As bassist, frequent songwriter, and occasional vocalist in the original
Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers was a key force in early British psychedelia and
progressive rock. In just two years the group had evolved from the goofy,
effervescent psychedelic pop of their 1967 debut single "Love Makes Sweet
Music"/"Feelin' Reelin' Squealin'" to the dada jazz-rock minimalism of
Ayers' infamous "We Did It Again." After the Soft Machine opened for the
Jimi Hendrix Experience across the States in 1968 and recorded their first
studio album, Ayers left the group to establish a long-running solo career
with more pop-oriented material, delivered in a witty, near-bass profundo
voice.
On most of his albums he explored the little-trod midpoint between weird
pop and the most accessible, humorous face of prog-rock, crafting bouncy
songs of indolence and whimsy that often tapped island rhythms. Leading
British experimental musicians like Lol Coxhill, David Bedford, and a
pre-Tubular Bells Mike Oldfield passed through his band while he veered
between sunnier variations of Syd Barrett and dissonant experimental jams.
He never did land a hit album or single in Britain, despite issuing
numerous LPs on Harvest, and in the US he was a definitive '70s cult
artist. He's only recorded sporadically in the 1980s and 1990s, with his
more recent efforts even harder to locate in the import bins than his early
solo material.
Now in his early fifties, Ayers made a rare visit to the States to play a
few gigs in California in May. Backed by the SF band Mushroom at the Great
American Music Hall in San Francisco, he was in merry form as he went
through a set of some of his more well-known vintage tunes, such as "Lady
Rachel," "Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes," as well as the Soft Machine cuts
"Why Are We Sleeping?" and "Save Yourself." Before soundcheck he found a
few minutes to talk about the Canterbury scene with a few local fans and
writers.
Q: What was unique about the Canterbury scene?
KA: Mike Ratledge from the Soft Machine had a degree in Oxford University
in philosophy at 22. I mean, he won a scholarship and then said, fuck that,
I'm going to play the organ. This was unique in pop. You don't find many
people with honor degrees playing pop, even from that kind of literary
background. Normally it was sort of art school. England is so defined, the
class system, your education. I think what was unique about the Canterbury
scene...these were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining
this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest
of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.
Q: Did you have a similar kind of literary upbringing to Robert Wyatt?
KA: Not from my parents, no. Robert had his from his parents, 'cause his
parents were middle-class intellectuals. I was brought up in Malaya. But
that is the difference, that this was the first time that anybody from the
middle class, well-educated, joined the pop scene. This was comfortable
kids who went to university.
Q: I'm surprised you call it pop.
KA: Well, I don't know, what else would you call it? Plop? (laughs) The
whole thing about Soft Machine was that it had all these people from, as I
said, middle-class literary educated backgrounds, suddenly going "fuck it,
I'm not going to join med school, I'm not going to become a lawyer or a
doctor. I'm not going to be a professional." And this hadn't happened
anywhere else in pop. That's why the Canterbury scene was unique, because
that is what happened there.
Q: You started off in the Wilde Flowers, then you showed up in Majorca to
find Daevid Allen to put the band together. What made you go find him?
KA: Daevid Allen was the first hippie that I'd met. He was straight out of
the beat scene, and he was very convincing (laughs). He read a lot. He was
articulate. He turned us on, Robert and me and Mike, to all
this--especially American--beat literature. And we suddenly thought,
wow...you have to imagine, just out of an English private school, and
suddenly you get this sort of exotic person coming through, who says, "fuck
this, fuck that. Smoke pot, read this." He actually had something to say,
he actually had a viewpoint. I suppose everybody else had no idea. All
these people just came out of school, sort of wandering around in the job
market, "what do I do now"--suddenly Daevid Allen's going, "Smoke pot now,
peace love and fuck your neighbor." That was something. As opposed to
nothing.
Q: Is that hippie ethic something that still motivates you?
KA: I think that the basic philosophy was very good. It was just be nice to
each other, and don't step on other people's toes and infringe on their
freedom. I think that's still valid. It just made sense, especially
when...I keep talking to you about English schools. Unless you've been to
one, you have no idea how bad they are. I mean, you just would not believe
them. You only start learning when you leave school.
Q: The Soft Machine had a whimsical feel. Was that influenced by your
literary background?
KA: We just had different references. We had literary references, so we
knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books
we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it. If you have
the same background, it doesn't matter which school you've been to, if
you've read the books, have the knowledge, and you have the intellectual
curiosity, you can talk to anybody who has the same thing, and you know
what you're talking about. So you relate that way.
The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of
mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what
everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell
that these people came from different reference areas. They'd read
different books. So we actually got away with making a lot of crap. I don't
mean crap--I mean that it wasn't professionally as good as what other
people were doing. Other people had much better sound, and they had good
producers. We worked alongside the Pink Floyd, we played gigs together, and
we suddenly saw them go, whooosh!! with huge sales. But we were just
dancing in the dark. There were groundbreaking ideas, musically and
intellectually. Post-war generation asking serious questions.
Q: When you made your first solo record, you were obviously still on good
terms with the Soft Machine, since they play on a lot of it.
KA: It was family for me--the only family I knew. We all lived together in
one house.
Q: When you went solo, was it because you wanted to play and write
different material than what the Soft Machine were doing on their first
album?
