Kevin Ayers on SPURENSICHERUNG (Roots & Traces) Blog

http://spurensicherung.blogspot.com/search/label/soft%20machine

2010-06-04

kevin ayers live in bremen 1976. a way too short radio broadcast for you to fall in love again.

and though the music he released in 1976 was rather boring kevin ayers still was a very lovable and fascinating entity live on stage. on the 19th of august northwestgerman radio bremen recorded an evening with kevin ayers live at the famous postaula in bremen of which at least seven songs were broadcasted some days later. though we can only guess who was with him that evening it is most likely that ollie halsall played guitar, bill livsey probably was on keyboards, charlie mccracken played bass and rob townsend sat in on drums (any information on the flute player is welcome). the last song is a fragment, but it is interesting and sadly nostalgic to hear christian günther again, a linking anchor man for strange and popular music in the late sixties, who later on was the stadium announcer for werder bremen and who died rather untimely in 2001.

ja: christian günther: kaum to underestimate. but back to kevin ayers: here is what you are going to hear:

- may i?
- whatevershebringswesing
- shouting in a bucket blues
- observations
- lady rachel
- blue
- mister cool (fragment with christian günther)

kevin ayers live in bremen 1976-08-19
(mp3 / 320 kbps / direct download / no scans)

download as FLAC via megaupload (260 mb)

2009-10-16

why do we waste our time listening to kevin ayers and lol coxhill?

why do we waste our time listening to kevin ayers and lol coxhill? - if you are asking your beautiful selves this question you might be reading the wrong blog, bloke! why do we waste our time listening tokevin ayers and lol coxhill? because we can and yes we can! and for your and my listening pleasure here are some obscure tracks i found in the black holes of my collection.

in 1996 the british band ultramarine released their version of hymn, a kevin ayers song to be found on his fourth album bananamour. and though i never heard their version of hymn i bought the remixes and they are quite interesting.
the collection does not only include mixes by the likes of µ-ziq, luke slater, paul sampson, mekon and mouse on mars, but also a new 1994 recording of the song by the ultramarine big band. recorded on the 10th of may 1994. the band featured kevin ayers on vocals, lol coxhill on soprano sax, jimmy hastings on clarinet and included simon kay on organ, jay posner on congas, jim rattigan on accordion and paul sampson on guitars. your copy of this collection of re-mixes and re-models can be found here. (mp3 at 256 kbps, 73 mb, add-supported download)
and though this was rather nice: there is even more fun. on the 31st of january 1971 david bedford visited lol coxhill in his rehearsal room. (and all the internet kids say: "yeah! lol! ROFL & LOL!") they had some kind of fun doing a version of two little pigeons (4 mb, direct download). and last but not least i found one minute from 1969: lol coxhill busking at piccadilly circus and getting busted by the police as part of a "swinging london"-video broadcasted on german television the same year. well...

2007-07-27

lady june, lol coxhill, steve hillage, david bedford, tim blake, archie leggett. live 1972.

the early seventies of the last century surprisingly enough were some very interesting times for non-linear (art)rock and anti-(under)dogmatic improvisation. the gap between hippie and punk left a lot of space for social and sonic experiments and experiences of all kind. the sub- & contextualizations of kraut and canterbury were two of the gestating corner stones of the dawning of a new error. and though tubular bells and the faust tapes influenced millions of forthcoming generations: success and a fortiori commercial success was inaccessible and inacceptable. great times we had!

in 1975 i bought "lady june´s linguistic leprosy" in a cut-out sell-out in a german department store. and though brian eno was mentioned on the cover i had no idea what to expect and i still can not delineate what kind of sounds these were that i have been listening to many times since then. the music was far beyond my teenage stockhausen and stooges experience.

june campbell cramer was born in plymouth on the 3rd of june 1931. she was a poet trying to stretch the limitation of "words" and to spread the illumination of vivisected "words". in 1971 she created lady june. most of her work remains undiscovered, obscure, noncommittal and discreet with only very few traceable occurences. here is one.

