On (re)discovering Kevin Ayers
Some of his music is very intense, and has great complexity and depth
(Kevin Ayers, 1972 concert)
Why pick up Kevin Ayers? Well, he died 68 years old in February and I was sad by this news. His songs are not closed, not polished, but open, or opening up in hazardly and unexpected ways. There are good reasons to rediscover his music. Ayers grew up partly in Malaysia, was a friend of Syd Barret (Pink Floyd), and liked the “whimsical” attitude of the best English pop music.
I thought I had heard most of it when it came out, from the late 1960s onwards, and I probably did at friends’ places and at parties, but it turns out I only had tapes of two of his albums, Shooting at the moon (1970) and Yes we have no more mananas (1976), both of which I enjoyed and played quite often, but sort of forgot later. When I went from tapes to vinyl in the 1990s I eventually picked up the Yes we have.. album (Harvest / EMI SHSP 4057) for NOK 150 and The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories (1974, Island ILPS 9263) for 100. Good used vinyl was cheaper than today. I bought many used LPs, and again, Ayers was sort of forgotten.
This has changed for the last weeks. The Dr Dream sequence, with Nico on vocals, is still very dense, chilling, and top quality – this is a good and underrated LP (did they listen not just to side A but side B also, at Allmusic.com, which gives it only two stars?) It has a very strong message to counter culture, be vary of dream makers, Dr. Dream and his ilk. Although the album arrived a bit late, and was not much heeded. This was prog after prog had fallen out of fashion.
The cover of The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories, scanned from my LP, below.
The cover has a man and a woman holding up masks to each other. The main sequence is complex music, not easy listening. The idea is that we are not really real to each other, in today’s society.
As I said, Ayers has been heavily played over the last weeks, and emerges as a much more interesting figure than I first thought. Listening to Unfairground (2007) in a digital version, I like the “prog” attitude which is still there in his songs. I hope it does not die out. On this album he emerges as older, more mature, still witty and observant, still with melancholy, but also more depressed than the 1970 man.
The way I see it, this depression is not psychological, mainly, but sociological. It happened to Ayers and a lot of other progressive artists from the 1965-75 period. It happened to the conscious part of the “1968 generation” generally. “What happened to our dream?” is a symbolic question.
Neil Young sings: “We were gonna save the world, then the weather changed, and it fell apart, and it breaks my heart” (“Walk like a giant”, on Psychedelic Pill 2012). “But think how close we came”.
Basically, the revolution that the “counter-culture” wanted did not happen. It was beaten down in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic convention in 1968, and in Paris and Prague the same year. “There’s blood in the streets of Chicago”, Jim Morrisson sang (“Peace frog”, Morrisson Hotel 1970); George R.R. Martin described it in his novel The Armageddon Rag.
Repression was the order of the day, here in the UK:
This picture could be called, “Long-haired freak brought back to normal”, or similar (although these terms are somewhat later). Note how one needed many men to do it. Ayers grew up with this kind of repression in his formative years as a youngster and young artist. The above picture is from a photo, probably ca 1968, shown in interview with Ayers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6kslKx5Zdo. This kind of repression, in the police as well as in schools, has recently also been documented in autobiographies from the time, including those of John Peel and Keith Richards, and in Miles, Barry 2004: Zappa – a biography.
Below, a 1972 concert picture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsF-gTyXA5Q
One should not be misled by appearances. There is a wordly look and a bit of a sneering attitude, not towards the audience, but in his music and the way he introduces it, “insouicance” towards the powers that be, for example, in the early videos of “Why are we sleeping” – a protest song (see also BBC version).
Another thing I like about him is that he has a kind of doodling attitude, rambling, being a bit lost, finding new ways. There is something wonderfully fresh and inventive, even if things don’t always work out in all his songs. An innovative aspect that can at times be thrilling, like when I first the best songs like “Walk on water” on the 2007 Unfairground. Just one word – wow.
He was certainly a paradox. From this thin young man one might expect a falsetto, but instead what comes out is a deep and somewhat world-weary voice. His words have a sense for small inconsequential things, but a special flair, in the direction of Syd Barrett, of making these small things suddenly emerge, flare up, with another and larger meaning. Truly a “prog” artistic ambition, if there ever was one. Yet at the same time Ayers scaled down and very consciously so, not wanting to be a superstar, but instead creating lyrics that were everyday and simple but also ironic and disobedient to the music machine as well as the rest of capitalism, or the system. He never obligated to become a money making artist, since he had seen other young artists like Jimi Hendrix being misused by the music machine. So even his most famous song May I is a bit “crossed over” so not to fit the hit machine either in France or the UK, although borrowing elements from both musical traditions, and free from commercial obligations, all the more playfully so,
Kevin Ayers was a musical innovator, a collage maker, a kind of “head” musical journalist (often, going down, down below, to the small things) – and thereby a postmodernist long before his time. He early rejected the technical-musical direction of Soft Machine and went for a more laid-back approach instead, at least on the surface. Yet some of his music is very intense, and has great complexity and depth.
