Kevin Ayers - Joy Of A Toy (1969)

Founder member of Soft Machine and a key figure in British psychedelic rock.
Kevin Ayers's debut solo album, Joy of a Toy, released in 1969, concluded with a song called All This Crazy Gift of Time. "All my blond and twilight dreams," sang Ayers in his signature, slightly wayward baritone, "all those strangled future schemes, all those glasses drained of wine ..."
In retrospect, it sounds like a statement of intent, though intent is perhaps too strong a word to apply to Ayers, whose singular songwriting talent was matched by a sometimes startling lack of ambition. "I lost it years ago; a long, long time ago," he told one interviewer in 2007, referring to his lack of ego and self-belief. "But, in a way, I don't think I've ever had it."
Ayers, who has been found dead at the age of 68 at his home in the medieval village of Montolieu in south-west France, was one of the great almost-stars of British rock. A founding member of Soft Machine, he was a key figure in the birth of British pastoral psychedelia, and then went on to enjoy cult status as a singer-songwriter in the late 1960s and early 70s. Among his champions were the late John Peel and the influential British rock journalist Nick Kent, who later wrote: "Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett were the two most important people in British pop music. Everything that came after came from them."
Ayers was born in Herne Bay, Kent, the son of the journalist, poet and BBC producer Rowan Ayers, who later originated the BBC2 rock music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test. After his parents divorced and his mother married a civil servant, Ayers spent most of his childhood in Malaysia, where, he would later admit, he discovered a fondness for the slow and easy life.
At 12, he returned to Britain and settled in Canterbury. There, he became a fledgling musician and founder of the "Canterbury sound", an often whimsical English take on American psychedelia that merged jazz, folk, pop and nascent progressive rock.
Ayers's first band was the Wilde Flowers, whose line-up included various future members of Caravan as well as Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper, with whom he would go on to form Soft Machine in 1966. Alongside Pink Floyd, Soft Machine played regularly at the UFO club in London, becoming one of the key underground groups of the time.
In 1968, the group toured the US in support of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a brush with rock stardom and relentless gigging that left the laid-back Ayers weary and disillusioned. He sold his Fender bass guitar to Hendrix's sideman Noel Redding, and fled to Ibiza with fellow Soft Machine maverick Daevid Allen. There he wrote the songs that would make up Joy of a Toy. It set the tone for much of what was to follow: Ayers's sonorous voice enunciating songs that ran the gamut from wilfully weird to oddly catchy, the whole not quite transcending the sum of the many varied and musically adventurous parts.
(Full version: www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/20/kevin-ayers)