First, the back story.
At the end of a long jaunt around the USA opening for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Kevin Ayers was exhausted from the grind of touring, quit Soft Machine, announced he was retiring from the music business, sold his bass to Noel Redding and retreated to the hippy haven of Ibiza. Ayers had contributed much of the material for The Soft Machine, and had obviously impressed Hendrix, who presented him with an acoustic Gibson J-200 guitar on the last night of the tour, extracting a promise that Ayers would continue with the writing.
More than eighteen months later (Ayers was never a bloke to hurry about things, and I’ve seen his personality described as laissez-faire sloth) he was back in London at Abbey Road Studios cutting his first solo album with a little help from Robert Wyatt (drums) and David Bedford, who did the arrangements and contributed piano and mellotron. Ayers looked after the guitar and most of the bass parts, Softs mates Mike Ratledge and Hugh Hopper turned up on Song for Insane Times and the whole exercise cost the Harvest label a reasonably hefty £4000.
Eighteen months in the Mediterranean with an acoustic guitar is almost certain to produce something a fair bit more laid back than the manic organ/bass/drums conflagration that characterised his former outfit (they’d been known to do something like We Did It Again for a quarter of an hour when opening for Hendrix in the States) and from the start of the album it’s obvious he’s headed in another direction. Joy of a Toy Continued is an infectious la la singalong instrumental that bears absolutely no resemblance to the Softs as far as the instrumentation goes (brass, woodwinds, bass and drums, not an organ in sight) and not too much to the track on The Soft Machine that it supposedly continues. It is, however, something of an ear-worm.
Woodwinds and strings lead into Town Feeling and odd guitar solos fill in between verses that seem to be setting out to evoke a rural community where there might be something lurking below the surface. Today, the town seems like a tomb / Everybody’s locked up in his room delivers a hint of something, anyway. There is, however, nothing covert about The Clarietta Rag, a jaunty little pop number complete with a fuzz guitar solo over what sounds like a trombone wheezing away.
There isn’t anything ambiguous about Girl on a Swing, a slice of summery love song with piano and odd mellotron tones Very much in the spirit of the times assuming you weren’t getting down with the revolutionary rhetoric. Not much of that in the sunny Mediterranean, particularly in outposts of Franco’s Spain.
His old colleagues from Soft Machine join Ayers for Song for Insane Times which takes a pot shot at pseudo-liberated narcissistic groovers joining in the chorus of I Am the Walrus, while Stop This Train (Again Doing It) delivers a six minute nightmare about a train that never stops and accelerates into some trademark Mike Ratledge strangled organ through the manic soloing that comprises the second half of the track. Eleanor's Cake (Which Ate Her) delivers a gentle dreamy acoustic number with springtime flutes and leads directly into The Lady Rachel, another five minutes of nocturnal ramblings with an interesting instrumental break and a charmingly sunny chorus.
Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong takes a semi-robotic bass and drum riff, marries it to two of Benny Hill's Ladybirds vocalising a Malaysian folk-song and then heads off into increasingly avant garde otherworldliness to end up in a chaotic discordant-edge mess. From there you need something to wind things up on a more positive note. All This Crazy Gift of Time manages to do that very well indeed, winding up an album that’s full of invention and variety.
Predictably, with the album proper out of the way it’s off into bonus track territory, starting with the charming 1970 single Singing A Song In The Morning, which follows on nicely from All This Crazy Gift of Time in a way these things don’t always manage to. A Top Gear session delivers a Whole World version of Clarence in Wonderland with a vocal contribution from Robert Wyatt, a Stop This Train that also features the Whole World with Coxhill wailing away and Bedford chipping in with odd discordant piano motifs, a reworked Why Are We Sleeping that veers off into Whole World avant garde free jazz territory and a maddening little ditty called You Say You Like My Hat featuring (I think) Robert Wyatt on kazoo.
When it comes to bonus tracks, two separate copies of an album have been known to deliver two sets of those buggers as well. The 2003 CD re-release came bundled with two alternate takes of The Lady Rachel (a longer orchestral version from the Odd Ditties compilation and a slightly shorter single version that seemingly didn’t make it onto the marketplace), three takes of Singing a Song in the Morning (two of them labelled as Religious Experience, one of which features the alleged presence of Syd Barrett) and Soon Soon Soon, all of which are nice to have but don’t add a great deal to the album itself.
Taken as a whole, Joy of a Toy comes across as very much a product of its era, which for someone who lived through the period in question isn’t a bad thing, though those unfamiliar with or daunted by exposure to whimsical English psychedelia may find their mileage varies substantially.
While it’s not Ayers’ masterwork (and there’s a fair body of opinion that would suggest he never managed to deliver one) Toy’s syncretic blend of English music hall elements, warped pop sensibilities, Malayan and Mediterranean languor, lysergic psychedelia, and the French i indicated a potential that was worth further investigation.
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