“I owe them”: the two bands Kevin Ayers called his “education”
Education is important in all facets of life, but particularly in the musical realm. Rarely will you find a generational artist without an exhaustive record collection and profound knowledge of his predecessors. For Britain’s greatest psychedelic master, Kevin Ayers, though, he found all the education he needed in the output of two bands.
To call Kevin Ayers’ career unconventional would be doing the songwriter a disservice: every facet of his being was unconventional. While his various contemporaries were tearing down the musical establishment, ushering in a new age of musical expression, or establishing themselves as household names in rock and roll, Ayers was, by and large, doing whatever he felt like.
In many cases, that lifestyle involved abandoning the music industry completely and exiling himself to sunnier climes, only returning once his creative juices had been replenished and, invariably, the music industry had completely forgotten about him.
That working practice was not merely down to Ayers’ laidback, hippieish nature; throughout his time in the music industry, the songwriter had repeatedly watched his fellow musicians and creatives being ripped apart and tortured by the business, and he was determined that the same fate would not await him.
It was within Soft Machine that Ayers got his first real experiences of the industry, at the forefront of the infamous Canterbury scene, leading the charge of Britain’s psychedelic revolution. With that cult band, Ayers didn’t find much in the way of chart successes, but he did strike upon a multitude of experiences that would go on to define his future career. Among them was meeting Jimi Hendrix.
Soft Machine supported Hendrix on his 1968 tour of the United States, and it was a revelatory experience for Ayers in a number of ways – in particular, the songwriter got to witness firsthand how, even back then, the industry was taking its toll on Hendrix.
“It was an eye-opener seeing all the money slosh around while Jimi was being ripped off. His disillusionment did me a favour. I didn’t like the party.”
Kevin Ayers
Shortly thereafter, Ayers took note of the writing on the wall and promptly left Soft Machine, briefly abandoning music altogether before carving out a truly masterful solo career. Nevertheless, the songwriter was always grateful to his bandmates for showing him the ropes: “I owe them and The Beatles for my education,” he said, “Since the only record I’d heard post-Malaysia was The Sound Of Music.”
Ayers’ childhood, largely spent in the territory then known as the Federation of Malaya, wasn’t the typical upbringing of a musical prodigy, but it seems as though he was able to make up for lost time upon his return to the United Kingdom, largely through consuming the earth-shattering genius of The Beatles and going on the road with Soft Machine.
As far as a musical education is concerned, there wasn’t much Kevin Ayers needed to know that wasn’t covered by one or both of those groups. After all, The Beatles formed the prevailing musical education of virtually every budding artist back in the 1960s and, indeed, beyond. Meanwhile, Soft Machine was adept at exposing both the good and evil of the musical realm, information that the songwriter certainly kept in mind for later years.
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