He seems to have been a kind and charming but also sometimes shy and troubled man. The general idea in the 1970ies was that he lived the life and partied with long stays in Ibiza, and elsewhere , although he delivered an album a year or so for a long period, so he clearly worked with his music.
“A pretty face will find a place, it is an easy place to be”, he sings in “Walk on Water”, 2007.
“But you know
You’re only a show
And you’ll reap what you sow
In your own way”
This song targets three figures, the rich or successful who “just got it made” and “never see themselves completely”, the people who “really need attention” and “just see what they wanna see”, as well as the pretty faces.
As part of the counter-culture, Ayer’s target of critique was not capitalism as such but a wider category, “the establishment”. Music should be a kind of critical reportage about “the establishment” versus “the people”. The latter was a very vague category – flower power? Good vibrations? Love? – and softly defined (like Soft machine), not hardcoded like it became in the Marxist (or religious, ecological, feminist etc) 1970s splinter versions of counter-culture.
Ayers was a very conscious participant of the counter culture, as he said later, this was the first time a young generation had got up and questioned the whole system, “saying, we really won’t do, you know, what our parents did”. See interview (not dated, early 2000s?) here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6kslKx5Zdo
Kevin Ayers is presently rated as 42 percent gay on the gay-o-meter presented here http://www.gay-or-straight.com/Kevin%20Ayers. His 1970 counter culture persona is not so easy to place, with post-modern-gendered eyes.
Note the symbolism of the UK police picture, above. Three short haired men in helmets are attacking a long haired man. Down! Obey authority! This was the attitude of the establishment, as people experienced it at the time, making even Keith Richards (in Life) become very clear – the system was out to get us!
Finally, a shot of Kevin Ayers, in the 2000s interview referenced above. He is a good interview object, telling stories with laughter, morale and insights, speaking of the great turmoil of 1968, the dreams he carried, and what happened after.
His most famous song “May I” tells the story of a male traveler who, weary, looks for a place to eat and sit down. He finds a place. There, a woman is sitting by another table. In the song, he asks for her allowance to let him look at her, “for awhile”. This temporary sense is the clue to the song’s uplifting quality. He is not out to grab her or make love to her, but just look, for a little while.
“May I” is a bit like a fifteen minute visual coffee flirt – but also a still life picture, beautifully developed into words and melody. Words and music hang together, in all his work, despite the large musical variation, showing his awareness to another main message from the counter culture. The head is not dead.
It is typical of Ayers’ music that after a heavy attack there is some rest, peace and silence. This was the way “concept” albums were made, in those days. After the Dr. Dream sequence, we get the song “Two goes into four”, a reflective and dialectical Ayers:
“Two times no more
Two will make four
Blue goes into green
Mostly unseen
Blue becomes green
Dreams take me so far
Life is the star
Trapped in my jar
Go follow the wind
Open your heart
Then you may start
To make it better”
The last two lines are a direct quote from Beatles “Hey Jude”. In a 1998 interview, he describes his way into the middle-class Canterbury scene as just an amateur being chosen “because I had the longest hair”. He was “dancing in the dark” musically. At the same time he did not like the “self-indulgent” musical direction of Soft Machine, although they remained friends. The main philosopher who has made any sense to him, he sais, is Gurdieff,
“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.”
My comment – well – if not “total” sense (the kind of obscure head / hippie talk that did not help), at least a lot of sense. The cultural “elaboration” associated with the counter culture was what created a mass movement, not just a small movement or sect. However the glue that held it together was very much relying of the spirit of the time, 1968, “the age of aquarius”, a fully new way to live, and so on, that did not make it.
Later the interviewer asks:
“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.”
A sociological part of the 1968 generation late-life depression is, very simply, that if you connect your hopes in your youth very strongly to the new and the young, there is a risk of misalignment later in life, especially if these hopes do not come true later on. As you turn old, you will not only feel out of it, but especially out of it, since the reason you were in was so associated with your youth in the first place. In Ayers’ words (2008 interview),
“I’m not getting any younger and it hits you after a certain age. What I mean is that you realize that certain thing probably won’t happen any more. There’s a kind of loss feeling more than anything else.”
Later in this interview he says that his albums have mainly been inspired by love affairs. “ I don’t necessarily have to write about the love affair but it just gives you the impetus to get going.” He also said, in a circa 2009 interview: “It’s true my attitude doesn’t suit the industry. I’m not into fame or ego. I’m crap at anything other than my music. There should be room for people like me.” An interesting thing about Ayers, like Sapho, is that you can seldom tell what is the gender of the person he loves, from the song itself. The love goes beyond gender. So perhaps he was a bit bi or gay. It does not matter.
Other sources:
