Kevin Ayers "The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories" (4*)

In my reading of the Kevin Ayers story, three albums into his career Ayers had gone for something approaching mainstream success with his fourth (Bananamour), largely, I think, on the basis that if certain of his notional peers could do it (and here we note the relative successes of Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells) why couldn’t he? A bit of tweaking around the edges and, well, you never know. Stranger things have happened...

And when Bananamour once again failed to move significant quantities you might conclude the problem lies with the label and start looking at a switch. Island Records were known to lavish money on developing and promoting their own artists, but that sort of generosity usually comes at a price and the price usually involves supervision and a degree of diminution in the old artistic freedom.

In this case that meant Ayers was absent from the producer’s chair, with his place taken by  Rupert Hine. It also meant there was money to throw around, which goes a long way to explaining the presence of a few more notable names alongside the usual suspects. Mike Ratledge and Mike Oldfield are back, but they’re joined by a substantial array of session players.

Mike Giles (ex-King Crimson) gets to sit behind the drum kit, but there are three bassists (John Perry, John Gustafson and Trevor Jones), three other guitarists alongside Oldfield and Patto man Ollie Halsall and a whole slew of keyboard players and backing singers. Throw in Lol Coxhill on sax Geoff Richardson’s viola, Ray Cooper on percussion and a guest vocal appearance from Nico and Ayers has plenty of sonic elements to work with.

The commercial aspirations are fairly obvious from the start of Day By Day, full of funky pop elements, with punchy backing vocals and a catchy hook, and See You Later definitely channels the Bonzo Dog Band before running straight into Didn't Feel Lonely Till I Thought Of You, one of Ayers’s all-time classics, with a superb guitar solo from Ollie Halsall. Up to that point I was unconvinced about the changed approach, but here we’re back in a familiar environment with added punch from the female chorus. Ayers at his best.

Not quite in the same boat, but definitely in familiar territory Everybody's Sometime And Some People's All The Time Blues matches a typical Ayers ballad with a subdued bluesy treatment and a delicate guitar solo (Oldfield this time around). Equally familiar is the introductory lyric in It Begins With A Blessing / Once I Awakened / But It Ends With A Curse, a much more bombastic reworking of The Soft Machine’s Why Are We Sleeping, complete with night club interlude (alto sax by Lol Coxhill) and a grandiose hard rock church organ climax that needs something after it to settle things down. Thirty seconds of Ballbearing Blues might be a throwaway of little consequence or substance but it does the job.

The album’s showpiece, however, is the four part suite labelled The Confessions Of Doctor Dream that starts off with Irreversible Neural Damage but actually isn’t a suite at all, rather four distinct songs segued and crossfaded to create a larger entity. This is presumably the result of pressure from higher up the pecking order since Ayers has gone on record as stating it wasn’t his idea.


A vocal duet with Nico, Irreversible Neural Damage runs over the top of a layer of acoustic guitars and spacey synthesised sound effects, delivering a creepy atmosphere that’s as sinister as the title is presumably meant to suggest before an electric guitar lick segues into Invitation, another moody piece that morphs into The One Chance Dance, complete with childish chorus and freak out before Ratledge's organ takes over the running.

The final section, Doctor Dream Theme matches a menacing vocal to a threatening riff, a five minute psychodrama that gyrates slowly and was presumably intended to pick up some of the Dark Side of the Moon audience. When it’s done the album proper runs out with Two Goes Into Four, an acoustic ballad that winds things up as it morphs itself into Hey Jude.

Non-album singles kick off the inevitable bonus tracks, with The Up Song bopping along quite pleasantly, though one doubts it was ever likely to garner massive airplay. After the Show seems to be about a groupie or similar creature, but, again, one doubts the actual commercial. The B side, Thank You Very Much, is a subtle reflective whisper, while four tracks recorded on 7 July 1974 at the BBC's Maida Vale studios (mightn’t start off very promisingly with a snippet called Another Whimsical Song (Really? Who’d have thought?) before a masterful acoustic rendition of The Lady Rachel. Ollie Halsall’s lead guitar shines on a reworked Stop this Train and he’s even better on a total shredding of Didn't Feel Lonely Till I Thought of You, a definite keeper if ever I heard one.

Ayers mightn’t have held the album in high esteem, and from where he was sitting (having watched while his artistic instincts were seemingly overruled, that notional four-part suite and all) you can see where he was coming from, but...

Having worked through the first five Ayers albums in some depth, having landed The Harvest Years 1969-1974 set, however, what we’ve got here is the most commercial outing of the five, and the switch to Island definitely seems to have been made with a view to maximising sales and/or impact. It mightn’t have worked out quite the way he’d hoped or anticipated, but, for mine, it worked out pretty well.

Vivian Stanshall "Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead" (4*, but approach with caution)

So, what does an artist do when the record company only presses  5,000 copies your debut solo album, Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead, then promptly deletes it?

Bear in mind, before you answer that question, the company in question was Warner Brothers, an outfit whose Stateside roster included such hip but relatively low-selling names as Ry Cooder, Randy Newman and Little Feat, all of whom went on to move a relatively substantial number of units but never managed sales figures that matched their critical acclaim.

