Thursday, August 1, 2019

Kevin Ayers, Meet The Whole World! (reposting a special tribute originally published 20 June 2007)


May I? - KEVIN AYERS & THE WHOLE WORLD (featuring Mike Oldfield on bass and Lol Coxhill on soprano sax)


Way back in 1971 or thereabouts I found an LP called Shooting at the Moon by Kevin Ayers and the Whole World. It was in the cheap bin (I remember paying something like 5 bucks for it!). When I put the record on back home, I was immediately hooked on Ayers' totally laid-back, basso profundo singing style, especially on a song called "May I?" A couple of hours ago I stumbled on this video clip on YouTube, featuring the original Kevin Ayers and the Whole World line-up, including the legendary Mike Oldfield on bass, and Lol Coxhill on soprano sax. Treasure to share!

I figure not too many are familiar with this great singer-songwriter who was truly a pioneer in his day, forming mythical bands like Soft Machine and hanging out with the likes of Daevid Allen of Gong. So here's an interview with Kevin Ayers I unearthed, slightly dated but it gives a pretty good overview of the man's work.

THE KEVIN AYERS INTERVIEW
by Jimmy James (May 1998)

As bassist, frequent songwriter, and occasional vocalist in the original Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers was a key force in early British psychedelia and progressive rock. In just two years the group had evolved from the goofy, effervescent psychedelic pop of their 1967 debut single "Love Makes Sweet Music"/"Feelin' Reelin' Squealin'" to the dada jazz-rock minimalism of Ayers' infamous "We Did It Again." After the Soft Machine opened for the Jimi Hendrix Experience across the States in 1968 and recorded their first studio album, Ayers left the group to establish a long-running solo career with more pop-oriented material, delivered in a witty, near-bass profundo voice.

On most of his albums he explored the little-trod midpoint between weird pop and the most accessible, humorous face of prog-rock, crafting bouncy songs of indolence and whimsy that often tapped island rhythms. Leading British experimental musicians like Lol Coxhill, David Bedford, and a pre-Tubular Bells Mike Oldfield passed through his band while he veered between sunnier variations of Syd Barrett and dissonant experimental jams. He never did land a hit album or single in Britain, despite issuing numerous LPs on Harvest, and in the US he was a definitive '70s cult artist. He's only recorded sporadically in the 1980s and 1990s, with his more recent efforts even harder to locate in the import bins than his early solo material.

Now 63, Ayers made a rare visit to the States to play a few gigs in California in May 1998. Backed by the SF band Mushroom at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, he was in merry form as he went through a set of some of his more well-known vintage tunes, such as "Lady Rachel," "Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes," as well as the Soft Machine cuts "Why Are We Sleeping?" and "Save Yourself." Before soundcheck he found a few minutes to talk about the Canterbury scene with a few local fans and writers.


Q: What was unique about the Canterbury scene?

KA: Mike Ratledge from the Soft Machine had a degree in Oxford University in philosophy at 22. I mean, he won a scholarship and then said, fuck that, I'm going to play the organ. This was unique in pop. You don't find many people with honor degrees playing pop, even from that kind of literary background. Normally it was sort of art school. England is so defined, the class system, your education. I think what was unique about the Canterbury scene...these were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.

Q: Did you have a similar kind of literary upbringing to Robert Wyatt?

KA: Not from my parents, no. Robert had his from his parents, 'cause his parents were middle-class intellectuals. I was brought up in Malaya. But that is the difference, that this was the first time that anybody from the middle class, well-educated, joined the pop scene. This was comfortable kids who went to university.

Q: I'm surprised you call it pop.

KA: Well, I don't know, what else would you call it? Plop? (laughs) The whole thing about Soft Machine was that it had all these people from, as I said, middle-class literary educated backgrounds, suddenly going "fuck it, I'm not going to join med school, I'm not going to become a lawyer or a doctor. I'm not going to be a professional." And this hadn't happened anywhere else in pop. That's why the Canterbury scene was unique, because that is what happened there.

Q: You started off in the Wilde Flowers, then you showed up in Majorca to find Daevid Allen to put the band together. What made you go find him?

KA: Daevid Allen was the first hippie that I'd met. He was straight out of the beat scene, and he was very convincing (laughs). He read a lot. He was articulate. He turned us on, Robert and me and Mike, to all this - especially American - beat literature. And we suddenly thought, wow...you have to imagine, just out of an English private school, and suddenly you get this sort of exotic person coming through, who says, "fuck this, fuck that. Smoke pot, read this." He actually had something to say, he actually had a viewpoint. I suppose everybody else had no idea. All these people just came out of school, sort of wandering around in the job market, "what do I do now"- suddenly Daevid Allen's going, "Smoke pot now, peace love and fuck your neighbor." That was something. As opposed to nothing.

Q: Is that hippie ethic something that still motivates you?

KA: I think that the basic philosophy was very good. It was just be nice to each other, and don't step on other people's toes and infringe on their freedom. I think that's still valid. It just made sense, especially when... I keep talking to you about English schools. Unless you've been to one, you have no idea how bad they are. I mean, you just would not believe them. You only start learning when you leave school.

