Kevin Ayers- 1969 Joy Of A Toy. The Soft Machine

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jamestkirk
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Kevin Ayers- 1969 Joy Of A Toy. The Soft Machine

Post by jamestkirk »

One of the few albums that have been reissued where I feel the bonus tracks to be essential--and equal to the original.

Religious Experience (feat. Syd Barrett) (Singing A Song In The Morning)
Not heard before until the reissue...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKEuSU1 ... I7_7m2XeYp

KEVIN AYERS
Joy Of A Toy - 1969


Joy Of A Toy (full album)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBXtGDS ... I7_7m2XeYp


Image


Joy of a Toy is the debut solo album of Kevin Ayers, a founding member of Soft Machine. Its whimsical and unique vision is a clear indication of how Soft Machine might have progressed under Ayers' tenure. He is accompanied on the LP by his Soft Machine colleagues Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge and Hugh Hopper.

After a Soft Machine tour of the USA with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Ayers had decided to retire from the music business. Hendrix however, presented Ayers with an acoustic Gibson J-200 guitar on the promise that he continue his songwriting. Ayers repaired to a small London flat where he composed and arranged a whole LP which was then presented to Malcolm Jones' fledgling Harvest label where it was recorded by Peter Jenner for the then exorbitant sum of £4000.

Joy features many of Ayers' most enduring songs from "The Lady Rachel" to "Girl on a Swing", the latter still, regularly covered by artists to this day like Candie Payne and The Ladybug Transistor. It was on Joy that Ayers developed his sonorous vocal delivery, an avant-garde song construction and an affection for bizarre instrumentation that would have a deep influence far into the 1970s and indeed the present day.

For the recording of Syd Barrett's first solo album—The Madcap Laughs—Soft Machine was brought in to do overdubs for a few of Barrett's tracks. It was during this time, Barrett did guitar for Ayers on his track "Religious Experience", (later titled "Singing a Song in the Morning") this version wasn't released until the 2003 reissue of Joy.

November 1969

Recorded: 17 June–11 September 1969; Abbey Road Studios, London

Genre: Psychedelic rock, psychedelic pop, Canterbury scene, experimental rock

Length:
41:30 (original issue)
1:07:04 (2003 reissue)

Label: Harvest

Producer: Kevin Ayers & Peter Jenner
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music".

-Aldous Huxley
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jamestkirk
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Re: Kevin Ayers- 1969 Joy Of A Toy. The Soft Machine

Post by jamestkirk »

KEVIN AYERS
JOY OF A TOY


Released 1969 on Harvest
Reviewed by Fitter Stoke, 19/06/2002ce

Eleanor's Cake (Which Ate Her) (2003 Remastered Version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCMJf4P ... Yp&index=7

There can be few dudes in rock who have been lazier than Kevin Ayers. The man hasn't released any new material in at least a decade and was hardly prolific before that. And it's not as if he's ever enjoyed a hit single or album to sustain him. God knows what he lives on.

Ayers started his professional life in the mid-60's with the Canterbury rock/jazz/R&B growbag that was The Wilde Flowers, from which evolved The Soft Machine, of which he was a founder member with such luminaries as Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen. Kev only lasted one album and 45 before jumping ship in '68. He bummed around the Iberian peninsula for a year before some pothead at Harvest, EMI's then new progressive arm, bravely decided to sign him up. And 'Joy Of A Toy' was the result. But no bedsitter singer-songwriter album this.

'Joy Of A Toy Continued' is the singalong instrumental that starts the record. Though it bears no resemblance to its partner on the first Softs' LP, It would have made a perfect alternative theme for Play School. But tweeness aside, it's an infectious 'la la' tune that annoys you for weeks after you've heard it. It isn't, thankfully, representative of the album, but then the beauty of 'Joy Of A Toy' is that every track is quite alarmingly different from its companions.

