Kevin Ayers - A Dandy in Canterbury

I have no ambition, I think I'm out of place

because I'd rather go fishing than take part in a race.

I'm lazy by nature, what can I do about it?

I was born in the wrong place, at the wrong time

(Am I Really Marcel?)

Kevin Ayers is one of those figures who have ended up spectacularly stashed away in the storeroom of collective memory. Partly because it's certainly hard to stand out from the thicket of names that animated the music scene of the Sixties and Seventies. But the historical oblivion of the fair-haired former Soft Machine bassist is, above all, the personal choice of a man "with no ambition, out of place, and lazy by nature." The result of a deliberate, sought-after own goal. Of a musician accustomed to vanishing from the scene when nobody expected it. Or, to put it better, when it least suited his career.

An adoptive son of Canterbury, Kevin Cawley Ayers was born in a seaside town in Kent (Herne Bay) on 16 August 1944. His father was the poet and BBC producer Rowan Ayers, who would later launch the famous rock music programme "The Old Grey Whistle Test." After his parents' divorce, Kevin spent his childhood in Malaysia because of his stepfather's job as an official in the English diplomatic service: it was there that the young Ayers developed that love of the simple life and relaxation that would shape his whole life. Despite appearances, life in Malaysia wasn't always easy, especially when little Kevin found himself the only white child in a school of 80 pupils. Things were no better when his mother enrolled him in a Catholic boarding school, which Ayers remembered as "full of homosexual priests" eager to vie for the little blond angel.

During his teenage years, Kevin returned with his family to England, to London, before settling in Canterbury around 1961. This move, too, wasn't exactly his choice: he was in fact packed off to the countryside after running into trouble with the police. It was there, however, that Kevin got the chance to enter the Wellington House home of the parents of Robert Wyatt, thanks to his girlfriend's connections: she was Jane, the sister of Pye Hastings, the future leader of Caravan. Among the people who frequented the house were all the main protagonists of the future Canterbury scene: the brothers Hugh and Brian Hopper, cousins Richard and David Sinclair, Mike Ratledge. There was, of course, also the Australian freak Daevid Allen, the real catalyst of the group. Legend has it, though, that Robert Wyatt had already heard of Kevin Ayers before then: he was, after all, the only boy in east Kent with long hair, at a time when that was an inevitable source of trouble. The actor Julian Glover, Wyatt's stepbrother, also remembers him as "the first to wear denim shirts and medallions: absolutely stunning."

After knocking about with friends between Majorca and London, Kevin Ayers began his artistic career first with the Wilde Flowers and then with Soft Machine, for whom he was singer, bassist, and main songwriter on the first album. As would often happen throughout his career, Kevin decided to abandon the scene once he realised he wasn't cut out for the gruelling pace of touring. In 1968, Soft Machine found themselves touring the United States as a support act for Jimi Hendrix, at the height of his fame. The bassist thus spent his evenings in the company of dozens of women and rivers of alcohol, two factors that would become a constant in his life; it was even rumoured that Ayers only ever wrote three kinds of songs: drinking songs, drunk songs, and hangover songs.

At a certain point, though, even the best of parties comes to an end. Despite his apparent joie de vivre, just like the Great Gatsby, Ayers carried within him that melancholic streak, that decadent spleen, which he shared with his friend Robert Wyatt. He began to grow tired of the parties and preferred to stay in his hotel room cooking fish on a camping stove. Nick Mason, who spent a lot of time with the band during that period, remembers him perpetually eating brown rice and following a macrobiotic diet. Not exactly the attitude you'd expect from a rock star.

I stopped going to parties. I cut myself off from everything happening around me, because of the violence and the excess. In the worst moments it was: plane, hotel, gig, hotel, plane, gig, Mike [Ratledge] and I would stay in our room: he reading books, me staring at the ceiling.

At the end of the tour, Ayers makes up his mind, sells his bass to Mitch Mitchell and sets off for the Balearic Islands. The first Soft Machine album, however, unexpectedly sells more copies than anyone imagined and breaks into the Top 40, forcing the band to regroup out of contractual obligation. Ayers, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found: it isn't just fatigue holding him back, but above all the jazz turn Mike Ratledge is imposing on his bandmates. Soft Machine were indeed drifting further and further away from melody and song form in favour of instrumental, totally free pieces. That's not the road Kevin Ayers wants to take. Nor, eventually, will it be Robert Wyatt's... But that's another story.

