Artist: Kevin Ayers
Genre(s):
Rock
Discography:
Unfairground
Year: 2007
Tracks: 10
Still Life with Guitar
Year: 2006
Tracks: 10
Joy of a Toy
Year: 2006
Tracks: 10
Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories
Year: 2005
Tracks: 11
Whatevershebringswesing
Year: 2003
Tracks: 11
Yes We Have No Mananas
Year: 2002
Tracks: 10
Rainbow Takeaway
Year: 2002
Tracks: 9
Odd Ditties
Year: 2002
Tracks: 20
Deia (Vu)
Year: 2002
Tracks: 8
Live in Concert
Year: 1992
Tracks: 9
Falling Up
Year: 1988
Tracks: 8
Bananamour
Year: 1973
Tracks: 8
Singing The Bruise - The BBC Sessions 1970-72
Year: 1970
Tracks: 12
Zaragoza
Year:
Tracks: 11
Holland 7-30-70 (Canterbury Anthology Vol. 11)
Year:
Tracks: 7
Canterbury Anthology - Volume 3
Year:
Tracks: 16
Kevin Ayers is one of rock's oddest and more likeable enigmas, even if often he's seemed non to operate at his highest potentiality. Perhaps that's because he's never seemed to get interpreted his music overly seriously -- one of his crucial charms and most aggravating limitations. Since the late '60s, he's released many albums with a distinctly British sensibility, devising ordinary lyrical subjects seem extraordinary with his rich low-toned vocals, imaginative wordplay, and bemused, relaxed attitude. Apt to flavour his songs with female backup choruses and alien island rhythms, the singer/songwriter inspires the image of a sort of progressive rock beach idler, writing around life's absurdities with a celebratory, relaxed detachment. Yet he is besides matchless of progressive rock's more important (and more than humane) innovators, portion to launch the Soft Machine as their original bassist, and functional with far-famed European progressive musicians like Mike Oldfield, Lol Coxhill, and Steve Hillage.
Ayers polite a taste for the bohemian lifestyle early, outlay much of his childhood in Majorca before he moved with his mother to Canterbury in the early '60s. There he fell in with the town's zymolysis underground vista, which included future members of the Soft Machine and Caravan. For a piece he american ginseng with the Wilde Flowers, a mathematical group that too included future Softs Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper. He left in 1965, met fellow monstrosity Daevid Allen in Majorca, and returned to the U.K. in 1966 to base the first lineup of the Soft Machine with Allen, Wyatt, and Mike Ratledge.
Sir Thomas Wyatt is usually regarded as the prime mover in arrears the Soft Machine, merely Ayers' contributions carried equal weight in the early days. Besides playing bass, he wrote and panax quinquefolius much of their material. He lav be heard on their 1967 demos and their 1968 debut album, only by the end of 1968 he felt burnt out and discontinue. Selling his basso to Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, he began to write songs on guitar, starring to a shrink with Harvest in 1969. His relationship with his ex-Soft Machine match remained amiable; in fact, Wyatt and Ratledge (as well as Ayers' replacement, Hugh Hopper) guested on Ayers' 1969 debut.
Ayers' solo corporeal reflected a folkier, lazier, and gentler set than the Soft Machine. In some respects he was comparable to Syd Barrett, without the rabidness -- and without the ferocious high of Barrett's almost advanced work. Ayers was never less than pleasurable and original, though his albums were erratic correct from the set about, swerving from singalong ditties and pleasant, frothy ethnic music ballads to at variance improvisation. The more ambitious progressive rock elements came to the head when he fronted the Whole World in the early '70s. The championship band included a adolescent Mike Oldfield on guitar, Lol Coxhill on sax, and David Bedford on piano. But Ayers only released i album with them earlier they dissolved.
Ayers continued to release albums in a poppier vein throughout the '70s, at a regular tread. As some critics have noted, this reliable output formed an ironic counterpoint to much of his lyrics, which often storied a life of leisure, or even laziness. That lazy charm was often a dominant feature film of his records, although Ayers constantly unbroken things interesting with offbeat arrangements, now and then telling in extraneous tongues, and seasoning his product with unusual instruments and earthly concern medicine rhythms. He (or Harvest) never gave up on the singles market, and indeed his charles Herbert Best early-'70s efforts in that direction were accessible enough to have been hits with a little more advertize. Or a little less bizarreness. Even Ayers at his most accessible and target wasn't mainstream, a moral excellence that endeared him to his loyal cult.
That cult was modified to the rock subway, and Ayers logically concentrated on the album market end-to-end the 1970s. Almost constantly pleasant, eccentric, and catchy, these all the same started to sound like a blind alley by the mid-'70s. Ayers pressed on without changing his approach, contempt the dwindling away audience for progressive rock and the oncoming trail of punk and new undulation. He only recorded sporadically subsequently 1980, though he remained active in the early nineties, generally on the European continent. The 2007 release The Unfairground was first twenty-first Century release.