'Town Feeling' follows, a lovely woodwind and strings introduction leading into Ayers' first real vocal showcase. And what a vocal - an English Scott Walker with pre-Ferry crooning: irresistable. Each lazily delivered verse, with simple but charming lyrics, is accompanied by delightful woodwind obligati and followed by an ever so slightly "wrong" guitar lick that makes the song truly different. The instrumentation here, and through most of the album, is almost 'Pet Sounds' in its variety and depth, thanks for the most part to the now well respected composer David Bedford (later to join Ayers' anarchic Whole World combo). 'The Clarietta Rag' comes next, rhyming its subject's name with 'Lambretta' (inspired!) and the jauntiest mellotron fills on record. And how many songs have you heard that accompany a fuzz guitar solo with a trombone? Unbelievably, it works.

'Girl On A Swing' is a beautiful, simple love song with that patent late-60's pedalled acoustic piano and subtle mellotron and backward tape interruptions. Ayers' doubled harmony vocal is nigh perfect. 'Song For Insane Times' sees Kev reunited with his Soft Machine pals in a song which, vocally speaking, (will I get shot here?) sounds not a million miles away from our beloved Julian. The occasional drum and keyboard lapses indicate a liberal intake of hallucigenics without which an album this downright gone would never have been. Check out Mike Ratledge's stereo-panned fuzz organ at the end.

Side Two begins with the album's highlight: 'Stop This Train (Again Doing It)'. Full of tricks that have now become cliches - cranked up turntable effects at the beginning and end, vocal-through-a-telephone effect, train-like acoustic guitar strums etc - here they form a fresh and vital song that sounds like the soundtrack to every worst nightmare you've ever had. You know the sort, the kind where you fall off a high building never to land, or, as here, you're trapped on a train that never stops and is only going to get faster. The manic soloing that infuses the second half of the track (with more great stereo effects - get those headphones on and fly) only intensifies the effect. One of the best bad trips on record.

'Eleanor's Cake (Which Ate Her)' is, despite the weird title, another gentle acoustic number with gorgeous woodwind backing. Was there ever a simpler yet more uplifting lyric than "Don't be sad and down/Take another look around/Maybe what you've lost you've found"? The nearest Kevin gets to bedsitter balladery, but not for long: it's strange dream time again with 'Lady Rachel', which breaks out of 'Eleanor's Cake' with a nasty Bontempi organ trill and a slow, disturbingly strummed guitar. One of Ayers' most noted songs, 'Lady Rachel's minor-keyed ambience, relieved only slightly by the "What will you dream of tonight" chorus, develops into a quiet, but still terrifying, instrumental sequence four minutes in that preempts the nastier moments of Lou Reed's 'Berlin'. Luckily for poor Rachel, the song, and her bad dream, ends with the (only comparatively) sunny chorus.

'Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong' defies categorisation. Essentially an instrumental built around a psychotic 7/4 bass and drum riff, it features girly vocalizations (courtesy of two of Benny Hill's Ladybirds!) and some Cecil Taylor-like piano abuse before devolving into pure avant garde about four and a half minutes in, similar to Peter Hammill's 'Magog' at the end of 'In Camera' (don't know that album? Do!). A million miles from anything else on the record. Then, out of the mire, fades in the final song 'All This Crazy Gift Of Time', where Kev shows us that he can be Bob Dylan as well. Except, of course, that Bob, for all his talent and charisma (it says here) could never sing like this. Terrific.

Like so many eclectic gems of its period, 'Joy Of A Toy' sold ball-all. I didn't get to hear it until 1975 when it was reissued as a cheap double album with its even more "out there" successor 'Shooting At The Moon'. But once heard, never forgotten. Kevin Ayers went on to make a handful of notable albums through to the late 70's when his muse faded somewhat, but never surpassed the invention and variety of this marvellous debut. For a singer-songwriter album with a difference, check it out.



(Currently available on CD from EMI with juicy outtakes including Syd Barrett's axework on one track. Alternatively, pick up an original Harvest SHVL 763 vinyl copy - great sleeve by the way - for about £40.)
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music".

-Aldous Huxley
afilosa09
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Re: Kevin Ayers- 1969 Joy Of A Toy. The Soft Machine

Post by afilosa09 »

I'm quite partial to Song For Insane Times. It doesn't sound unlike something off of THIRD (the only Soft Machine album I have.) Of course, if it was on that album, it would have to quadruple in length!
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