The solo debut: playful joys and shots at the moon

Despite the circumstances, the first Canterbury scene musician to go solo in 1969 is, paradoxically, Ayers himself. The accomplice and promoter of his newfound confidence is Jimi Hendrix, who urges him to carry on and gives him a Gibson J-200 as a gift. After a brief stay in the Balearics, Kevin decides to head back to London and starts writing his solo debut, drawing on old Soft Machine sketches as well as fresh inspiration. It's with that very material that he eventually turns up at the door of Malcolm Jones at the newly founded Harvest label (EMI's progressive "subsidiary"), who offers him the chance to record with Peter Jenner for the then-exorbitant sum of £4,000.

The title, Joy Of A Toy, borrows from a track on the first Soft Machine LP, but also alludes to the toy instruments used to put the record together. The songs are indeed the result of Kevin Ayers's eccentric way of throwing into one pot a typically childlike sense of humour, a nostalgic and adult melancholy, the sensuality of exotic countries, the spontaneity of Dada art and the madness of psychedelic rock. An impressive array of unconventional instruments (oboe, cello, piccolos, oboes, kazoo, little trumpets, whistles) was employed, brought along by a long line of guest musicians, among whom his former Soft Machine bandmates stand out, along with arranger David Bedford, who provides the guiding thread throughout.

Opening the dance is the lysergic little march of "Joy Of A Toy Continued", the perfect link between past and present: it's no coincidence that it's Wyatt himself sitting behind the drums. "Song For Insane Times", on the other hand, brings in the entire Soft Machine line-up, inevitably giving the melody a more jazz-inflected feel, with a sound faithful to the Canterbury blueprint in odd time signatures and a manic twist towards the end, where Ratledge runs riot on his organ; very few rock musicians have sublimated their disillusionment with Sixties culture as well as Ayers does on this song. The record also includes a handful of pop compositions with a very particular dynamism, such as the lysergic trip of "Stop This Train (Again Doing it)" and the fiery mix of trombones and mellotron on "The Clarietta Rag", while on the two unsettling visions of "Girl On A Swing" and "Lady Rachel" (dedicated to his daughter), the music even takes on sinister contours, full of aching, arcane melancholy. A psychedelic fairy tale à-la Lewis Carroll, which turns the values of the surface world upside down and also wraps itself around the ambivalent folk of "Eleanor's Cake (Which Ate Her)", dedicated to Eleanor Barooshian, who together with Cake had provided the counter-vocal on Soft Machine's "Why Are We Sleeping?".

There's also room for childhood rituals: "Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong" is sung in Malay, in memory of Kevin's years in Malaysia with his family. Closing the record is the hedonistic folk ode to life "All This Crazy Gift Of Time", a reminder that, after all, this was still the acid-soaked London of Donovan and his friend Syd Barrett, who appears on guitar in the bonus track "Religious Experience (Singing A Song In The Morning)".

Despite its title, Joy Of A Toy actually turns out to be a far more complex record, one that skilfully blends proto-glam, acid-folk, psych-rock and démodé allegories not far removed from Pink Floyd's Barrett-era work. Light and shade, then, and not merely the soundtrack to a lazy, sun-drenched afternoon: behind Kevin Ayers's naïf smile lies a great deal more bitterness.

Immediately after releasing his debut album, Ayers realises he needs a steady band behind him and summons a handful of Canterbury dignitaries, grandly naming the new line-up "The Whole World". Among all of Ayers's albums, Shooting At The Moon (1970) is by far the most experimental and the hardest to pin down, coming across as more uneven than the rest of his output. One could even say that, in its schizophrenia, it sounds like what Soft Machine might have sounded like had they carried on with Kevin Ayers. Yet, once you remember that the "whole world" that came to his aid is made up of four eclectic artists, his eccentricity starts to look like a lucid form of madness; the line-up features the likes of Lol Coxhill (sax), David Bedford (keyboards, guitar, accordion, marimbaphone), Mick Fincher (drums, percussion) and seventeen-year-old Mike Oldfield (bass, guitar), on whom Ayers is willing to bet everything.