A sensitive artistic type might perhaps slink off to lick his wounds in some dingy garret, but Vivian Stanshall was hardly the shrinking artistic violet, was he? No, if you're the man behind the more extreme dadaist tendencies of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band (not that any of the other key players in the Bonzos was exactly straight) you destroy their boardroom and place a bag of bluebottle maggots behind the label president's office radiator. Cop that, young Harry!

On the other hand, even a cursory listen to Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead would, however, prompt the average listener to agree that, yes, I can understand the reservations. Those other names on the Warner Brothers roster had something approaching commercial potential, but on Men, Mr Stanshall, freed from the relative restraining collaborative influence of Neil Innes, his main collaborator in the Bonzo era, headed off to investigate the outer reaches of his considerable imagination.

Exposure to other expressions of the same outré adventurism would have the listener knowing what to expect, but, with the exception of the original Rawlinson's End on the Bonzos contractual obligation Let's Make Up and Be Friendly most of those expressions came after Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead.

While Innes was there through sessions at The Manor, Trident and Apple Studios, as were Traffic (at this point Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, Ric Grech, Gaspar Lawal and Rebop Kwaku Baah) and in the absence of co-writers (apart from the opening Afoju Ti Ole Riran (Dead Eyes), co-written with Gaspar Lawal) everything was written and arranged by Stanshall and, not to put too fine a point on it, it shows. Where you could count on Innes to deliver a veneer of commerciality or pop sensibility, what's on offer here veers off towards territory where the buses don't run without quite getting there and while it's not as confronting as it might have been it's hardly Top 40 potential either.

What is there, however, is the Stanshall verbal imagination, expressed in words that don't quite fit in the standard rock'n'roll lexicon and contain frequent references to the Stanshall virile member.

From the opening Afoju Ti Ole Riran (Dead Eyes) which you can’t help reading as a burst of invective against his record company in particular, the music industry in general or Western Society as a whole (or, indeed, all three) through to the concluding Strange Tongues (they’ve tacked both sides of the Lakonga / Baba Tunde single onto the end as bonus tracks, but Strange Tongues is the actual conclusion of the actual album) you’re in the recorded presence of one of the great English eccentrics, a man whose mind roamed paths that exist somewhere on the other side of linguistic inventiveness.

Swingin’ jowls, a puke-box & an ulcer here, the Avant-Gardener pruning his beard over there, one’s left wishing someone had the foresight to declare the man an International Treasure and do something to ensure his survival.

Much of it was, of course, fuelled by drink, and there’s probably no way he was going to live through to a ripe old age, but take Men, follow it with a visit to Sir Henry at Rawlinson End and an excursion to the high veld and Ndidi’s Kraal and place a tick beside the observation that Teddy Boys Don’t Knit and you can’t help wishing someone had been around to ensure more of Stanshall’s imaginings were preserved for posterity.

Oh, and if you're inclined to head over to iTunes and investigate further, click on the one with the copyright notice that reads Estate of Vivian Stanshall 2012...

Doug Sahm and the Tex-Mex Trip "Groovers Paradise" (4*)

After his collaborations with Jerry Wexler and an all-star cast on Doug Sahm & Band and Texas Tornado failed to do the job Doug Sahm aligned himself with the Creedence Clearwater Revival rhythm section (Doug Clifford, drums, and Stu Cook, bass) and the result is a collection of songs espousing the glories of the Texas hippie lifestyle that skip across generic borders through pastoral blues, R&B, rock, country, norteño, with a dash of Cajun through multi-instrumentalist Link Davis Jr’s Cosmic Cajun Trips.

From the opening choogle of Groover's Paradise the theme’s obvious and while there are people out there with a Devil Heart there are always Houston Chicks to soothe the soul of a dude who’s done what he’s done For the Sake of Rock 'N' Roll!


Now, you might reckon there’s a tongue firmly wedged in cheek here, but a read through Texas Tornado (Jan Reid with Shawn Sahm, University of Texas Press, 2010) will reveal not only did Sir Doug live the rock’n’roll lifestyle to the hilt, he did it without doing an actual day’s work right up to his death aged 58 in November 1999. On that basis he had plenty of time to enjoy the Beautiful Texas Sunshine, while a long term residential address close to legendary waterhole the Soap Creek Saloon would provide ample opportunity to Just Groove Me and an abundance to check out whether Girls Today (Don't Like to Sleep Alone). We’re not talking politically correct here, folks.

There’s the cheerful brass driven La Cacahuata, a touch of wistfulness on Her Dream Man Never Came and while these things don’t always work out the way they should, and you can have nights when the keg is hard on your head, if you Catch Me in the Morning we should be able to sort out a few things the singer now regrets.

Throughout the album we’re looking at a guy who’s been there, done that, wrote the book and is waiting to star in the movie (he released his first record at the ripe old age of eleven back in 1952) and has an instinctive mastery of the genres he’s exploring. That doesn’t mean everything he turns his hand to works out the way it should, but when it does there aren’t too many who can deliver the same good time vibe with the same joyous groove.

On Groovers Paradise it’s present in abundance.