Kevin Ayers - Yes We Have No Mananas (1976) {2009 remaster}
By 1975 the worlds of rock and pop had parted like the proverbial Red Sea. Progressive Rock was close to its nemesis, luxuriating in the global successes of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and countless other bands that swarmed in their wake. Meantime the British charts were filled with such gems as Windsor Davies and Don Estelle's "Whispering Grass", "If" by Telly Savalas, Mud and the Bay City Rollers. The notion that pop songs could be knowing and cool had been lost amidst, on the one hand a welter of 25 minute epics and guitar histrionics and on the other a mix of teen manipulation and variety turns.
Midst such polarity it's perhaps not surprising that Kevin Ayers was something of a little boy lost. An engaging if quirky songwriter, Ayers, had started in that hippest of Canterbury outfits, The Soft Machine, touring America with them in support of Jimi Hendrix before departing for the hedonistic climes of Ibiza - in the days when it was still cultured in a Robert Graves kind of way and exotically remote. From this base he would periodically emerge with a clutch of new songs to cut an album with a bewilderingly eclectic array of talent including the free-form saxophonist Lol Coxhill, boy-wonder guitarist Mike Oldfield, Gong's Steve Hillage and classical composer and arranger David Bedford.
"Yes We Have No Mananas", released in 1976, is possibly Ayers' most mainstream album. It is a glorious collection of songs which are by turns knowing, slightly cynical and occasionally snarling, in a louche kind of way. Many are about the age-old trials of love and loss whilst others like "Star", "Mr Cool" and the memorable "Ballad of Mr Snake" seem sly digs at the industry he worked in. Ayers' rich baritone voice, surely even more elegant than Bryan Ferry's, gives his witty songs and wonderful melodies a timeless lounge-lizard feel. But if this is pop marooned in a sea of Physical Graffiti and Tobergraphic Oceans, it is quality stuff, splendidly played with Family's Rob Townshend and Charlie McCracken from Taste providing the rhythm section on many tracks and featuring the much missed Ollie Halsall's power-pop guitar and searing solos.
"If you want to be a star, start shining, shine on...unless you are prepared to die, don't try for a star" sings Ayers on the opening track. Perhaps thankfully he wasn't. Overlooked and underrated, nearly thirty years on, quite unfashionably this album still twinkles.
Paul Kelly
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