18 January : Forget About Emancipation, It’s Just Imagination

The story goes that when Kevin Ayers decided to leave Soft Machine after touring as Jimi Hendrix’s guest support band in the US, Hendrix gave Ayers a Gibson acoustic and instructed him to keep writing songs. The first fruit of that was Joy of a Toy, yet another album released in late 1969 but only reviewed in early 1970.

Until I started this project, I hadn’t heard Joy of a Toy but I used to have and play regularly his third album, Whatevershebringswesing, which I really liked. The Guardian, in 2013, reprinted an earlier interview with Ayers from 2008 in which the album was described as ‘a piece of psychedelic whimsy’. Wikipedia talks of Ayers’s ‘whimsical and singular vision’ and developed his ‘avant-garde song construction.’ Melody Maker (17 January 1970) talks of the ‘warm, hazy and sometimes sinister feel of songs half-remembered from distant childhood.’

I can understand where those reviewers got that, and yet I’m not sure any of them do justice to the album. It is certainly very English. I should not have been at all surprised had the opening track, Joy of a Toy Continued featured the voice of Ray Davis, just as it features the descending bass riff from Waterloo Sunset. The Clarietta Rag is the sound of someone who half-remembers Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite. Several other songs feature Ayers crooning over lounge music passed through a Soft Machine filter–which is much more listenable than the description suggests.

Like the work of all singular artists, the music is in its time but, for the most part, not of its time, and the song construction, far from being avant-garde, is mostly conventional, though the instrumentation is eccentric. Listening to it a second time, I had the odd sensation that I could hear all the songs the album influenced being born. If I’d listened to it without knowing who it was, I’d have guessed either The Jazz Butcher or someone on the outer fringes of Britpop.

‘A gem’, Melody Maker called the album and I think that’s fair. I’d probably want to lose some of the stranger instruments, but it’s hard to resist the tongue-in-cheek absurdity and joie de vivre of the thing.

It’s all on Spotify, complete with bonus tracks.