•
Rating: I don't know about you, but for me, genius in the musical field must be associated with recklessness. Frankly, I don't like the Keith Jarrett types who make you feel the distance between their immeasurable talent and the mediocrity of your passive listener being. At one of his concerts, I was almost tempted to react like That-Fancy-Guy in David Foster Wallace's story, scorching the hair of the girl sitting in front of me. In short, I prefer the rogue geniuses like Frank Zappa, who involve the audience to choose how the piece he's playing should end: polka, ballad, march, or boogie (see "DC Boogie" on Imaginary Diseases).
Kevin Ayers is indeed a genius, but one of the lazy ones. A singer with a deep voice, a good multi-instrumentalist, and an excellent composer whose merits include founding the Soft Machine... as well as leaving them almost immediately once he realized they were becoming too serious (and another madman like his buddy Robert Wyatt would imitate him shortly after). The most important ambition in Kevin's life has been to lazily lie under the Ibiza sun enjoying oysters drenched in champagne while others slaved away in the usual routine of scheduled records – concerts all year ... what a miserable life!
The first symptoms came when he sold his Fender bass to Noel Redding while touring the USA with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, progressively spacing out his appearances. Despite the laziness, Kevin Ayers produced some wonderful records in the seventies, such as the whimsical "Joy of a Toy" in 1969 and just the following year this immense "Shooting at the Moon," with even a steady group accompanying him before he got bored with the backstage life again.
And what a band! Modestly named The Whole World! With a sample of respectable musical humanity: the young Mike Oldfield on bass and lead guitar, the extravagant jazzist Lol Coxhill on saxophones, a keyboardist/arranger from a classical background like David Bedford (who would later orchestrate "Tubular Bells"), drummer Mike Fincher, some appearances by Robert Wyatt on vocal harmonies.
With all these potential multi-instrumentalists, there's fun to be had, but above all, Kevin has fun muddying the waters with a suite that transitions from the Canterbury ballad dominated by his warm chansonnier voice in "May I?", traversing the progressive excursion of "Rheinhardt and Geraldine", to then ending up in the delirium of crazy tapes before "normalizing" in the fusion of "Colores para Dolores." I believe this ten-minute freak-out perfectly represents his sonic agenda.
Ask these virtuosos to play rock 'n' roll, and they'll make a gritty parody of it in "Lunatics lament," with a filtered voice and a great guitar solo from the eighteen-year-old Oldfield, never heard so pissed off. And it's amazing how they can suddenly switch from "canonical" rock to the most absurd experimentation of "Pisser dans un violon": the irreverent agony of a cello that desperately needs to use the bathroom, spread over eight minutes of plucked, struck, rubbed strings on an atonal keyboard background and contrabass fingerings. Kevin tests the audience's patience only to send the survivors on a prize trip between oysters and flying fish in a tropical paradise ("The Oyster and the Flying Fish"): acoustic guitars and tambourine accompany his voice and that of Bridget St. John in a duet of ulla ulla ullalallá. On the other side of the beach, between the toucans and the parrots, there's a hippie rave accompanied by Caribbean notes of "Clarence in Wonderland" (which his buddy Daevid Allen with Gong would also cover). He even ventures into a quirky seaside promenade tune for a cheek-to-cheek dance with the professional saxophone of Lol Coxhill involved in a spectacular encore solo on stage. And I assure you this is the same group that just immersed us in another underwater experimentation ("Underwater"), made of reverberated notes, an exhausting tuning of instruments in Neptune's realm where every guitar or bass note emanating from the bottom of the ocean stretches like an air bubble all the way to the surface.
As a final prank, Ayers reprises his old "Jet-Propelled Photograph" from the pataphysical Wilde Flowers/Soft Machine repertoire and renames it "Shooting at the Moon," here Kevin is jazz progressive along the crooked bass lines of Oldfield and the saxophones of Coxhill chasing each other from one stereo channel to the other. Get the compact disc because it offers surprises galore in the bonus tracks, including the whimsical ballad "Jolie Madame" in a duet with Bridget St. John and none other than the French version of the great "May I?," translated, of course, into "Puis Je?" even more bohemian with that accordion accompaniment, to be sung with a beret tipped to one side and a baguette under the arm.
Kevin Ayers, in other words, a genius who pretended to be dumb to avoid going to war....
Loading comments slowly