Q: The Soft Machine had a whimsical feel. Was that influenced by your literary background?

KA: We just had different references. We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it. If you have the same background, it doesn't matter which school you've been to, if you've read the books, have the knowledge, and you have the intellectual curiosity, you can talk to anybody who has the same thing, and you know what you're talking about. So you relate that way.

The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas. They'd read different books. So we actually got away with making a lot of crap. I don't mean crap - I mean that it wasn't professionally as good as what other people were doing. Other people had much better sound, and they had good producers. We worked alongside the Pink Floyd, we played gigs together, and we suddenly saw them go, whooosh!! with huge sales. But we were just dancing in the dark. There were groundbreaking ideas, musically and intellectually. Post-war generation asking serious questions.

Q: When you made your first solo record, you were obviously still on good terms with the Soft Machine, since they play on a lot of it.

KA: It was family for me - the only family I knew. We all lived together in one house.

Q: When you went solo, was it because you wanted to play and write different material than what the Soft Machine were doing on their first album?

KA: Soft Machine were going more in the direction of fusion jazz and I didn't like that. They were going more in the direction of jazz, which didn't interest me. I was strictly pop. They were into what I consider really to be incredibly self-indulgent music. It's stuff you play for yourself, and "fuck the audience."

Q: What about playing "We Did It Again" for half an hour for Brigitte Bardot?

KA: That's a serious statement. I think she said to get those wankers off or something.

Q: In an interview you said all your songs, except for a few romantic ones, were pataphysical. Where did you come across pataphysics?

KA: I think that was just a literary thing. The fact that you actually string a few sentences together was important in those days. Soft Machine became famous in France before anything else happened. They adopted us. The French like arty things, they like something a little bit different. In fact, what made Soft Machine was an article in Nouvelle Observateur, which at that time was a very... in those days, things like Melody Maker and NME, it mattered then. If someone wrote something about you, it could make or break you. Now it doesn't matter at all. We got written up, I think, 'cause Mike was fucking the journalist, actually. So we got a good review, and that was it. Suddenly France just opened up. We were the darlings of the literary scene there.

Q: Who were your main literary or formative influences?

KA: Philosophically, the only person that influenced me was Gurdjieff. What he said made sense to me. What I really liked about him was, he was a total charlatan. He didn't make any bones about it. His thing was that you cannot present the truth to people in simple form. You have to elaborate. Otherwise they're not interested. Did you ever read his book? It's just bullshit, absolute bullshit. But he says, you have to write 100 pages to say one sentence, to make it interesting for people. Otherwise they won't accept it as real. You have to say a lot in order to get a little across.

Q: Are you still inspired by things like that when you write?

KA: It's still there. I mean, I still think he was absolutely right. His two premises were, you have to say a lot to get a little across. you have to excite people. The other thing was, we're only working at five percent of our potential, which made total sense. What I loved about him... he came to America, you know, and he was very good at raising money. One of the things he did here was, he was in New York, he invited a bunch of people, saying, "this is the time of your life." And he made them have sex, and charged them a lot of money for it. And they were saying, "Wow, thank you, this is the best night of our lives." He just talked dirty to them, so they all had sex with each other and [said] "wow, this is so good," and they gave him thousands of dollars. What he did was say, "Look, this is what you really want to do. I'll organize it. Just give me the money."

Q: When do you think you most fully realized your own potential with your music?

KA: I don't think I can answer that. It's hypothetical, one will never know. I mean, some days you wake up and you think, Jesus, I could be a really good comedian. Then half an hour later, you forget the idea. People who really want to make money in this world make it. You have to have tunnel vision. You have to say, this is what I want to do. I believe that. If you wanted to make money, you would make it.

Don't you ever wake up in the morning and think, geez, I could really do with a lot of money? You think, I have a brain, I could use it, I could actually do this, I could play the stock market, I could be a televangelist or something. You could actually do it if you really wanted to do it. But you would have to really want to it. So basically you wake up in the morning and say, "oh, I don't really want to do anything."

Q: Is commercial success something you still aspire towards?

KA: No no no. It's all been a total fluke. I would have liked to have made more money, 'cause I think everybody has a creative period, normally between about 19 and 30. That is the time when you have to establish yourself in life. If you haven't made it by the time you're thirty, you never will, basically. Okay, forty (laughs). If you wind up forty and you don't have a house and a car and life insurance and health insurance, you know, you're fucked.

Q: Was it frustrating for you not to have much success in the States?

KA: I didn't really have that much exposure here. It would have been good. Basically the idea is to make a bunch of money with the creative talents you have before you're forty. I'm not answering your question, am I? This is the underlying thing, this is what is behind it. Whatever it takes, whether it's America or Holland, I don't know, it doesn't matter. You have a certain window in your life where you're intellectually curious, you have energy, and you're not blase, and you're not tired of life. That's when you have to do it. That still doesn't answer your question. It does, actually, really.

Q: You're talking about hitting thirty - were you conscious of the British underground that had started around '67 losing momentum around that time?

