Something Else marks the exit of Shel Talmy and the entrance of Ray Davies as producer. If you want to mark the difference just listen to the first two tracks. David Watts (by Ray) has the full sound of a record of its time and the single Death of a Clown (by Shel) sounds a strangled and overdriven. As promised in the previous set, Face to Face, the band stand strongly behind Ray Davies, his ever improving songwriting and, unlike almost all the other releases I've written about for 1967, the result is that the record sounds like a band is playing it. Yes, there's a harpsichord here and processed vocals there but there's a real wholeness in the sound that offers a kind of honesty when compared to the likes of Pepper or Sell Out. Those are great albums but this is a very true one, as well.
David Watts bops along with schoolboy cheek, shouted "Oi"s, clicketty rhtyhm guitars, rich piano and some really fine singing. Watts is the head boy at the school, an overachiever making his path straight from the prefecture to Oxbridge to a law firm and the House of Commons. Ray wishes he could be like David Watts but it's pure unrefined sarcasm: David Watts has it all and just keeps getting it without any come uppance because those of his "pure and noble breed" never get one of those. We all want what David Watts has but we're all glad we'll never be him, as well. This rollicking joyful hymn of hate is infection supreme with its viral "fa fa fa fa" chorus that sounds like a posh stutter or just some vocable you might hear among the small talk at an occasion.
As the knees up fades to silence we hear out of the dark a echoed piano so sad that it's hard to believe it's playing a major scale. It gets almost to the end of its phrase before an acoustic guitar crashes a chord riff down to the start of the song. Released as a solo single by Dave Davies, Death of a Clown has always impressed me with its singalong energy and effortlessly dark atmospherics. From the schoolgirl la la las of Rasa Davies to the bass glissando on the piano in the verse about the fortune teller to the light handed reverb and sparse band track this one works every time. I'll admit it might be difficult to acquire a taste for Dave's strained Dylanesque vocal but that too will happen. Both raucous and eerie a miniature masterpiece.
The envy in Two Sisters is not the glorious sour grapes of David Watts but as delicate and poignant as the harpsichord intro courtesy of Nicky "Session Man" Hopkins. It's really just a vamp on one minor chord but its twin identifiers of old order and sadness are unmistakable. Single and sensational Sylvilla looks into her mirror in her luxury flat while across town Percilla looks into her washing machine and thinks of her jealousy of Sylvilla's freedom. Percilla feels imprisioned by her life. In frustration she casts off the things that have come to identify her as a wife and mother and the homebody sister, the dirty dishes and women's magazines go into the bin, giving her some elation and a taste of long gone freedom. Then in a vision of what matters to her the most she understands what is really valuable to her and her jealousy vanishes. Many is the commentary that has this song as a veiled account of Ray Davies' own envy of his brother's cock of the walk lifestyle in Swinging London and even if it's no more than fancy on our part it still carries a sting. Ray was able to write his own seething jealousy into a pair of characters so lifelike you could cast them (Hannah Gordon as the prim Percilla and Suzie Kendall as the wild and vain Sylvilla). It's a British '60s new wave film packed into a few minutes and commands a warm smile.
No Return folds a dark slice of grief into a gentle bossa nova with minimal arrangement, high hats on the kit, shakers, bass and a single acoustic pulsing quietly. The narrator lost his first love and now can only think that she has gone. He has friends but feels isolated without any way back, encased in silence. While the similarly themed See My Friends from a few years prior sounds as despairing as its subject with an insistent drone of constant loss this gives us an almost playful contrast between the late night cocktail throb of the music and the emptiness of the emotion in the lyric. The lines end on ninths or sixths leaving an open sound as the harrowing certainty of the realisation repeats. Open and closed. Open and closed. Exactly how a bad breakup can leave you.
Harry Rag brings us back to the musical hall Kinks wiv a knees up ode to lighting up a gasper. Not much more to it than that: let the world do its worst as long I've a ciggie to get through it. A bright and loud snare rolls a marching pattern under the grind of minor key guitars and thumping bass landing somewhere between Kurt Weill and a chorus line of Pearly Kings. Utterly enjoyable every time.
Tin Soldier Man looks forward to the more arch style of later albums as a pentatonic melody borne on a redcoat brass band describe uniformity, the basic unit of the rat race, a middle class functionary who might as well be clockwork. I don't get much more out of it than this as the points keep coming around but the playing is great chunky Kinks with a cheeky vocal from Ray. We'd hear this developed more in later songs like Victoria which sound more confident but this is a fine start.
Situations Vacant looks back to the satirical tales of the previous album. Suzy and Johnny are happy enough with their lot until his mother bears down on him to improve himself which he does by leaving his lifelong job to look for something in the City until he and Suzy are ruined and separated and Johnny's mother's real ambition is realised. Lovely thunderous guitar from Dave and the band in strong form lift this side closer way above filler. Ray keeps chucking in little jazzy or showtune style moments like the coda to this song, something else he'd develop more fully in the following year's masterpiece and onward.
Side two opens with the flipside of the Death of a Clown single, Dave Davies' Love Me till the Sun Shines. A catchy chorus and loping beat keep this one rolling. He doesn't care what she does as long as she does what it says in the title. Some nice diversions in the middle eight but this one doesn't have to break ground or dig deep, it's about joy.
