The Deià Cemetery

 

Found this pic on line by chance; is there any other way? I don't look up gravesites normally. Just looking for Kevin Ayers' videos. If you share my taste (?) in music then maybe these makeshift markers and the sun bleached stones will make some kind of sense to you.  The graves are up on a hillside village in the north of Majorca. It's a bit of an "artists" cementerio apparently. It's also possible that none of their human remains are actually there, considering their often chaotic lifestyles. The joke's on us. Perhaps. They did live there as part of a loosely constructed artistic community for a while in the 80s.

I did find the video. An odd line up of  Kevin Ayres, Ollie Halshall, Andy Summers, Zanna Gregmar, John Cale and various others gigging in Spain.

Kevin Ayers is of course fairly well remembered as the boozy, melancolic songwriter, quirky genius and erratic performer that he eventually turned out truly to be. In what always was a mixed career in music, he was a founding member of Soft Machine (still going in some form or other). And as he lurched from one thing to another, always remained an influence on all sorts of musos. Maybe even me. I recall that at high school everybody had a copy of Soft Machine Third, but by then Kevin Ayers was long gone and scuba diving in the Far East somewhere. He came back eventually and put out more dry, whimsical and mostly goodish tunes.

Ollie Halsall is maybe less well known but he was an incredible musician and brilliant guitar player. (Lots of odd stuff here). He had a techinque and a range that made him sound like no one else. His distinctive lyrical runs and dynamic, highly fluid bursts of playing are quite incredible at times. He played in the Kevin Ayers band and with the rock group Patto and of course made some of the music for the infamous Ruttles. He led a colourful sort of life and died young, well he was in his 40s. 

Both Ayers and Halsall seem to have consumed almost industrial amounts of drugs and alcohol in their lives. Their later work maybe a little more tricky to access than their early stuff - a common problem in the rock world as the years pass. It's a wonder that they lived as long as they did ... which wasn't all that long in the scheme of things. RIP etc. assuming this is the actual resting place.