Kevin took me under his wing, in a way: rather than wanting to teach me music, he wanted to teach me about life. It's hard to explain why all this mattered so much to me. After the row I had with my father before leaving Reading, I felt like I'd lost an anchor. I wasn't exactly looking for a new father figure, but I needed someone I could trust, someone I could rely on as a guide. (Mike Oldfield)

With the second album, we're far removed from the realm of beauty, and the songs are consistently pushed outside the bounds of the ordinary. Often to the point of absurdity. That's not the case, though, with "May I?", a chanson straight out of a Left Bank Parisian café, driven by Lol Coxhill's saxophone and Mike Oldfield's bass, which steer the band into the song's second half, where David Bedford's accordion and Ayers's baritone voice send the track off into a romantic vaudeville. In case that doesn't quite get the point across, among the bonus tracks on the current reissue there's a French-language version, titled "Puis Je?".

But madness is just around the corner, and so, beyond the barricade, there's a trio of rather experimental songs, starting with the avant-garde pièce "Rheinhardt & Geraldine/Colores Para Dolores", which opens in Canterbury fashion, develops into psychedelic rock with progressive ripples, and then suddenly cascades into tape manipulations that take over the space usually reserved for a solo. Then it's straight back into the main theme to close, as if nothing had happened. Structures and ideas we'd come to appreciate a quarter of a century later, in the heretical prog sampling of Tortoise or the surreal digressions of Jim O'Rourke.

Ayers even offers his own take on rock'n'roll with the Babylonian "Lunatic's Lament", before losing himself in the free-form sounds of "Pisser Dans Un Violon" ("pissing in a violin", as the colourful French saying goes), lurching between silences, murmurs and scattered string improvisations: a challenge that leads deep into the folds of a subtly hallucinated avant-garde.

The visionary, bittersweet storyteller side of Kevin Ayers is nevertheless still present in tracks like "The Oyster And The Flying Fish" (a duet with Bridget St. John) and "Clarence in Wonderland", written while he was with Daevid Allen on a beach in Deià in 1966, recalling a private party with Soft Machine attended by none other than Brigitte Bardot. "Red Green And You Blue" sketches out yet more new horizons of pop ballad running parallel to the territory John Cale was exploring at the time. There's always that veiled urge to provoke and play, as in the chaotic carnival of "Shooting At The Moon", a direct descendant of Soft Machine's "Jet Propelled Photographs" (1967), unspooling into a robotic hypnotism that pushes the boundaries of psychedelic rock further still, offering more than one cue even to the Stranglers who would come later.

Musically speaking, the album clearly throws a spanner in the works of the commercial ambitions the record label has for the handsome Kevin Ayers, at a point when the former Soft Machine man's own disinterest in promoting his record is already tipping towards self-sabotage. Nothing about his way of approaching music and life is clear-cut or well defined. So the party is, once again, about to end. The Whole World experience will indeed come to a close shortly after Shooting At The Moon, undone once more, unsurprisingly, by idle Ayers's inability to put up with the grind of touring.

Bananas and confessions: the mature albums

By the time he came to record his third album, Ayers once again found himself alone, forced to call back keyboardist Bedford and guitarist Oldfield from the previous lineup. Filling out the roster were several more musicians and guest friends, most notably ex-East of Eden man Dave Dufort (drums) and Gong's Didier Malherbe (sax, flute). The music on Whatevershebringswesing (1971) is still firmly rooted in the Canterbury tradition: oblique, sometimes jazzy pop, punctuated by plenty of odd ideas, but always kept sunny by the whims of the flamboyant crooner Ayers. Though his melancholy does occasionally surface, all the bassist really needs is to pick out life's little pleasures among the dead leaves, be it a sun-drenched beach, a good glass of wine, or a flirtatious woman.

The opening track is a mini-suite of Ayers/Bedford coinage, “There is Loving/ Amongst Us/ There is Loving”, whose introductory theme was unceremoniously lifted from a 1970 Ayers single ("Butterfly Dance"), here spliced into a riot of orchestral sounds beneath Malherbe's saxophone, which then settles into the psychedelic antechamber of the lyrics' philosophical musings (a combination Ayers would develop further a few years later on The Confessions Of Dr. Dream And Other Stories).

