. It may seem incredible in these (queasily, prudishly) hypersexual times that an album as good as Sweet Deceiver was spurned for a little glamour on the cover (male artists today enjoying the trickle-down benefits from 3^rd wave feminism). Kevin hightailed it to Europe, where, now with a full-blown heroin habit, he kept working, with ace guitarist and close friend Ollie Halsall, who died of an overdose in 1992, garnering little respect from a music press that once feted him.

But Ayer’s first half-dozen albums would be held in high regard by a rising generation of experimental rock artists, and those who engineered and contributed to his comeback on 2007’s The Unfairground included  members of Ladybug Transistor, Teenage Fanclub, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Welsh band Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, who had recorded a song titled ‘Kevin Ayers’ in 1994 (the opening sample is from Joy of a Toy’s ‘Song From Insane Times’).⁵

Oedd e'n canu i pawb
Oedd e'n feindio dim ffordd allan
A falle os ni gyd yn gweiddi
Bydd rhywun yn clywed

Did he sing to everyone
Did he find any way out
And maybe if we all shout
Someone will hear

A reference to one of Kevin’s greatest songs, ‘Shouting in a Bucket Blues’

So I sing for everyone who feels there's no way out
So maybe if you all shout someone will hear you
Listen to them shout

(The performance below is from The Old Grey Whistle Test, a show that was originally the brainchild of Ayer’s father, BBC producer Rowan Ayers).

There are songs on The Unfairground that revisit Ayer’s experimental arrangements, like ‘Brainstorm’, which mirrors the agitated minimalism of the guitar parts in ‘Confessions of Doctor Dream’.

The intro to ‘Friends and Strangers’ brings to mind a line from ‘Song From Insane Times’ from Joy Of A Toy, “and we all sang the chorus, of ‘I Am The Walrus’”.

I was going to analyze Kevin Ayers’ lyrics a bit more, but I’m well past my 2000 word ideal and I’ve just read some choice quotes from Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. It seems better, instead, to complicate things with an esoteric insight. Carl Jung, as is well known, used the terms animus and anima for the masculine and feminine sides of the psyche, and explained how the balance between them often shifts during the human lifespan (a concept relevant to the ideas on gendered listening expressed in my Rasputina piece last year). The guiding principle of the animus Jung defined as Logos; the obsession with the exact values of things that gives us science, law, and dictionaries, while the anima’s guiding principle is Eros, the obsession with love, friendship, and emotional relationships that holds us together. To borrow a meme, “Eros is borderline, Logos is autistic”. Logos in songwriting is an exactitude of wordplay, best heard in the lyrics of the masters, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, whose songs are often concerned with putting people and things in their place; however kindly in the case of Cohen, he’s employed in ordering the world; the Logos connection is stated explicitly in the line “I'm the little Jew who wrote the Bible” in ‘The Future’, Logos also being the Greek term for the word of God, divine law.⁶ Kevin Ayers has well-developed Logos gifts – he speaks exactly and writes objectively, respects the dictionary meanings of words, and can wrap a paradox around his little finger. But his subject matter is Eros, and not just in love songs, which are a dime a dozen, but more often in lyrics like ‘Shouting in a Bucket Blues’, which is about the vulnerability of friendship and communication, or in the little throwaway number at the end of Dr Dream, ‘See You Later’.

A lot of things can happen
When you're walking down the street
But it never fails to amaze me
When people that I meet
Say, well I'll see you later...
I just answer how?
How will you see me later
When you can't see me now?
Hulloooo

Eros also rules those songs where Ayers questions his own sanity, like ‘Lunatic’s Lament’ and ‘Brainstorm’. The Unfairground is densely populated with these anxieties and longings, in songs like ‘Cold Shoulder’ and the title track, but they run all through his work, the envoi resembling the Thomas Bracken poem every New Zealand schoolkid once learned by heart, ‘Not Understood’.

Not understood, we move along asunder;
Our paths grow wider as the seasons creep

And it’s this attention to Eros, even more than his sexy deep voice and the rumpled good looks John Reid tried to exploit, that explains why Ayers’ music continues to appeal to a higher percentage of loyal female fans than most, perhaps all, of his peers.

Kevin Ayer’s death, in 2013, affected me more than the loss of any other celebrity. I felt as if I’d lost a close friend, and it didn’t matter that he was one I’d never met. Early on, I identified with his music because it seemed to involve similar choices, of chords, melody and mood to my own, and I could aspire to his soft, world-weary sexual confidence more easily than the camp or macho versions then so admired. And today, he’s still an under-rated figure, with more to tell us about creativity than those icons we’ve exhausted in ways Sontag would deplore.

 
Algorithmic influencer - Brian Eno, ‘I’ll Come Running’

1. The Beatles’ interest in tape loops and other studio effects shouldn’t be ignored, and the United States of America and The Red Crayola were also working in this field from the less commercial end.

2. François Bayle also remixed both these works into a number of longer, and more elegant, pieces in 1969 and 1971 – Solitioude samples are edited next to a snippet from Hendrix’s ‘Have You Ever Been To (Electric Ladyland)’ and some beautifully treated classical recordings (“Hendrix, Zappa, Mozart, Beethoven’) at minute 32 of Le Langage des Fleurs. Appropriately, considering the close connection between the Softs and Hendrix – the arrangement of ‘Purple Haze’ shows a Soft Machine influence, the Softs were invited to tour the USA with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and, when that experience became too much for Kevin (the prospects of touring on the scale required for the success he deserved overwhelmed him throughout his life) and he left the Soft Machine to retire from music, Jimi gifted him a coveted Gibson Super Jumbo 200 acoustic guitar on condition he kept writing songs.

3. François Bayle was born in the French colony of Madagascar

4. In 1974 John Reid was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment in New Zealand for punching model and journalist Judith Baragwanath in the face at a party.

5. I wasn’t interested in listening to new music in the period when Neutral Milk Hotel were the darlings of the cognoscenti, hence missed their work completely, but I listened to their ‘Marching Song’ a few hours before researching and writing this description of The Unfairground because Mona Evie sampled it on ‘Bicycle Day Special’. Which is a perfect example of the concordance I’m trying to supply in these mixed-up pages.

6. “Logos in its standard meaning designates a word, speech, or the act of speaking (Acts 7:22 ). Logos in its special meaning refers to the special revelation of God to people (Mark 7:13 ). Logos in its unique meaning personifies the revelation of God as Jesus the Messiah (John 1:14 ).”