KA: Soft Machine were going more in the direction of fusion jazz and I
didn't like that. They were going more in the direction of jazz, which
didn't interest me. I was strictly pop. They were into what I consider
really to be incredibly self-indulgent music. It's stuff you play for
yourself, and "fuck the audience."
Q: What about playing "We Did It Again" for half an hour for Brigitte Bardot?
KA: That's a serious statement. I think she said to get those wankers off
or something.
Q: In an interview you said all your songs, except for a few romantic ones,
were pataphysical. Where did you come across pataphysics?
KA: I think that was just a literary thing. The fact that you actually
string a few sentences together was important in those days. Soft Machine
became famous in France before anything else happened. They adopted us. The
French like arty things, they like something a little bit different. In
fact, what made Soft Machine was an article in Nouvelle Observateur, which
at that time was a very...in those days, things like Melody Maker and NME,
it mattered then. If someone wrote something about you, it could make or
break you. Now it doesn't matter at all. We got written up, I think, 'cause
Mike was fucking the journalist, actually. So we got a good review, and
that was it. Suddenly France just opened up. We were the darlings of the
literary scene there.
Q: Who were your main literary or formative influences?
KA: Philosophically, the only person that influenced me was Gurdjieff. What
he said made sense to me. What I really liked about him was, he was a total
charlatan. He didn't make any bones about it. His thing was that you cannot
present the truth to people in simple form. You have to elaborate.
Otherwise they're not interested. Did you ever read his book? It's just
bullshit, absolute bullshit. But he says, you have to write 100 pages to
say one sentence, to make it interesting for people. Otherwise they won't
accept it as real. You have to say a lot in order to get a little across.
Q: Are you still inspired by things like that when you write?
KA: It's still there. I mean, I still think he was absolutely right. His
two premises were, you have to say a lot to get a little across. you have
to excite people. The other thing was, we're only working at five percent
of our potential, which made total sense. What I loved about him...he came
to America, you know, and he was very good at raising money. One of the
things he did here was, he was in New York, he invited a bunch of people,
saying, "this is the time of your life." And he made them have sex, and
charged them a lot of money for it. And they were saying, "Wow, thank you,
this is the best night of our lives." He just talked dirty to them, so they
all had sex with each other and [said] "wow, this is so good," and they
gave him thousands of dollars. What he did was say, "Look, this is what you
really want to do. I'll organize it. Just give me the money."
Q: When do you think you most fully realized your own potential with
your music?
KA: I don't think I can answer that. It's hypothetical, one will never
know. I mean, some days you wake up and you think, Jesus, I could be a
really good comedian. Then half an hour later, you forget the idea. People
who really want to make money in this world make it. You have to have
tunnel vision. You have to say, this is what I want to do. I believe that.
If you wanted to make money, you would make it.
Don't you ever wake up in the morning and think, geez, I could really do
with a lot of money? You think, I have a brain, I could use it, I could
actually do this, I could play the stock market, I could be a televangelist
or something. You could actually do it if you really wanted to do it. But
you would have to really want to it. So basically you wake up in the
morning and say, "oh, I don't really want to do anything."
Q: Is commercial success something you still aspire towards?
KA: No no no. It's all been a total fluke. I would have liked to have made
more money, 'cause I think everybody has a creative period, normally
between about 19 and 30. That is the time when you have to establish
yourself in life. If you haven't made it by the time you're thirty, you
never will, basically. Okay, forty (laughs). If you wind up forty and you
don't have a house and a car and life insurance and health insurance, you
know, you're fucked.
Q: Was it frustrating for you not to have much success in the States?
KA: I didn't really have that much exposure here. It would have been good.
Basically the idea is to make a bunch of money with the creative talents
you have before you're forty. I'm not answering your question, am I? This
is the underlying thing, this is what is behind it. Whatever it takes,
whether it's America or Holland, I don't know, it doesn't matter. You have
a certain window in your life where you're intellectually curious, you have
energy, and you're not blase, and you're not tired of life. That's when you
have to do it. That still doesn't answer your question. It does, actually,
really.
Q: You're talking about hitting thirty- were you conscious of the British
underground that had started around '67 losing momentum around that time?
KA: You only become conscious of things that you have things to compare
them to. You can't make assessments if you don't have something to compare
them to. I think that what happened with post-war society--suddenly young
people were going, we don't like what our parents are doing. We don't like
war. The war was over, people had money, and they had time. It was like a
one-off. My youngest daughter says to me, geez dad, I wish I'd lived in the
sixties. I know what she means, because there was a whole bunch of stuff
happening. People were pre-video and people read books in those days, and
talked to each other. It was a unique time. In fact, if you check the
history of human beings, you'll find it's the only time that young people
ever got up and had any effect at all. What happened was that the
establishment moved in and discredited them- "they're hippies, they don't
wash, they smoke pot." But there were huge advances in human rights and
basic freedoms. It never happened in the history of man, never.
Q: Are you going to do more stuff with the people you worked with in the
Canterbury scene?
KA: No.
Q: Do you communicate with them?
KA: No, I don't know where they are these days. It's very sad, 'cause we
were very close to start with. That's okay, it happens to the best of
lovers.
Also see our 2008 Ayers interview and our Robert Wyatt interview
