Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 187

Record label: Harvest

Produced: Peter Jenner

Recorded: EMI Studios, London; 1969

Released: November 1969

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Kevin Ayers (g, v); Robert Wyatt (d); Mike Ratledge (k); Hugh Hopper (b); Rob Tait (d); David Bedford (k, p); Peter Mew, Sean Murphy, Ian Knight (e)

Track listing: Joy Of A Toy; Town Feeling; Clarietta Rag; Girl On A Swing; Song For Insane Times; Stop This Train (Again Doing It); Eleanor’s Cake (Which Ate Her); Lady Rachel; Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong; All This Crazy Gift Of Time

Running time: 41.30

Current CD: Harvest 5827762 adds: Religious Experience (Sing A Song In The Morning); The Lady Rachel (extended first mix remix); Soon Soon Soon; Religious Experience (Sing A Song In The Morning); The Lady Rachel (single version); Sing A Song In The Morning (single version)

Further listening: Whatevershebringswesing (1970)

Further reading: Why Are We Sleeping fanzine; www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ marwak/ (fan site)

Download: HMV Digital; iTunes

Taking its name from a track on Soft Machine One, which in turn had been taken from an Ornette Coleman composition, Joy Of A Toy evocatively captured its performer before he was burdened with the trappings of cultdom or the requirements of trying to be a pop star. Although he’d retreated to Majorca to write the songs for this album, only the singalong title track, The Clarietta Rag, and Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong convey any sense of carefree sunny climes (and the latter was mainly a legacy of Ayers’s colonial upbringing in Malaya, at that). In fact Joy Of A Toy is an unmistakably English, at times (as on the sombre Town Feeling) resolutely urban record full of drizzly streets and hungover memories of last night’s party.

Song For Insane Times, a bittersweet freeze frame full of astute cameos, perfectly captures the post-Summer Of Love spirit of ennui, disillusion and detachment that was abroad in the late-’60s. Both lyrically and musically it would have sat easily on Soft Machine Two had Ayers stayed with the band he helped form. (Incidentally, the voice captured in a snatch of studio dialogue at the beginning of Song For Insane Times, for a long time rumoured to be Syd Barrett, is in fact Robert Wyatt.) Lady Rachel, a mainstay of Ayers’s live set, was written for his daughter. Girl On A Swing shimmers like heat haze on a summer’s day with some beautifully delicate piano played by arranger David Bedford (soon to join Ayers’s band The Whole World). Stop This Train (Again Doing It) was, like Why Are We Sleeping? on Soft Machine One, inspired by the teachings of Gurdjieff, the mystic and philosopher who has also inspired the music of Robert Fripp, Kate Bush and Keith Jarrett, among others.

‘Gurdjieff ’s teachings were the lightning bolts that formulated my later ideas,’ Ayers told MOJO. ‘You develop a fairly comfortable little story and then slip something startling in as if nothing had happened.’ Joy Of A Toy is full of such moments. As the man once said, ‘Banana’.