Credit: Dangerous Minds / Cherry Red Records / Kevin Ayers

Kevin Ayers was one of those beautiful, reluctant geniuses the British psych scene seemed to conjure out of thin air in the late 1960s.

A founding member of Soft Machine, Ayers bailed before the band got too serious, preferring beaches and wine to endless tours and egos. The guy had a voice like melted chocolate spiked with hash oil—languid, woozy, aristocratic—and a songwriting style that made childlike wonder feel like it had taken acid and moved to Ibiza. He was friends with everyone from Brian Eno to Syd Barrett, Nico, and John Cale. He could’ve been huge, but he didn’t chase fame. His albums are patchy, brilliant, frustrating, deeply human.

To me, ‘The Lady Rachel’ is one of Ayers’ finest and most haunting compositions – a dreamscape of a song, co-written with David Bedford and Peter Jenner, soaked in tape delay, backwards guitars, and a kind of hallucinogenic melancholy that sticks to your skin. There’s an eerie calm to it, like Syd Barrett covering Scott Walker in a velvet-curtained crypt. First released in 1969, the track floated like a ghost through Ayers’ catalogue, reappearing in different incarnations, each one stranger and more beautiful than the last.

‘The Lady Rachel’ is one of those tracks that doesn’t hit you straight on, it sort of seeps in through the floorboards. The first time I heard it, I thought my record player was broken. Everything felt like it was dragging in slow motion. Ayers isn’t singing so much as murmuring from the other side of the mirror. It’s not catchy. It’s not even friendly. But it gets under your skin and stays there.

When the great Kevin Ayers died in 2013, I checked YouTube to see if there was a vintage live clip of him performing my favourite song from 1969’s prog rock milestone Joy of a Toy. There wasn’t, but a few weeks later, a kind soul posted this humdinger of a performance from Belgium in 1975.

Ayers, with a band including Zoot Money and Ollie Hassell, does an astonishing 12-minute-long performance in the clip below. If you’re a Kevin Ayers fan, you’ll plotz. The quality is great, too.

The thing that I wondered about is the audience murmuring among themselves at the song’s start. Who the hell would have talked during Kevin Ayers in his prime? Idiots!

When Ayers died in 2013, he left behind a body of work that still glows in the right corners – dusty record shops, late-night college radio, the YouTube accounts of strange, generous archivists. There’s a weird grace in how Ayers disappeared. He lived, loved, sang, and slipped offstage without making a fuss. But those songs, those moments, they linger like smoke.

So, enjoy 12 minutes of peak Ayers. The sound is tight, the camera lingers, and if you love this song, this is the version you want to see.