Lazy Old Sun begins like a typical Kinks mid-pace rocker but this plummets south from the second line onwards. The summer is overcast or rainy and Ray's getting antsy for some beams. It's the production and arrangement that do the shining, though. A low growling slide guitar carries the strummed acoustic up the odd chord progression as the middle lines of the verse caterwaul almost atonally from low in the mix, sounding like the fast slow warping of a citizen under the influence of that nasty lysergic stuff. This crawls to a ninth note over a minor chord like a horror movie score and then everything plays the same way for the second verse after a jarringly conventional middle eight. My favourite lines are from the second verse: "When I was young my world was three foot seven inches tall. When you were young there wasn't any world at all." Dissonant trumpets and musical viscosity take this far out of what anyone might have expected of The Kinks and close to Syd's Pink Floyd and certainly what The Beatles were getting up to with the Magical Mystery Tour numbers. It is the only thing on the album that sounds like it comes from its milestone year. As such it jars for the first few listens until its form emerges to the repeat listener and starts feeling like a song (see also the plunge into raving psychedelia that is Mind Gardens on The Byrds' Younger Than Yesterday). Persist and reap rewards.
Afternoon Tea starts out like filler but goes the slightest step over that with a compelling call and response chorus. Boy tells of a girl he used to share routines with. These form the focus of his memories and longing for her. A strident 2/4 beat keeps it just shy of Dixieland as the big melancholy chorus belts out the title.
Funny Face is Dave's third outing on the album and starts with a disjointed rhythm which breaks into a hard 2/4 and a building snare gallop to the chorus and a strange falsetto second section. It sounds like nothing so much as The Kinks trying on a Pet Sounds Beach Boys groove with odd beats and shimmering angelic vocals. It doesn't quite get there but doesn't outstay its welcome either. But, wait a minute: "smudged mascara and pill-shaped eyes" "the doctors won't let me see her"? What is this song about? He's trying to visit her in hospital but can't get past the frosted glass window to see her. Suicide attempt? Plastic surgery? Domestic violence? The music has such a winsome Brian Wilson or Turtles light to it but there's some real nastiness going on in the lyric as though someone didn't tell the director that the murder investigation movie wasn't meant to be a comedy. The effect of the offset is interesting but it still troubles.
Birdsong and Ray comes in over a piano, both pulsing out a single note toll before this suddenly turns into a suave but sad '30s croon about the narrator's lady departing for a yachting holiday in Greece while he flubs about without purpose. It would have some parallels with Davies' own circumstances but it feels more like a jokey take on the trivial problems of the uppercrust. The lovely introduction that sounds like a welcome to a new season soon turns into a feeble voiced complaint.
But at last we come to one of Ray Davies' single song masterpieces. The echoey guitars descend impossibly form a C down to below their range (really using a single guitar note, descending keyboard in a rudimentary application of the shepherd tone) at the bottom of the steps is the instantly appealing pentatonic melody on the guitars encased in that spidery echo, joined by a fresh acoustic guitar bashing out the chords. Ray comes in with Rasa in a slow descant behind him. "Dirty old river must you keep rolling flowing into the night..." The narrator sits at the window of his flat and looks out on the street at dusk near Waterloo Station. He picks people out in the crowd like Terry and Julie who meet outside the tube station on Friday nights. He himself is a shut in, telling himself he has no wish to join the throng and that as long as he can gaze on Waterloo Sunset he is in paradise. Whether we believe him or think he protests too much we can't deny the joy of the stream of his observations and the bursting light of the middle eight "Chilly chilly is the evening time. Waterloo sunset's fine" with its higher vocal, splashes of falsetto harmonies and crashing guitar chords and its fluent transition back to the verse. The closed circuit of the song emphasises the observer's isolation but also his insistence on his contentment. It's sad but it's happy and as soon as it falls into the ringing piano chords and overlapping harmonies in the fade you want to hear it again.
Something Else didn't do well. It emerged in a scene that blazed with paisley and singing rainbows. One record smashed baroque orchestras against sitars while another mixed delta blues with musique concrete. The Beatles soared into the stratosphere with their satin Victoriana pressure suits while Brian Wilson went steadily psycho trying to record the sound of flames. And there were the Kinks who ventured a little out of their playpen but mainly delivered on their promise to make accessible music played by a band you could see at a pub. They just didn't invest and it cost them.
I first heard this album in the 2000s. Apart from the tracks that always made it to the compilation sets I had no idea what to expect. The artwork is of its time with its art nouveau decorative font and circular portraits of each band member and the title uses a then-current phrase to mean special (I can vaguely remember a tv music/variety show called Something Else which even to my just post toddler mind seemed hokey) as well serving as a self-effacing joke.
That said, this was a progression, it's not like they did an LP of You Really Got Me clones, not only had the songwriting moved forward but the production quality had significantly improved, it was a 1967 album. Ray Davies, though he expressed regret at his production decisions here, proved a good helmsman and in control of his band's sound to everyone's benefit. The singles included here are stellar and even the more closeted experiments make it through and between those there is a flow of good music played well. Why the flop? Who knows? The fabs had got to the point where they could retire from playing live and release an album instead of a tour. The Kinks still had to slog, were still banned from America (which looked good at home as well as improved chances overseas).
From this perspective it sits comfortably between Face to Face with its rumbles of expansion and Village Green with its all out appeal assault on pretty much everyone who hears it. It stands as is but I like to hear Swinging London the way it was on a Monday morning as the tube stations were opening and the market concrete was being hosed down. Tin soldiers jostle on the footpaths, getting to jobs to pay for their tv licences, navvies thanked providence for the existence of Harry rags, Sylvilla and Percilla thought about giving each other a ring, people think about their last breakups which they dream of washing away at the pub, and onward to Friday evening where the throng gathers and moves like a dogless herd outside Waterloo Station over the dirty old Thames, and London's cycle grinds to the end of another week's turn. If there was anyone who might take me through this I would insist it were Ray Davies and crew. And so they did.
Listening notes: I bought this first on CD, a reissue with bonus tracks but for this post I listened exclusively to the remaster from 2011 included in the Kinks in Mono box set. Clean and solid audio quality that sounds a little better than the original vinyl would have. Recommended.
