KEVIN AYERS & THE WHOLE WORLD: SHOOTING AT THE MOON

The sole album featuring Kevin's short-lived touring band, The Whole World, is a dizzy world tour veering through gentle Ayers pop on the one hand (Clarence In Wonderland, May I?) to interesting avant-garde instrumentals such as Underwater and Pisser Dans Un Violon - the instrumentals showing the influence of recent Soft Machine experiments as well as early Floyd and musique concrete. The songs themselves range from recently-composed material to old archival stuff dating from Kevin's time in the Soft Machine (versions of some of which appear on the Jet Propelled Photographs demos from 1967, back when Daevid Allen was in the group). A confident building on the potential of Ayers' debut, this is definitely one for fans of early Soft Machine and 60s psychedelia.