After such an avant-garde opening, the rest of the album feels more conventional: such is the case with the elusive seduction of "Margaret", featuring Johnny Van Derrick's violin, over which an intimate Ayers sings in counterpoint with a lush piano. The sensual rhythms he's so fond of show up in the jazzy saraband of "Oh My" and the western-style revelry of "Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes" and "Champagne Cowboy Blues", the latter written by Oldfield while waiting at Abbey Road for his perpetually late mentor.

There's also room for some echoes of Soft Machine's dada-rock on the gloomy "Song From The Bottom Of A Well", a studio experiment that sounds exactly as its title suggests: a track sung from the bottom of a well, with Ayers' cavernous voice seeming to crawl up from the depths, gradually swallowed by a barrage of shrill sound effects. A track that would have sat comfortably alongside early Soft Machine's "Why Are We Sleeping?". And it's precisely his old bandmate Robert Wyatt who returns on the title track, a heartfelt hymn to friendship with a boozy, Dionysian chorus ("So let's drink some wine and have a good time/ but if you really want to come through let the good times have you"), in which Ayers' deep baritone gently runs aground on Wyatt's high notes, which always sound on the verge of shattering. And shatter they do, over Oldfield's gorgeous, extended guitar solo, another track to which he makes a significant contribution. The album closes with "Lullaby", a liquid lullaby for flute and piano performed by the madcap Didier Malherbe in a surprisingly new-age atmosphere, rounded off with babbling brooks in the background.

Kevin Ayers' dandyish lifestyle, out of step with ordinary ambition and the hunger for success, leaves its mark on this album too, whose uneven quality from track to track shows just how the bassist never quite dug all the way down into his own talent.

I think you've got to be missing something upstairs, or else you've simply got to be starving for fame and money to want to play the music industry's game. I'm not very good at that.

Shortly after Whatevershebringswesing, Ayers called in another crew of helpers to record his new album, Bananamour (1973), the last of his original Harvest period. To that end, in early 1972 he formed Archimbald together with bassist Archie Leggett (introduced to him by Daevid Allen), whose only surviving document is the odd glam-rock variety show Banana Follies (Hux, 1998), staged together with Lol Coxhill and David Bedford at London's underground Hampstead Theatre. The album, released posthumously, is in fact a radio version of the identically-titled stage show, dating from 1972.

Shortly after that experiment, the duo merged into Decadence, adding drummer Eddie Sparrow and guitarist Steve Hillage. Here too, Ayers surrounded himself in the studio with longtime friends: Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge and David Bedford; conspicuously absent, however, was young Mike Oldfield, who at the time was hard at work forging "Tubular Bells".

By this point in his career, Ayers is less and less the court jester. He starts moving toward a more conventional style, and despite the presence of avant-garde figures like Wyatt and Hillage, the drift toward warmer, friendlier climes is becoming unmistakable. It's on this very record that Kevin reaches the peak of his commercial potential, steering clear of pseudo-avant-garde excursions in favour of eccentric pop, with an unprecedented dose of R&B replacing the country-rock of the previous album as the main leitmotif. The album's title alludes to what, for the sad Canterbury jester, is the very symbol of his music, the banana: "proud and dignified, yet ridiculous the moment you peel it". It's a record that, much like the artist himself, walks the line between the serious and the facetious, between catchy melodies and bizarre experimental pastiche. The opening track offers an early nod to Ayers' existential spleen ("Don't Let It Get You Down"), with a big horn section and the celestial backing vocals of Doris Troy, Liza Strike and Barry St. John (three names that will sound familiar to anyone who's read the sleeve notes of "The Dark Side of The Moon"), joining Ayers in a laid-back, easy-going pop groove.

There are also eccentric blues-rock moments on "Shouting In A Bucket Blues", probably one of the record's highlights, thanks above all to Steve Hillage's spacey guitar solos. There's also room for funky-psychedelic moments ("Interview"), soul snapshots ("Internotional Anthem") and a slow blues like "When Your Parents Go To Sleep", featuring bassist Archie Leggett on vocals, chosen because Ayers wanted someone who could sing in the style of Ray Charles.

