Kevin Ayers

Monday, 18 February 2013


Bill Wyman may have written and recorded a little ditty called (Si, Si) Je suis un rock star, a wonderful little bit of fractured Franglais, but Kevin Ayers (16 August 1944 – 18 February 2013) lived it.

Actually, if the whispers and rumours are true, Ayers mightn’t have matched the Stone formerly known as Bill Perks’ reputation as a Living Sex Legend but he definitely seems to have managed more than his fair share, to the alleged discomfort of, among others, John Cale and Richard Branson.

His main claim to fame, however, lay in his involvement in the early incarnations of the pioneering psychedelic outfit Soft Machine, named for a William Burroughs novel, and in the subsequent string of solo albums he recorded for the Harvest and Island labels through the seventies.

Born in Herne Bay, Kent, the son of journalist, poet and BBC producer Rowan Ayers, who went on to become involved with the BBC2 rock programme The Old Grey Whistle Test, Ayers spent his childhood (between the ages of six and twelve, anyway) in Malaya, where, by his own account, he discovered a fondness for a slow, easygoing lifestyle, after his parents divorced and his mother married a district officer in the colonial service.

Returning to England aged twelve to attend the Simon Langton Grammar School in Canterbury, an alleged hotbed for teenage avant-garderie, he ended up as a key player in what became known as the Canterbury Scene, starting as a member of The Wilde Flowers, formed in 1963 with Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper and Richard Sinclair, who went on to form Caravan and Hatfield and the North. Ayers was, in his own account, asked to join the band because he had the longest hair.

In 1966 Ayers and Wyatt formed Soft Machine with keyboardist Mike Ratledge and Australian guitarist Daevid Allen, with Ayers switching from guitar to bass and sharing the vocal duties with Wyatt.

Allen, a couple of years older than his bandmates, had headed from Melbourne to Paris in 1960 after exposure to Beat Generation writers while working in a Melbourne bookshop. He’d stayed at the Beat Hotel in the room vacated by Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, sold the International Herald Tribune around the Latin Quarter, and met Terry Riley and William Burroughs before moving to England in 1961, renting a room near Dover from Wyatt’s parents. Inspired by the musical philosophies of Sun Ra, he formed the Daevid Allen Trio, a free jazz outfit with Wyatt on drums and brought serious jazz and beatnik influences when he and Wyatt joined forces with Ayers and Ratledge in the psychedelic quartet that became, effectively, the house band at London’s legendary UFO club once Pink Floyd moved on to bigger things. 

Those UFO gigs resulted in the French tour that prompted Allen’s departure since he’d overstayed his visa and couldn’t get back into England. He stayed in France, took part in the Paris protests in 1968, handing teddy bears to the police and reciting poetry in pidgin French. This apparently didn’t go down well with the more political elements and he ended up in Majorca, with partner Gilli Smyth, met poet Robert Graves and formed the earliest incarnations of Gong.

Ayers, Wyatt and Ratledge continued as a three-piece, went on to record an album (The Soft Machine, 1968) in the USA, half way through a tour opening for Jimi Hendrix. They’d already cut a single (Love Makes Sweet Music/Feelin' Reelin' Squeelin', both written by Ayers) with Allen on board as far back as February 1967. The album was co-produced by Hendrix manager Chas Chandler and Tom Wilson, fresh from five Dylan albums and the first Velvet Underground album. 

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© Ian Hughes 2015