Kevin Ayers Remembered

His drummers needed to make him laugh. His manager needed to keep hold of the corkscrew. Yet somehow, in the early ’70s, Kevin Ayers made four extraordinary solo albums. Robert Wyatt, Mike Oldfield, and those long-suffering managers remember the beautiful, lazy boy with an “amazing melodic gift”…

Even with The Whole World on stage with him, it’s Kevin Ayers everyone’s looking at, the crowd’s unanimous gaze turned towards him, entranced. There’s something almost liquid about him, as if he’s been poured into his own body. He’s not dressed up, or anything. There’s no cape, cat-suit, kimono or neo-Kabuki clobber, just a scooped-neck T-shirt with long sleeves and the kind of bellbottoms you might see on a sailor, a gigolo deckhand, fresh from a shift in the happy Adriatic, a girl in every port still warm from his recent touch… read more >