One of the record's climaxes comes with the alienating crescendo of "Decadence", where a powerful build-up of pathos recalls the dynamics of the Velvet Underground's "Heroin", minus the New York band's lysergic unease. Ayers sings his hymn in the manner of Nico, closing the track with a "drink it to Marlene" that pays homage to the German model herself. The former Soft Machine bassist also finds time to celebrate another great friend on "Oh! Wot A Dream": we're obviously talking about Syd Barrett, to whom Ayers dedicates a series of verses over a polite ruckus of whimsical percussion, honking ducks and clinking glasses, all woven together into what sounds like a carefree collage of musique concrète, with slide guitar sealing a radiant country-pop canter. The playful spirit of the "crazy diamond" is thus evoked through the mundane memory of an afternoon walk, and his simple gift of a sandwich to a hungry Ayers. A lyric so spontaneous and direct that it becomes touching precisely because of its disarming sincerity (“tu sei la persona più straordinaria/ scrivi il più particolare genere di brani/ ti ho incontrato che tu fluttuavi nell’acqua/ mentre io ero in barca, un pomeriggio”). On a record so marked by memories of friends, Robert Wyatt inevitably makes an appearance too, lending his thin voice to "Hymn", before Ayers leaves the listener with a dramatic ending nobody sees coming ("Beware Of The Dog"), thanks in no small part to Bedford's near brass-band orchestral arrangement.

Bananamour is a record that doesn't offer many moments of eccentric psychedelia, but is instead a varied and perfectly accessible window into Ayers' thinking. After this album, meagre commercial returns led Kevin to terminate his Harvest contract early and gradually lose interest in the music scene in favour of the Balearic sun, long his chosen place of exile. His love for the islands would later translate into a change of label: Ayers moved to the more prestigious Island, a company usually known for spending big money promoting its artists. Having nearly turned 29 by that point, Kevin felt it was time to take the big step; in exchange for financial backing, though, the blond Canterbury man would have to give up a bit of his artistic freedom: for the first time, the ex-Soft Machine man did not produce his own new album, leaving the whole job to Rupert Hine. The result is an Ayers split in two: on one side, the record turns out full of potential hits; on the other, Kevin has fun taking his poetic license and experimenting, once again playing spoiler to his own success.

After disbanding the Whole World, at Island Kevin Ayers got the chance to bring in some big names for his new backing band: recruited were Mike Giles of King Crimson (drums), Geoffrey Richardson of Caravan (viola), Johnny Gustafson of the Merseybeats (bass) and his guitarist friend Ollie Halsall of Patto (pictured), alongside a long roster of guests, some by now regulars such as Lol Coxhill (sax), chanteuse Nico, his old Soft Machine bandmate Mike Ratledge (keyboards) and newly-minted millionaire multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield, fresh off the global success of his "Tubular Bells". It's hardly an exaggeration, then, to say that at the time Ayers was something like the Canterbury equivalent of what John Mayall was for the blues: plenty of artists who'd go on to write music history passed through his court.

The fifth album, The Confessions Of Dr. Dream And Other Stories (1974), opens with the choral — and slightly anachronistic — funk of "Day By Day", followed by the sarcastic country of "See You Later", with bicycle bells and train whistles serving as a preamble to the spirited blues of "Didn't Feel Lonely Till I Thought Of You", stitched together with Ollie Halsall's pyrotechnic guitar work. After the poignant "Everybody's Sometime And Some People's All The Time Blues", things take a decidedly different turn with “It Begins With A Blessing/ Once I Awakened/ But It Ends With A Curse”, which is essentially a beefed-up version of his "Why Are We Sleeping?", found on the first Soft Machine LP. That same unsettling attitude shows up on the title track, a suite that can be read as a warning against self-delusion and, more broadly, against the dangers of taking too many drugs; this adventurous pharmacological epic is split into four parts which, in truth, turn out to be four distinct songs, stitched together somewhat arbitrarily by Island's decision.

The opening section ("Irreversible Neural Damage") is extremely interesting, full of intertwined acoustic guitars, strange synth sounds, manipulated tape loops, the fuzz of Mike Ratledge's distorted organ and the Teutonic chill of Nico's voice; the second part ("Invitation"), entirely instrumental, lightens the mood with a classic, unpretentious hard-rock groove, while the third movement ("The One Chance Dance") bears some resemblance to the sound of Gong, with cosmic screams, arcane laughter and rambling choruses, before culminating in the suite's final part ("Doctor Dream Theme"), probably the best of the lot, with its mad slow groove, otherworldly guitars and a closing riff so drawn-out and menacing it could haunt the listener for days. Still, Kevin refuses to leave us with another curse, and closes the album with "Two Goes Into Four", one of his finest acoustic ballads ever, a sweet lullaby that seals the record just as gently as it began.

