Kevin Ayres

So the sardonic king of sunshine has left us for good. A founder member of Soft Machine, he also led The Whole World (lead guitarist Mike Oldfield) and managed to record a string of charming, quirky and avant-garde albums although he claimed to be work-shy, and had a tendency to vanish between albums or tours. He told me once that he used to think living the easy life in the sunshine was the way to live. "Now I'm fucking sure it's the way!"

Ken Loach unbanned



The unlikely venue of Bath City Clubhouse hosted a rare showing of three banned Ken Loach films on Friday 1^st February, just the job for your blogger, who is a bit of a Loach completist. After the director identified himself as an unequivocal supporter of Bath City FC, the night opened with a trip back to the black-and-white 'sixties; a documentary made with Tony Garnett for Save The Children and London Weekend TV which turned out to be a call for an end to the injustices that put children in harm’s way, and the relationship between class politics and and charities; more polemical rather than the expected celebration of the Charity’s fiftieth anniversary; simultaneously an unintentionally funny exposure of the charity workers, no matter how well-intentioned they were, as upper-class and patronising. Also one made for LWT during the Miners’ Strike, which inescapably included lots of footage of police brutality. This was too hairy for Melvin Bragg and his fellows at the TV station; More embarrassing for them might have been the question implied: ‘If the police were only following orders, who gave the orders?’