KA: You only become conscious of things that you have things to compare them to. You can't make assessments if you don't have something to compare them to. I think that what happened with post-war society - suddenly young people were going, we don't like what our parents are doing. We don't like war. The war was over, people had money, and they had time. It was like a one-off. My youngest daughter says to me, geez dad, I wish I'd lived in the sixties. I know what she means, because there was a whole bunch of stuff happening. People were pre-video and people read books in those days, and talked to each other. It was a unique time. In fact, if you check the history of human beings, you'll find it's the only time that young people ever got up and had any effect at all. What happened was that the establishment moved in and discredited them - "they're hippies, they don't wash, they smoke pot." But there were huge advances in human rights and basic freedoms. It never happened in the history of man, never.

Q: Are you going to do more stuff with the people you worked with in the Canterbury scene?

KA: No.

Q: Do you communicate with them?

KA: No, I don't know where they are these days. It's very sad, 'cause we were very close to start with. That's okay, it happens to the best of lovers.

[Reposted 21 February 2013 & 6 October 2014]






Kevin Ayers, founder of Soft Machine, has died aged 68
By Alice Vincent

Kevin Ayers, an influential musician in the Sixties psychedelic scene, has died aged 68. The English singer-songwriter was found dead at his home, where he lived alone, in the South of France around lunchtime on Tuesday by a neighbor. It is thought he died on February 18, 2013.

Bernard MacMahon, from Ayers's record label Lo-Max Records, told the Telegraph that the musician had not been ill, but had "lived a rock'n'roll lifestyle." A note was found by his bed which said, “You can’t shine if you don’t burn.”

MacMahon said that Ayers was “the ultimate product of the Sixties generation,” and that he was a “proper artist,” not motivated by the prospect of fame, but by a “turmoil to create something he was happy with”.

Ayers founded Soft Machine and played early gigs with Syd Barrett's band Pink Floyd in the Sixties, paving the way for a wave of psychedelic pop music. Soft Machine's self-titled debut album is considered a psychedelic classic, and music critic Nick Kent said that Ayers and Barrett "were the two most important people in British Pop music. Everything that came after came from them."

When Jimi Hendrix moved to London in 1968 he became good friends with Ayers. Hendrix encouraged Ayers to write music, giving him a Gibson guitar to do so, and the two musicians toured America together that year.

In 1970, Soft Machine made history by being the first band invited to play at the Proms. Ayers’s first solo album, Joy of the Toy, was very influential for future rock bands Sonic Youth and Teenage Fanclub. He went on to write music with Brian Eno and Elton John, before retiring for 15 years in the 1990s, when he moved to the South of France. In 2007, Ayers released critically acclaimed album The Unfairground, but was reluctant to perform.


Sunday, July 28, 2019

A dirty movie every man, woman & child on earth MUST watch! (repost)



Published on 28 September 2012

Excursion into the realms of soil, the # 1 lifegiver on Earth... its fundamentally important ecological functions, our poor understanding of it, as well as our destructive relationship with it. Soil is so essential to life, and thus to us, that our survival is directly dependent on our understanding of soil and how to protect it.

[First posted 25 September 2014]



Sharing Water with Robert Heinlein (repost)


A few hours ago I finished re-reading - perhaps for the fourth or fifth time since I first stumbled upon it in 1970 - Robert A. Heinlein's cult classic of reasonably epic proportions, Stranger in a Strange Land. [Click on the link for a synopsis and if you're keen to read the book, I suggest you look for the uncensored 1991 edition.]

As often happens with vast intelligences that have played a significant role in my mental upbringing, I just discovered that July 7th happens to be Heinlein's birthday. If he hadn't died in his sleep on 8 May 1988, Robert Anson Heinlein would be celebrating his 103rd birthday today.

I don't really know where to begin when it comes to defining the ways I have been influenced and inspired by a consummate storyteller like Heinlein. I'm tempted to describe him as a speculative anthropologist; an ardent observer of humanity who couldn't resist imagining all the different ways being human could be a much more joyous and fulfilling condition - shorn of all the idiocy and hypocrisy implied by the words "polite society."

Among Heinlein's various prescriptions, as dispensed through his prolific output of long and short works - loosely categorized as "science fiction and fantasy" - his obvious delight in satirizing organized religions was matched only by another scintillating intelligence named Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

In honor of a great soul, a free spirit and a boundless imagination that has impacted on at least three generations of readers, here's a selection of wry quotes from Robert Heinlein collected from various novels (Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough For Love, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) by a fellow admirer...

One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.

History does not record anywhere a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help.

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

One man’s 'magic' is another man’s engineering. 'Supernatural' is a null word.

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

I’ve never understood how God could expect His creatures to pick the one true religion by faith - it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other “sins” are invented nonsense.

A monarch’s neck should always have a noose around it. It keeps him upright.

Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

The supreme irony of life is that no one gets out of it alive.

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.

Learning isn’t a means to an end; it’s an end in and of itself.

Specialization is for insects.

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool.)

“Love” is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?


[First posted 7 July 2010, reposted 20 April 2016 & 4 June 2017]