Success: the concert with Brian Eno, Nico and John Cale

After recording The Confessions Of Dr Dream And Other Stories with a group of session musicians, in 1974 the restless Kevin Ayers decided to form a new band, naming it The Soporifics. Rather than doing the sensible thing and taking his group into a rehearsal room, the ex-Soft Machine man led them to the Rhône Valley for a lovely spring holiday, using the proceeds from his previous album to fund the trip. This grand idea lasted until the money ran out: right at that moment, Island got in touch with Ayers to tell him sales were going rather well, and that they had even booked the prestigious Rainbow Theatre in London for a date on 1 June 1974 — a show that sold out within days.

With only three weeks to go before the fateful date, though, the band gathered their gear and headed back to the London suburbs, rushing to the Walpole Picture Theatre in Ealing to set up rehearsals. After a week of anxiety, Ayers realised he simply didn't have time to prepare, so he picked up the phone and started calling old friends. The first to be enlisted was Nico, the intoxicating diva of the first Velvet Underground album, who in turn used her influence to rope in one of Ayers's own heroes, John Cale, who happened to be in town recording his own album; Cale, in turn, brought Brian Eno into the project, and other friends of Kevin's spontaneously pitched in to help: so it was that, exactly a year after his terrible accident, Robert Wyatt showed up for one of his first live appearances in a wheelchair, and Mike Oldfield, at the peak of his commercial success, joined the show too, not having forgotten who had believed in him before anyone else. Among the many other notable guests were Ayers's friend and guitarist Ollie Halsall, drummer Eddie Sparrow, bassist Archie Leggett and keyboardist John "Rabbit" Bundrick.

The result was put on record in record time as June 1st, 1974, an album that captures the fascinating musical summa of an unprecedented quartet. In truth, Island's aim was anything but purely artistic: the goal was to promote Ayers as an improbable silver-booted popstar. The opening number is Brian Eno's "Driving Me Backwards", strongly underscored by John Cale's viola, while the following "Baby's On Fire" is just as distinctive, if less startling, awash in all the glam chromatics of Roxy Music. On "Heartbreak Hotel", Cale instead tackles an Elvis Presley cover, an unsettling, unrecognisable version that seems to slow time almost to a standstill, while also giving the words an entirely new meaning — as if sublimating the frustration over a certain pre-concert "incident" that may well have contributed to such a venomous performance. On "The End", the microphone passes to Nico, who drags the Doors masterpiece through a distant, paranoid vocal, accompanied only by some chilling keyboards.

At this point, Kevin Ayers's playful spirit begins to roam the stage through a run of five songs ranging from the docile "May I?" to the sly "Shouting In A Bucket Blues" (oddly retitled "Standing In A Bucket Of Blues" on the sleeve), all the way to the rousing "Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes", with Oldfield's guitar solo carving into his old song just as it did on the studio version.

The album is finally wrapped up by a compositional diptych drawn from the more recent The Confessions of Dr. Dream And Other Stories: "Everybody's Sometime And Some People's All The Time Blues" and "Two Goes Into Four", the latter elevated by Cale's viola and Eno's synthesizer.

This event, as we've mentioned, was not without its own romantic twists. Even the cover photo, taken by Mick Rock in the foyer of the Rainbow Theatre shortly before the concert, hints that something strange was going on: the ambiguous look exchanged between John Cale (on the right) and Kevin Ayers (on the left) is explained by the fact that, the night before the show, Cale had caught Ayers in bed with his wife Cynthia Wells (aka Miss Cynderella, a famous groupie belonging to the GTOs). Ever the professional, Cale nonetheless went on stage, and later preserved the incident for posterity on his next album, Slow Dazzle, in the song "Guts", with its provocative opening line "the bastard in the blue jeans fucked my wife/ he did it quick and sly", dedicated to none other than Ayers.

