Ayers, however, disliked the monotony associated with touring, describing it as dehumanising, and probably wasn’t entirely happy about the complexities that were creeping into the Soft Machine repertoire, sold his white Fender Jazz bass to Noel Redding and dropped out of the band, heading for Ibiza with an intention to take things easy and enjoy life in the company of his old colleague Daevid Allen.
With the pair cloistered in the island village of Deia, Ayers wrote the songs that made up his first album, Joy of a Toy, and set the tone for the albums that followed, with Ayers' sonorous baritone delivering material that ranged from the pastoral whimsy through catchy pop to the deliberately weird. His second album, Shooting at the Moon (released in October 1970), featured an ensemble he labelled The Whole World, including a young Mike Oldfield doubling on bass and lead guitar, avant-garde composer David Bedford on keyboards and free jazz saxophonist, Lol Coxhill and while the band broke up after a short tour, Bedford and Oldfield contributed to Ayers' next album, Whatevershebringswesing which featured, among other delights, the darkly melancholy Song from the Bottom of a Well and the catchier Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes.
Ayers assembled a new band built around bassist Archie Legget and drummer Eddie Sparrow for his fourth album (1973’s Bananamour), which featured some of his most accessible material, including Shouting in a Bucket Blues and his tribute to Syd Barrett, (Oh! Wot A Dream).
He switched to the more commercial Island label for 1974’s The Confessions Of Dr Dream And Other Stories, an expensive (£32,000) exercise that brought Mike Oldfield back into the fold and started a twenty year partnership with guitarist Ollie Halsall from prog rock band Patto. That year also saw Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy, an interesting collaboration with one Lady June (June Campbell Cramer), recorded in the front room of her home in Maida Vale with her spoken poetry backed by Ayers, Brian Eno and Pip Pyle and a heavily promoted concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre on 1 June 1974 where Ayers was accompanied by John Cale, Nico, Brian Eno and Mike Oldfield.
A live recording was released in close to record time as June 1, 1974 but the event was marred by tensions that flowed out of Cale’s discovery of Ayers in the cot with the Welshman’s wife (and the incident prompted Cale to write Slow Dazzle’s Guts) the night before the show.
By this time, of course, the British music scene as a whole had headed into the mid-seventies limbo that was abruptly derailed by the New Wave/Punk movement later in the decade, and one suspects the laid back Ayers with his tendency to disappear towards the Mediterranean to enjoy good wine and decent food was never going to appeal to the emerging sensibilities. He was, by this stage, close to the epitome of stoned hippiedom, which simultaneously explains his inability to translate some rather decent and very interesting recordings into a sustainable high profile career.
He was back on Harvest in 1976, with an album called Yes We Have No Mañanas (So Get Your Mañanas Today) that probably underlined the stoned hippie image, though it was commercial enough to elicit an American contract with ABC Records, and a collection of B-[sides and outtakes called Odd Ditties, that probably did its bit to confirm long-standing impressions.
In any case, there were chemical issues entering the equation, and as the seventies passed into the eighties a string of patchy albums every couple of years (Rainbow Takeaway, That's What You Get Babe, Diamond Jack and the Queen of Pain, Deià...Vu and As Close As You Think) and a predilection for sunnier climes saw him increasingly sidelined from a mainstream that he probably never felt part of anyway.