ICES. the international carnival of experimental sounds. in 1972 lady june was part of an experimental tribal meeting at the london roundhouse. she performed a linguistic leprosy with david bedford (keyboards and), lol coxhill (soprano sax), steve hilledge (born hillage, of course, on guitars), tim blake (synthesizer and), archie leggett (bass), bobby stignac (percussion), tim cresswell (???), daevid allen (gong-guitars), jugglers, fireeaters and clowns (puke!). this copy of a second generation cassette tape starts and ends as harsh as it does.
side a, 224 kbps, 47:35, 78 mb
side b, 224 kbps, 47:38, 78 mb

alternate download side a
alternate download side b

some more (kevin ayers, david bedford, lol coxhill, mike oldfield, mick fincher, ollie halsall, archie leggett, chris spedding, robert wyatt, brian eno... [just kidding...]): may i?

2007-05-31

david bedford, robert wyatt, kevin ayers, lol coxhill, mike oldfield and the london sinfonietta: the garden of love 1970

the garden of love was originally written by david bedford in 1963 for an ensemble including flute, horn, clarinet, trumpet, double bass, dancers and a rock band. on the 26th of september 1970 he performed this composition at the queen elizabeth hall in london withkevin ayers and the whole world, the legendary rock ensemble he was part of in these times and played keyboards with. other members of the band and performers on stage included of course kevin ayers on guitar, mike oldfield on guitar and bass, lol coxhill on saxophone,robert wyatt on drums, five members of the london sinfonietta on the aforementioned flute, horn, clarinet, trumpet and double bass plus "six beautiful girls for dancing and turning pages".

a cd recording of this performance was only released posthumously byvoiceprint in 1997, has since been deleted from their catalogue and is unavailable by the time being.

 35 mb rar-file, 20 minutes mp3 with 224 kbps

download with divshare
download with mediafire

Posted via email from ttexed's posterous

Biba Kopf Kevin Ayers Epiphany

http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/8GgBS8PJb3lvelHbbvx6YBhJ6ojaqk32tNipB_WwBZqDgj_ppmG_PfR_Mp8AYldg-N7MK5nJHpP01zYpaciXAumLYj92zg0n5cmgM8Leeq3F0A/KAWire.pdf

From richardbrunoelliott at the whatevershebringswesing yahoo group: http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/whatevershebringswesing/


The Wire
epiphanies
Biba Kopf has his life changed by a
mysterious noise in the night


During one of their habitual tirades against the
evils of Western music, party leaders in Beijing
once unfavourably compared the oeuvre of Elvis
Presley with the Chinese revolutionary hit "The Faeces
Collectors Descend From The Mountain". Had the
venerable cadres been more familiar with Yukio
Mishima's startling literary debut Confessions Of A Mask
(1949), in which a four year old Yukio recounted his
sexual arousal at the sight of a youthful night-soil man
coming down the slope, they might have have been
more careful about the selections for their youthpurifying
revolutionary jukebox. For Mishima's encounter
was, he wrote, a presentiment that "there is in this world
a kind of desire like stinging pain". So who knows what
unusual longings Beijing's injudicious cultural watchdogs
unleashed in the hearts of young China?

A kind of desire like stinging pain... In musical terms
such a desire manifests itself through disharmony, dirt in
the ear, the spillage of noise. Pardon my pretension, but
my Christmas holiday reading of Deadly Dialectics: Sex,
Violence And Nihilism In The World Of Yukio Mishima,
accompanied by a video of a childhood favourite Tom
Sawyer—well, it was a holiday — unreeling in the
background, triggered a memory of the first time I was
really aroused by noise. It occurred during the following
Sawyer scene: a barge loaded with a cannon floats
downriver, intermittently firing salvos with a view to
raising the corpse of the hero, presumed drowned. The
blast, the recoil, the sonic boom rolling across the
surface of the water in this instance failed to bring up a
bloated body. But it did conjure for me the image of a
six-foot plus British blond, with a voice as deep and
resonant as that unfolding sonic boom. Inevitably, I
heard it first through the darkness of a late-night John
Peel show back in 1972, the voice naturally preceding
the name of its bearer. It was shrouded in a dense fog of
sound, consisting of depth charge bass and a knot of
indistinct, yet squealing lead noises, which slowly and
inexorably ricocheted across the song's watery base.
Maybe I should have gotten out more, but back then I'd
heard nothing like it, especially not the voice. Its very
English baritone defied the period predilection for mid-
Atlantic accents, just as the song cleared itself of rock's
usual drab, denim debt to 12 bar blues. I flipped on the
bedroom light and carefully noted the details of this, to
my fresh ears, unearthly performance. The singer? Kevin
Ayers. The track? "Song From The Bottom Of A Well".



