I’ve been listening to a lot of Kevin Ayers records for the last week or so: it’s been strange hearing him discussed on the radio and in the mainstream media, as I’d always assumed he was very much a niche interest. Maybe it’s the years I spent waiting to acquire a copy of the Whatevershebringswesing LP, until BGO finally reissued it in the 1988. The first two of those three albums that Ayers made with David Bedford (Joy of a Toy & Shooting at the Moon) have been part of my musical subconscious since I was 15 or so, and all three still sound fascinating.

One of many intriguing things about Ayers is the way that he surrounded himself with very talented but diverse people, and then he seemed pretty much to get drunk in the middle of them all and try to be himself, while they attempted to make coherent sense of it for an audience. Lots of people in pop music try that and fail spectacularly; somehow by force of charisma and some very good songs Ayers pulled it off, some of the time at least.  But then his band were very talented indeed: in 1970 it was David Bedford (already a successful avant-garde composer), Lol Coxhill (free improv legend), Mike Oldfield (aged 17), and a succession of drummers, including Robert Wyatt who would fill in when no-one else could. A group like that is never going to hold together for long, but when it comes into focus the music still sounds like nothing else. Thank you Kevin Ayers for being a wise drunken fool, for lending Oldfield a tape recorder so that he could figure out how to make Tubular Bells, and for making some great records. Thank you very … much.

Yesterday was the first full meeting of the bass culture team, and one of the many conclusions we came to is that Bass Culture isn’t really a very helpful description of what we’re trying to do. Simple oppositions between treble and bass, melody and accompaniment, oral and literate, or even traditional and, um … not traditional, don’t necessarily provide a useful framework for describing what’s going on in the music.

Oh, I almost forgot - the Mackintosh CDs have arrived! Physical copies (containing detailed notes on the music, which you really need) will be for sale here and elsewhere very soon; downloads from iTunes from 11 March.