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“The bugger within the quick sleeves fucked my spouse / Did it fast, then break up…” John Cale’s infamous opening to his 1975 music “Guts” described Kevin Ayers’ seduction of his spouse Cindy, the previous Miss Cinderella of the GTOs, the night time earlier than he and Ayers had been as a result of share a stage in London. It grew to become the incident for which the June 1, 1974 live performance on the Rainbow Theatre could be greatest remembered by rock historians.
JONI MITCHELL IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE!
The thought for the live performance was cooked up over a lunch for 5 at an Italian restaurant referred to as Gatamelata on Kensington Excessive Avenue. On the desk had been Ayers, Cale, Nico, Brian Eno, and me. The date was Could 13, which tells you the way a lot spontaneity was concerned in placing the occasion collectively.
A couple of months earlier, I’d joined Island as head of A&R. Cale and Nico had simply been let go by Warner Bros, and each had been amongst my early signings. It appeared apparent to ask Brian Eno (and Phil Manzanera, his erstwhile Roxy Music colleague) to work with them within the studio. The recording of Cale’s Worry was effectively underway and the periods for Nico’s The Finish had been about to start, each albums being made at Sound Strategies in Chelsea, with the good studio engineer John Wooden.
Ayers had already been signed by my predecessor, Muff Winwood, and his first album for the label, The Confessions Of Dr Dream And Different Tales, was about to be launched. There have been excessive hopes, after his two albums with Delicate Machine and 4 as a solo artist, of relaunching him to a wider viewers, capitalising on his louche beauty, seductive baritone voice and charmingly off-centre songs. Possibly there was a hedonistic, post-hippie Scott Walker in there someplace.
As we sat all the way down to lunch, Kevin was three weeks away from launching his album with a live performance on the Rainbow. Reasonably than simply including the same old nondescript assist act, I assumed it could be extra fascinating to show the night into one thing resembling the bundle exhibits of the early ’60s. It will create advance publicity for the primary Island efforts of Cale and Nico whereas additionally serving to Eno, who was within the early phases of setting up a brand new post-Roxy profession for himself, having launched Right here Come The Heat Jets initially of the yr.
The announcement provoked a stir within the UK’s 5 weekly music papers, now largely staffed by writers who knew concerning the Velvets and the Delicate Machine. Visitors within the backing band would come with Mike Oldfield and Robert Wyatt. The live performance offered out rapidly. It will be one of many occasions of the summer time for London’s scenemakers, adopted by comparable, barely extra modest live shows in Birmingham and Manchester just a few days later. It may additionally be a good suggestion, I assumed, to document the Rainbow gig and put an album out rapidly, as a type of official bootleg.
Regardless of the pre-concert confrontation between Ayers and Cale, the night went effectively. John Wooden and I, sitting within the Island cell recording truck parked within the alley behind the theatre, noticed the proceedings solely on a small, fuzzy black-and-white TV monitor, from a single fastened digicam. We spent the subsequent three nights mixing and modifying the performances into an album that hit the outlets on June 28, precisely 4 weeks later. There was no post-production: no overdubbing, no fixing of errors, no sprucing. Any deficiencies in <June 1, 1974> had been all the way down to me, because the producer. And half a century later, I’ve virtually forgiven whoever on the NME got here up with a brilliantly ego-deflating acronym for the 4 stars: ACNE.
Richard Williams is on the panel for a fiftieth anniversary celebration of June 1, 1974 at London’s The Social on June 1, alongside Phil Manzanera, John Altman, Galen Ayers and Uncut’s Allan Jones, with stay performances by Emma Tricca and Darren Hayman
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