As an arousing icon of transgression Kevin Ayers
hardly bears comparison with Mishima's night-soil man,
but you have to remember things were more innocent
then. (Or perhaps it was just
me — I can only imagine the
jolting pleasures of coming of
age to, say, a group like Coil.)
Naturally enough I sought to
repeat the experience and searched
out the song on the LP,
Whatevershebringswesing. The
anticipation was great but getting it
home was an immense disappointment.
Far from being an album spilling over with
dirty noises akin to "Bottom Of A Well", it
began with some orchestral idyll called "There
Is Loving", followed by a collection of dotty
ditties and a totally daft take on Velvet
Underground's "Sweet Jane", called "Stranger
In Blue Suede Shoes" (my George Washington
complex impels me to admit I made that last i
connection long after the fact). I mjght have shelved, it in
disgust, but economic factors dictated I couldn't afford
to play the thing just once. So the true pleasures of
Kevin Ayers's music surfaced slowly: his very Englishness
(probably preserved by a childhood largely spent in
some Far Eastern colony); his awry wit and lazy charm,
which manifested themselves in the countercultural
equivalent of a Noel Coward song; and a yen for
experiment that dated back to his experiences in
Canterbury during the early 60s, when he partnered
Australian gonzo Beat alchemist Daevid Allen in the first
version of Soft Machine.


Indeed, the two finest pieces on Soft Machine's debut
album are credited to Ayers. The first is a lengthy stiffriffed
workout on a track with a passing resemblance to
The Kinks' proto-Metal masterpiece "You Really Got
Me", called "We Did It Again". Legend has it that Ayers
wanted the group to hammer away at the single,
unvarying title phrase for as long as they could stand it,
with no changes or embellishments, but the others
buckled long before he did. The second is the great,
cod-philosophical wake-up call "Why Are We
Sleeping?", in which he dramatised the teachings of his
guru, Gurdjieff (in the 60s everyone needed a guru).

The fact that he quit Soft Machine after their first, by
all accounts gruelling US tour with Jimi Hendrix was the
first indication of Ayers's proto-slacker tendency to
escape to the Balearics at the first whiff of the kind of
serious hard work that prefigures commercial success.
He continued to escape there throughout what you
might charitably call a career of missed chances,
throughout which the dividends became frustratingly
more erratic as it progressed to his present invtsibftty Cr
you could read his laziness as his means of preserving
the fragile, but very precious qualities that set him apan
from his contemporaries. Though not without their
strong moments, Ayers's later albums became more
straitjacketed inside the usual rock expectations. But he
first three are all wonderful mixes of wistful, summery
(no, I can't believe I'm writing this either), vaguely
philosophical songs like Joy Of A Toy's "Lady Rachel",
harder edged locomotive pieces such as "Stop This
Train", and alternately hazy or Spike Jones-y
experiments. In addition, they are about as far rerrc. =:
from rock as you could then stretch while still being
somehow part of it. No real surprise, given that they are
performed by bizarre ensembles of noted fringe players
including his former partners in Soft Machine — most
persistently, Robert Wyatt — composer David Bedford
(also responsible for Ayers's off-the-wall arrangement
saxophonist Lol Coxhill, and... a very young Mike
Oldfield, whose double tracked bass and guitar parts ori
the title track of Whatevershebringswesing amount to
the loveliest two minutes in the entire Kopf collection.

Whereas by current standards "Song From The
Bottom Of A Well" now sounds positively creaky rather
than Big Noise creepy, the Whatevershebringswesing SB.
remains my single-most transgressive disc. Just watch
your friends recoil in horror when they discover they're
falling for an album with Mike Oldfield on it.