STILL LIFE WITH GUITAR Review

Somewhere in a parallel universe, Kevin Ayers is huge. His two year long World Tour has just climaxed with twelve sold-out nights at Wembley, the new triple album has gone coffee-table on advance orders alone....

In truth, this fourteenth solo album slipped out just before Valentine's Day, Ayers hung around long enough to exchange pleasantries with a couple of magazines and then quietly journeyed back to the gardens of Deya. The journalists will have wondered whether 'eccentric' was spelt correctly, settled for 'quirky', mentioned the Soft Machine and filed the report under 'Ayres'......

Strange cover, strange title but oh, miracle! Four years of fermentation since the impressive 'Falling Up' have given us a set of vibrant, velvet, acoustic songs - soft, demure, human and real, back on the track of personal communication after the last decade's uneasy alliance with fast technology and artificiality. Ayers is a lyricist par excellence, open and yet private, innermost fears and longings shared but still secret - the first three songs are like eavesdropping at an open door, feeling an invited empathy with invisible scenarios and sad, broken relationships. The lovely 'Thank You Very Much' surfaces from 1974 still replete with its fleeting but eternal moment of ethereal passion whilst 'There goes Johnny' trips madly like a Cajun barn dance full of crazy people searching for unobtainable answers.... 'Ghost Train', with the faithful Ollie Halsall on acoustic guitar, takes us all back 23 years to side 2 of 'Joy Of A Toy', eerie, creepy, weak at the knees, life passing, still sleeping, another year gone by, another year, another year. Personal.

Ayers is back on production and he cares about this one. That shows. Mike Oldfield plays muted guitar on 'I Don't Depend On You', B.J. Cole and Anthony Moore return on a couple of songs, Danny Thompson is unmistakeable class elsewhere and there's a distinctive backbone of Fairground Attraction's Mark Nevin, Simon Edwards and Roy Dodds throughout. 'When Your Parents Go To Sleep' reworks the song from 1973's 'Bananamour' and does it very well.( Though I am reminded by a friend of the scenario that Ayers, now approaching 50, probably creaks rather than creeps into the girls bedroom! Her parents would be in their 80's, perhaps a chase on walking frames would ensue.... Bill Wyman is doing a cover version apparently... ) 'M16' spits flamenco riffs and is lyrically just off at a slightly unsatisfying tangent, as was 'Night Fighters' on the last album. 'Goodnight Irene' is the Ledbetter chestnut, a finale to close the hours in a dark, intimate smoke-filled nightclub before meeting the dawn.

Good news, bad news... I would deify any record company that has the foresight to invest in Kevin Ayers. Thank you Permanent, but why, why, why does this record emerge in all its formats without a single credit or piece of information printed anywhere? Is total anonymity the right promotional technique for Kevin Ayers? Why isn't the grainy faxed lyric sheet I hold in my hands part of the package? Perhaps overseas readers will have fared better... Ha'porth of tar maybe but surely that's why some ships float and some don't and this album deserves to float to Nirvana on a sea of grace...

Final point. Ayers' first three albums are available as reissues ridiculously cheap. Go on, mortgage something and have an early Christmas!

PERMANENT RECORDS LTD., 32 HOLMES ROAD, LONDON, NW5 3AB

MW

This review first appeared in the Ptolemaic Terrascope

first published in WAWS #1, Oct 92