Masterclass with Bread and Jam: THE KINKS FILE

In 1978 the only thing I knew about The Kinks was a chapter in a years old book about British pop and that leader Ray Davies was acting like an embittered has-been: he upturned his table in a nightclub when the act on stage played a version of Tired of Waiting for You, taking the title as a snipe about him being a has been. The book chapter mixed an admiration for his work with a condemnation of what was then considered his downward spiral into alcohol. Then two things happened.

The first was Van Halen's cover version of You Really Got Me, their hit debut in Australia. I heard the tail end on the radio and thought I was hearing the original for the first time and couldn't believe how contemporary it sounded. Then I saw the clip of Zepellin wannabes and looked through them into the song which bashed its way with primal rage.

The second thing that happened was a clip of The Kinks doing their new single Sleepwalker on Countdown. Same kind of chunky chord guitar assault but with a vocal far more compelling than the cover version of YRGM. Something had to be done.

Win came to the rescue with an old compilation from his sister's collection which he taped for me.

The compression on the TEAC tape deck in the rumpus room really pumped the old recordings and the opening snarl of You Really Got Me burst out. And then when the weird guitar riff scanscion changes with the entry of the vocals and everything is locked into the new rhythm this relatively tiny production feels enormous. Nothing else I'd heard from that early in the 60s had anything like that power. Early 60s? It trumped the Van Halen version, making it sound like Cracker Night in a one ute town.

The compilation was a frustrating one, probably a mix of whatever was easily to hand and relatively licence free to use on release. There were great moments but also bewileringly naff ones. I needed more.

But if the Beatles back catalogue had been hard to find a few years before the Kinks' was impossible. You couldn't even find the more recent ones apart from Sleepwalker. I didn't get Sleepwalker, even though it was well written up everywhere because I didn't want the single to be a fluke and wanted to start at the beginning. I knew even then that I probably wouldn't have got into the Beatles if I'd only heard Wings or Walls and Bridges. And one day it happened.

I went into town with Mum and splintered off as usual to haunt the record shops. There in Palings I found The Kinks File, fresh as the morning's bread. It was a double with every single they'd released in the UK in the 60s. It was about nine dollars. I had three on me. I must have expected to find nothing of interest. After we got back home I raided my cash I nagged Mum to take me back into town. Mine!

That night Mum stopped me for a peculiar moment, hinting, as I worked out later, that she thought I'd been going back for drugs. If she'd been observant she would've noticed the record in my hands (encased in its period-correct  Palings paper bag) that contained something far more dangerous than THC.

It was a yardwork free Saturday and (with Stephen at Uni in Brisbane) I had the rumpus room to myself. On went the disc, down went the needle.

The Kinks' version of Long Tall Sally is history's worst. Regardless of how you rate the Beatles you'd have to agree that their version of the Little Richard number eclipses the original and can only be helpfully described as blistering. The Kinks' first single is a strange murmured version, the kind of thing a hipster duo would do now and succeed with. I have only heard it in its entirety in the last two years as it was part of the Kinks in Mono box set, failing to make even the multi disc compilations in the meantime. The unignorable fact of it is that The Kinks could not have been unaware of the fabs' version when they did their own. And then they went ahead with it. A lifelong conundrum.

After that this compilation fulfils the following requirements of compilation albums: it's instructive, it's compelling, it's fun.

My first impressions:

1. The production standards plummet below George Martin's work for the Beatles. At first this feels cheap but as the sides progress it assumes its own flavour. As soon as the brash opening of You Really Got Me stutters to life more and more intention appears in the smaller scale scene.

(On this pressing the sound was tinny and hollow. It fed back if I turned it up. If this had been almost any band but the Kinks it would have been the end of my fandom. Anyone who bangs on about the innate superiority of the vinyl experience should give these discs a spin. Bad mastering always equals bad listening, vinyl, cd, cassette, wax cylinder or stone tape. If you see this auctioned for a lot of money, go and find a recent remastered cd compilation and thank me later.)

2. After the embarrassing misstep of Long Tall Sally Ray Davies completes a lightning practical course in Beatlesque songcraft. Then, when You Really Got Me happens and Tired of Waiting For You soon after he has cleared his apprenticeship and breaks his own path, a lonely one until following generations do what I'm doing. Where he goes often sounds easy but there is a great deal of heft involved in creating that impression, heft we never feel and only know if we work out the songs ourselves and see what's inside them. There be wonders there.

3. Even the jubilant highs of Till the End of the Day or Everybody's Going to be Happy have the same sober melancholy as Well Respected Man or Waterloo Sunset. The middle eight of Set Me Free has a kind of psychotic beauty. "I don't want no one if I can't have you to myself..." is the kind of thing everyone who's ever been fourteen has felt but Ray's delivery is barely controlled, wide-eyed and experienced. You don't want to know what he will do (including to himself) if she says no. See My Friends has been endlessly debated to even accomodate gayness but, really, it still eludes easy definition beyond a longing far more naked than you'd expect from a mid 60s beat band. By the time you hit Shangri-La you are swept on a wave of deep sadness that is both elating and dangerously high.



4. After all the partying and boy/girl Friday night drama Ray Davies cared about what was around him. It's funny in Dedicated Follower of Fashion. It isn't in Well Respected Man, a minor key Cockney two-step observation of a ruling class predator in city clothing. In Dead End Street it goes from spirit of the blitz false cheer to a football chant of DEAD END! DEAD END! "What are we living for? Two roomed apartment on the second floor." That melancholy seethes with anger and almost before we know it this song feels like watching something grim starring Albert Finney. Waterloo Sunset takes down a long set of stone steps to show us a quite beautiful city scene observed, in case we should forget, by someone who protests that he doesn't need any friends. Everyone else in 1967 is turning into a hippy. And then there's Shangri-La again: "The little man who gets the train got a mortgage hanging over his head but he's too scared to complain cause he's conditioned that way." And the new estates keep rolling out, the lavatories have been moved inside along with everything else. Outside is just for show.

5. The Kinks are English. Not like Herman's Hermits or Steve Marriot's "'Ow's your bird's lumbago?" They are English like Graeme Greene, Alfred Hitchcock, Joyce Grenfell, Charles Dickens and Christmas Panto. They might have been stirred up by American rock and RnB but they put it in a council flat and let it dream of country gardens. They are reason No.1 why the British reinvention of American rock music in the 60s outstripped the original for decades.

If, like me, you found yourself in the middle of a Kinks compilation in the late 70s and at all inclined towards your own musical adventures you knew you were in class when you listened, an intensely practical class with the best, funniest and sharpest teacher in the system.