Kevin+ayers

Kevin Ayers - The Harvest Years 1969-1974 (2012) [5CD Set] {Harvest/EMI Remaster}
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© 2012 Harvest / EMI | 5099995650920
Rock / Psychedelic / Art Rock

Kevin Ayers R.I.P… Goodnight Mr. Ayers…. 5 CD set features his first five albums Harvest; Joy of a Toy, Shooting at the moon, Whatevershebringswesing, Bananamour and The confessions of Dr Dream along with bonus tracks. The Soft Machine, not long after recording their first album and touring America, began breaking up – just the first in a long series of personnel changes and subsequent new directions that formed one of art rock's winding sagas of the '70s. Kevin Ayers was the first to leave, mostly because of that American tour, and he soon became one of the first acts to release music on Harvest, a new progressive label from EMI that promised to offer the best and brightest in the new vanguard of British rock.

Kevin Ayers - Songs For Insane Times: An Anthology, 1969-1980 (2008) {4CD Box Set Harvest-EMI 521 5570}
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© 1969-80, 2008 Harvest / EMI Records | 521 5570
Rock / British Psychedelia / Canterbury Scene / Art Rock

2008 four CD anthology that covers Ayers' musical career from 1969 to 1980; a period most fans and critics deem his best. Ayers remains one of Rock's oddest enigmas. He makes ordinary subjects extraordinary with his rich low vocals and inventive wordplay. He projects the image of a Prog-Rock beach bum writing about life's absurdities with a celebratory, relaxed detachment, yet he is also one of Prog- Rock's more important innovators, helping to launch the Soft Machine, and working with noted progressive musicians Mike Oldfield, Lol Coxhill, and Steve Hillage. Ayers' solo material reflected a Folksier, lazier, and gentler turn than Soft Machine. He was often compared to Syd Barrett, but without the madness and is never less than enjoyable and original, Discs One to Three contain 49 hits, album tracks and more while Disc Four was recorded at The Queen Elizabeth Hall, London on 25th May 1973.

As the Soft Machine's first bassist and original principal songwriter, Kevin Ayers was an overlooked force behind the group's groundbreaking recordings in 1967 and 1968. This, his solo debut, is so tossed-off and nonchalant that one gets the impression he wanted to take it easy after helping pilot the manic innovations of the Softs. Laissez-faire sloth has always been part of Ayers' persona, and this record's intermittent lazy charm helped establish it. That doesn't get around the fact, however, that this set of early progressive rock does not feature extremely strong material. Ayers' command of an assortment of instruments is impressive, and his deep bass vocals and playful, almost goofy song-sketches are affecting, but they don't really stick with the listener…

Five years on from the peerless remastering of Kevin Ayers' core (Harvest label) catalog, Songs for Insane Times dips into much the same bag of tricks for a four-CD anthology that truly does reflect upon everything that made his earliest albums such a timeless joy. Traversing a decade's worth of releases from the delightful debut Joy of a Toy on, the three discs that carry Ayers through to 1980's That's What You Get Babe are an almost peerless gathering; key album cuts are joined by the string of 45s that he so typically omitted from the long-players, and if there's a disappointing lack of unreleased cuts here, that's only because the remasters cleaned them up long ago. Two discs take listeners through the very best of Ayers, up to and including 1974's Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories (the accompanying "After the Show" single opens disc three); the third wraps up the lesser but still enjoyable late-'70s output..

Kevin Ayers - Joy Of A Toy (1969) {2004 Japan Mini LP Edition}
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© 2004 Toshiba-EMI Japan / Harvest | TOCP-67357
Rock / Art Rock / Psychedelic

Ayers left the Soft Machine for a solo career when his basic pop leanings appeared at odds with the intense jazz/rock of his former colleagues. This album was a cult favourite at the end of the 60s for no reason other than that Ayers was well liked because he was ever so slightly mad. Take a look and listen at the content of this album: 'Song For Insane Times', 'Eleanor's Cake (Which Ate Her)' and 'Stop This Train (Again Doing It)'. Through the haze of quirkiness there is a strong light melodic feel to much of the music, and Ayers did possess a heartbreaker voice that prompted one woman to state, 'he is the sexiest man in the world'.

Kevin Ayers - Still Life With Guitar (1992) {2013 Japan Mini LP Remaster AIRAC-1700}
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© 1992, 2013 Airmail Japan / Dnvmusic | AIRAC-1700
Rock / Art Rock / Canterbury Scene

Cardboard sleeve (mini LP) reissue. Features 24 bit remastering in 2013. Comes with three bonus tracks. Still Life with Guitar is the fourteenth studio album by Kevin Ayers. It found him consolidating his 1988 return-to-form Falling Up[2] with a collection of largely acoustic songs that many critics regarded as being equal to material penned at the perceived heights of his career in the mid-1970s. Ayers produced the album, with his then manager Dave Vatch in England and was accompanied by an impressive cast of musicians, including Mike Oldfield, Ollie Halsall, Danny Thompson, BJ Cole, Mark E. Nevin and other members of Fairground Attraction.

Kevin Ayers - Sweet Deceiver (1975) {Harvest 268 2962 rel 2009}
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© 1975, 2009 EMI Records / Harvest | 268 2962
Rock / Art Rock / British Psychedelia / Canterbury Scene

Sweet Deceiver is one of Kevin Ayers' more mainstream efforts. Any album that has Elton John playing piano on a few tracks can't be too weird. That's not to say, though, that this is exactly mainstream in and of itself. Ayers continues to play his offhandedly charming miniatures, with occasional Caribbean rhythms and trademark droll, bemused lyrics. The problem is that while this has its charm while you're listening, little sticks or incites you to return. By this point in his career, Ayers was in danger of catching on a treadmill, restating his idiosyncratic concerns in familiar ways without amplifying them.

It is indeed an oddity that, for all the considerable ambition of his albums, this collection of singles and unreleased outtakes may be Ayers' most satisfying LP. Why? Perhaps because when he's constrained within the 45 format, he taps his strongest and most endearing qualities: easygoing, singalong melodies, droll, nonchalant (even non sequitur) lyrics, good-natured sotto voce vocals, even female backup harmonies. There's little trace of the inaccessible, difficult (usually instrumental) passages that occupy much of the space on his early albums. Spanning 1969 to 1973, this includes eight tracks that wound up on flop singles, as well as six outtakes from the albums he recorded during this period, though there were no obvious reasons for their exclusion (too pop oriented, perhaps?)…

By the late '70s, Ayers was faced not only with the problem of increasingly redundant material, but also with the fact that the audience for his brand of weirdo progressive rock was shrinking precipitously, making him sound not just repetitious, but dated. There are still some good moments on this album - the chamber music arrangement of "Strange Song," the brief burst of singalong nonsense called "Hat Song." But it's one of his more faceless efforts, with anonymously laidback arrangements that are more prone to swirling keyboards than much of his previous output. And a song like "Beware of the Dog" is so meandering in its attempt to be likably weird that it's virtually meaningless.