A sweet deceiver: the Eighties and the onset of decline

Even if the Canterbury story, according to Ayers himself, ideally comes to a close with the concert of 1 June 1974 at the Rainbow Theatre, The Confessions Of Dr. Dream and Other Stories remains without doubt the epitaph of a golden period: it was here that Ayers met his true artistic soulmate, guitarist Ollie Halsall, and it was the shock of Halsall's death in 1992 that led Kevin to withdraw from the music world for years.

With his next studio album, Sweet Deceiver (1975), Kevin began to fall prey to his addictions. The record is marked by the overbearing presence of Elton John on piano, but still delivers a few gems such as "Observations", "Toujours Le Voyage", "City Waltz" and "Circular Letter". The hilarious parody "Guru Banana", meanwhile, shows once again just how uncomfortably the idolised-popstar label sat on Ayers, but while the first side offers solid songwriting, the second half runs out of steam with a few forgettable tracks ("Once Upon An Ocean", "Farewell Again").

After Sweet Deceiver, critics began to be unfairly harsh on Ayers. In an era when the press largely decided the fate of many songwriters, it was Nick Kent's disgraceful verdict in the NME, writing Kevin off as a spent artist, that put an end to what little glory the Canterbury dandy had left. A critical dismissal, driven above all by prejudice against the pop direction Ayers had taken, that has persisted undiminished to this day. His later albums, though they abandoned experimentation, in fact contain catchy, tasteful and rather refined songs; and it's worth remembering, too, that they were the natural evolution of their author, especially if one considers the very reasons Kevin had left Soft Machine in the first place.

I was never one for noise. Au contraire. I was drawn to melody, and unlike others I never cared much for free-form stuff. I was more about melody and catchy, sensual rhythms.

After a handful of collaborations (including one with Lady June on "Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy" in 1974), Kevin Ayers decided to return to Harvest with Yes We Have No Mañanas (So Get Your Mañanas Today) (1976) and Rainbow Takeaway (1978), two records that still contain a few notable tracks. The first alternates between love songs ("Falling in Love Again", "Love's Gonna Turn You Round", "Yes I Do") and thinly veiled jabs at the music industry ("Star", "Mr. Cool", "Ballad Of Mr. Snake"), and is a highly accessible album, offering a few eccentric moments on "Everyone Knows The Song" and "Blue", driven by Ollie Halsall's frenetic guitar.

He's no longer the eccentric jester of psychedelia: now Ayers comes across more as a sophisticated Al Stewart, with the deep voice of Leonard Cohen and an existential melancholy worthy of Nick Drake.

On Rainbow Takeaway, the standouts are the glam-reggae of "Goodnight Goodnight", the cabaret turn of "Hat Song" and the disillusioned soul of "Ballad Of A Salesman Who Sold Himself", on which Kevin seems to resign himself to his demons as he sings “a bottle of booze/ a bit of a tune to sing/ goodbye, everything”. By the end of the Seventies, punk had taken hold in Britain, and Ayers seemed to vanish from view, plagued by his addictions to alcohol and heroin.

In the following decade his recording output therefore became increasingly sparse, foreshadowing his retreat to France. He realized he had hit rock bottom in his life as a heroin addict when he sold an entire portable studio that Mike Oldfield had given him as a gift, just to get hold of cash. After the commercial near-failure of Rainbow Takeaway, Kevin decided to pack his bags and move to Spain, where in 1982 he took part in "Percussione" - a film now impossible to find - directed by Josecho San Mateo, in which Ayers appears as both actor and soundtrack composer. His faithful musical partner Ollie Halsall (another perennial next big thing of the 70s) was, during this period, also his partner in addiction. The new decade thus opened musically with the forgettable That's What You Get Babe (1980) and Diamond Jack And The Queen Of Pain (1983), the latter probably the Mariana Trench of Ayers's career. The singer-songwriter himself has said he barely remembers that album: partly because he wasn't mentally in a state to know what he was doing, and partly because the result simply wasn't up to his usual standard.

Things picked up somewhat halfway through with Deià... Vu (1984), livened up by an exotic cover of Bob Dylan ("Lay Lady Lay"), even if there's little else worth remembering. In tribute to his fond memories of Mallorca, the songs carry a melancholic, sensual charm, as in the old-school rock of "Thank God For A Sense Of Humor", the calypso rhythms of "Be Aware Of The Dog", and the blues symposium of "Champagne And Valium", in which Ayers's growing depression also comes to the surface ("Doctor, Doctor, can you feel my pain?/ Doctor said: shit, man! Not you again").

