Kevin Ayers
All This Crazy Gift of Time: The Recordings 1969-1973
CHERRY RED
From his development of avant-garde psychedelia with Soft Machine and his earliest solo albums through to his mad Island Records avatar-of-art-rock period in the mid-1970s, Kevin Ayers is no less than one of the most crucial figures in 20th century British music. His solo time on the experimental psych-pop treadmill began with the masterfully innovative albums Joy of a Toy, Shooting at the Moon, Whatevershebringswesing, and Bananamour, collected here in the new box set All This Crazy Gift of Time: The Recordings 1969-1973 along with a forever-infamous Hyde Park Festival appearance in 1970 and all the buzzers and bells of unreleased material and vintage European television appearances.
To call this new box set a well-deserved collection is an understatement—it’s a wealth of weird featuring Great Britain’s collective of pre-prog all-stars of the Canterbury scene, with Robert Wyatt, David Bedford, Lol Coxhill, Steve Hillage, Mike Oldfield, and Syd Barrett backing Ayers’ mad-hatter lyrical works of whimsy and woe, his crystalline guitar wonk, and his deep vocals as he tentatively approaches la-la-la-lullabies, pastoral freak-folk excursions, jumbled Gong-prog, chamber-pop test patterns, circus noise, noise noise, and the truly haunting fear-fest of tracks such as “Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong.”
Though it would be inaccurate to say that 1969’s Joy of a Toy (one of the first two albums released on the Harvest label next to Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma) presented the full range of Ayers’ mixed-bag messiness, it did set the table for the excursions that followed. Remastered for the purpose of All This Crazy Gift of Time, the now-bright-sounding mix of blithely effervescent balladry and probing exploratory space-pop that is 1970’s Shooting at the Moon, the eerily cryptic lyrics and dramatically odd orchestration of 1972’s Whatevershebringswesing, and the very nearly accessible Bananamour from 1973 are unrivaled in the canon of avant-pop recordings. Only Ayers could write and play tributes to dark entities such as Nico and Syd Barrett on Bananamour, and melodically make their (and his) eccentricities sound commonplace.
Meanwhile the live efforts included here (such as the previously unreleased John Peel radio show from 1970, the full set from Hyde Park that same year, and gigs at Queen Elizabeth’s Hall), when played side-by-side, present a moving sonic portrait of a wild instrumental talent whose visionary guitar work—when combined with his low, icily emotive vocals—make you wonder why Ayers didn’t break to greater effect. Gorgeous songs such as “Girl on a Swing” or the poignant “Decadence” could easily have made their way to FM setlists in the US throughout the 1970s had they been given the push that Pink Floyd had. No matter—just think of Kevin Ayers and this lushly awesome box set as defined by one of his most well-known moments, “Songs for Insane Times,” and move forward.
