Whatever he bringsé
The wayward charm of Kevin Ayers is celebrated in a new book of lyrics, photos and recipes for poached trout
“He had a very childlike brain” GALEN AYERS
THE closing track of 1988’s Falling Up, “Am I Really Marcel?” may have been the closest Kevin Ayers got to writing an autobiography. “I’m naturally lazy but what can I do?” he sang. “I was born in the wrong place and the wrong time too.” Shooting At The Moon: The Collected Lyrics Of Kevin Ayers maps out the life of the greatest underachiever of London’s psychedelic underground in songs, personal photographs, handwritten notes and recipes for various fish dishes rescued from the carrier bags of personal memorabilia found in his house following his sudden death in
2013, aged 68. His daughter, singersongwriter Galen
Ayers, has curated this scattershot retrospective; and if it is an incomplete picture of a complicated man, his dissolute life makes it a minor miracle that so much has survived.
“Isn’t it amazing?” she says, pondering the four books of handwritten lyrics her father left behind. “How did these books make it? I promised my dad I’d take care of his legacy, so I fulfilled a promise with this book. It has been six years since he died and it has been such a struggle to come to terms with his life choices. I feel that by doing this book – seeing the photos within the life narrative and the songs – it made me so much more sane.”
Ayers’ career was a maddening one. Stunningly handsome in an ugly age, the original Soft Machine bassist’s sleepy baritone and quirky, sensuous songs saw him hailed as a star in waiting for large parts of the 1970s. As it was, parallel-universe hits “Oh! Wot A Dream”, “Singing A Song In The Morning” and “Caribbean Moon” never got much further than the John Peel show, the eminently distractable writer tending to wander off to the South Of France or his Balearic retreat in Deia, Mallorca as soon as it looked like his career was gaining any kind of momentum. “He had a very childlike brain,” Galen reckons. “He didn’t want to take responsibility.”
His taste for women, drugs and wine were writ large on his essential Harvest albums, Joy Of A Toy (1969), Whatever she brings we sing (1972) and Bananamour (1973), but pleasures ossified into increasingly bad habits as the 1980s approached. He cleaned up a little after his guitarist and closest friend Ollie Halsall overdosed in 1992, but was too unworldly to function in the Twitter age, despite enlisting the relatively youthful Teenage Fanclub and Euros Childs to help make what turned out to be his final record, 2007’s gloomy The Unfairground.
Galen remembers sadly: “People were offering world tours, to do things so he could stay alive, and he would be, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, I’m gonna do this.’ And then you’d get a message from him saying, ‘I can’t do it. I’ll kill myself, and I won’t mean to. This game isn’t for me any more.’ He couldn’t change into what it took to continue a relationship with music.”
Ayers died leaving a cluttered home in France, three daughters by different partners and an inconsistent back catalogue, but Shooting At The Moon showcases the insouciant, sun-kissed charm that is also a vital part of his legacy.