After the pleasant As Close As You Think (1986), the decade was closed out by Falling Up (1988), co-written with Ollie Halsall, which delivers two soft-rock delights in "Am I Really Marcel?" and "Another Rolling Stone", along with an intriguing cover of Mike Oldfield's "Flying Start".

Still life with guitar: isolation in the Nineties and Two-Thousands

After a hiatus, Kevin Ayers returned in the Nineties with the fine Still Life With Guitar (1992), alongside several members of Fairground Attraction and guitarists BJ Cole and Mike Oldfield. Met with favourable reviews and featuring some extraordinary songs, the album is almost entirely acoustic, a device that allows Ayers to sing his boozy soliloquies. Ollie Halsall is directly involved only on "Ghost Train", while among the songs worth mentioning are "There Goes Johnny", "I Don't Depend On You" and "Thank You".

A few months after the album's release, however, came the tragedy that would mark Kevin Ayers's life forever: the death of Ollie Halsall from an overdose. The loss of his "musical lover" is one Ayers would never fully recover from, but it would finally push him to quit heroin for good.

Lovers come and go but friends are hard to find.

Yes, I can count them all on one finger alone

("Shouting In A Bucket Blues")

Fifteen years later, Kevin emerged from his exile with The Unfairground (2007) and went back to surrounding himself with old friends, but above all rediscovered the urge to share and to sing. For a time, during this period he lived with an American waitress half his age: there's no doubt she was the one who inspired Ayers's acclaimed comeback, since he admitted more than once that he was incapable of writing songs when he wasn't in love.

The Unfairground is a thoroughly respectable pop album, containing some real gems, such as the reworking of "Only Heaven Knows" and the catchy "Brainstorm" and "Run Run Run". A general air of joie de vivre runs through it, contrasting with the deep, lived-in lyrics, which tell of things lost along the way. Among the musicians who contributed, worth noting are Robert Wyatt ("Cold Shoulder"), Hugh Hopper, Phil Manzanera and Bridget St. John, the latter featured in the captivating duet "Baby Come Home".

In 2013 death finally caught up with him in Montolieu, a remote village of 800 souls in the south-east of France, where Ayers had been living in complete solitude for some fifteen years by then. After a life spent in the company of hundreds of women, he was survived by his three daughters (Rachel, Galen, and stepdaughter Annaliese), as well as his sister Kate. His passing went almost unnoticed in the press, even though his body of work should have shone as brightly as that of his friend Syd Barrett, another essential piece of the English psychedelia puzzle.

Curiously, found beside his bed was a note reading "You can't shine if you don't burn": perhaps a line for a song, perhaps a farewell message. The circumstances have still never been fully clarified. Apparently Kevin died in his sleep from cardiac arrest - the perfect death for a singer-songwriter who was "lazy by nature". News of his passing was released by Montolieu's press office, which described Kevin as "a good person, very simple", recalling how the musician had left one of his guitars in a local café, writing on it: "For anyone who wants to play it". A simple gesture, yet not a trivial one, that captures the full generosity of this eccentric artist.

After his death, his daughter Galen - born to Kristin Tomassi, Richard Branson's unfaithful ex-wife - took her father's ashes to Deià, where Ollie Halsall is also buried, so they could play together forever beneath the stars. The only one of our countrymen present at the procession in his honour was composer and pianist Andrea Cavallo, who tells us it was a beautiful ceremony, attended by notable figures such as Bob Geldof, John Altman and Bridget St. John, who sang in tribute to her late friend.

There's no doubt that after more than forty years of a career spent always on the sidelines, fleeing a business world that steals your soul, Kevin Ayers deserved far more. That angelic face, framed by a cascade of blond curls and possessed of a nineteenth-century gentleman's savoir-faire, could easily have adorned countless t-shirts. Fate, however, decreed that he would remain just the face of an unknown Canterbury dandy.

Contributions by Marco Bercella (“Shooting At The Moon”), Massimo Marchini (“The Unfairground”), with special thanks to Andrea Cavallo

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