Shindig! #165 – Kevin Ayers & The Whole World

KEVIN AYERS’ repeated bursts of creative reinvention captured unique moments in time and attracted both beauty and talent, including a teenaged Mike Oldfield.

MICHAEL BJÖRN reconsiders Ayers’ enduring cachet of early ’70s albums and talks to Ron de Bruijn, eyewitness, concert taper and youth club acquaintance of Ayers’ Dutch girlfriend Margaret Brand

Kevin had met saxophonist Lol Coxhill busking outside Baker Street station and invited him together with Soft Machine and David Bedford to a wonderfully cacophonous BBC Top Gear session in February ’70. However, taking Soft Machine on the road was never an option, and Kevin instead found drummer Mick Fincher to join him, Coxhill and Bedford. The surprise discovery was 16-year-old child prodigy Mike Oldfield, who switched from guitar to bass to join. Mike had already recorded an album when he was 15 together with his five-year older sister Sally as Sallyangie — a catenation of Sally and ‘Angie’, Davy Graham’s famous acoustic folk-blues instrumental.

In parallel to gigging as The Whole World, in April they also started recording Shooting At The Moon. Released in October, its title track was a worthwhile reworking of Soft Machine’s ’Jet-Propelled Photograph’. The continental feel of opener ‘May I?’ is followed by the ominous ‘Rheinhardt & Geraldine’. Kevin sings: “From the poison comes the flower, Butterfly for just an hour.” The track then segues into the alluring progressive rock of ‘Colores Para Dolores’. Unfortunately, ‘Pisser Dans Un Violon’ lives up to the waste of time its title alludes to, and ‘Underwater’ is equally pointless.

With Dave Dufort on drums, The Whole World toured Europe, and found themselves in the Netherlands in late December. Aged 16 and very music interested, Ron de Bruijn was surprised to read in a Dutch newspaper that a girl he knew in Dordrecht, Margaret Brand was in fact Kevin Ayers’ girlfriend. “I used to hang out in youth clubs, and she was there,” says Ron. On 15th December, The Whole World played in the Verblifa, an abandoned factory in Dordrecht. Ron went there with his Grundig TK141 tape recorder. “It was terribly cold,” he recalls, noting that the band were late arriving from Paris. “It was already 9:30 before they got on stage. Everything was in a rush, but I got it on tape. They did all the great songs: ‘Clarence In Wonderland’, ‘Why Are We Sleeping?’… everything that you’d expect. Mike Oldfield had some long solos, and you could already hear traces of his own albums.”

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