So, what, is it Tommy? No, the songs tell of things like military service, post war austerity, boomtime affluence etc. but there are no dialogue songs or descriptions of present action. In absence of the tv movie it was written for, it comes across as more of a concept album, a kind of grimly real echo of Village Green (which, itself was not without its own counter points). Outside of its purpose as music for pictures some of it can lag which is why I'd recommend listening all the way through. Very little is as immediately engaging as the album before it but the developing image has a lot to give.
We start in the dull grey echo of history's biggest empire and where better than a sprightly toast to the monarch at the centre of its most powerful moments, Victoria. A bright, roistering tune that rises and falls before soaring into a chorus consisting only of the name. A melancholy middle eight with a lot of power behind it (this is a great Dave Davies album, apart from anything else) belies the flag waving and feels like nothing so much as someone viewing the ashes of a Guy Fawkes bonfire and wishing it could have gone forever. A clean solo from brother Dave if full of cheer and leads to more jubilant chorusing. A quick tour of the empire, commonwealth and peoples and we finish on more shouting chorus before eventually ending on a very understated frown in the horns of the brass section.
An acoustic guitar matches a military snare drum and the band comes in for a descending chorus of Yes, Sir. No, Sir. A bright section only dresses up the grind of military service in recruitment promises before the embittered chorus quashes all that. A strange folky interlude in a minor key and 2/4 rhythm reinforces the sense of servitude before an officer class type sings coolly of hoodwinking the soldiers into thinking they're more than gun fodder with a posh cackle rounding it off. The dour chorus plays us out.
Some Mother's Son uses the kind of rising melody against a broadening harmonic structure as stirring military songs to sing of the horrors and futility of war, its grief and devastation. Backed by an acoustic led band and the harmonies that people often forget about when thinking of The Kinks. A sober and quietly angry statement.
Driving is the love child of Picture Book and Autumn Almanac but you get over that as soon as it kicks in and go along with the simple pleasures of getting away from the city and the grinding costs of workaday life to picnics with beer and pastries on the grass in the sun. Arriving at the exact point where we need a break from the empire and the wars, the exuberant chorus lifts us to the air.
Brainwashed begins with a soul groove led by the bass and blasts to life with a brass section. A swift and wordy verse details how the benefits of social mobility, welfare and the notion of consumerist freedoms are just more control with the forceful refrain: get down on your knees. This is not couched in irony nor seems specifically from a character point of view (though it suggests student activism or even unionism). It's almost over before it's begun, leaving the way a great rock song should with you wanting more. Of all the songs on the album this is the one I can most easily imagine backing a montage of images from the movie.
Australia rushes to life with an emigration pitch. As the song proper kicks off we get more of the same except this is a Kinks song so it has levels. A stunning long setpiece lists all the advantages of moving from the big smoke to a clean living sunny paradise in the southern seas, without drug addiction nor class distinction. The rich vocal arrangement is meant to remind us of the utopian teen choruses of The Beach Boys and the time and feel changes are very reminiscent of the adventures that Brian Wilson and co were finding in albums like Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile (even more in the uncompromised original project simply titled Smile). Dave has a few lines of his own and Ray's voice is rendered cartoony here and there by pitch control. This pushes into the elongated instrumental section that takes up most of the track with Dave Davies showing how expressive he can be with a clean guitar sound, swirling backing vocals. It sounds like the mind of someone who has come to a big life changing decision and is tripping on the good vibes of massive self support. Yes, there is a massive irony involved but the band is making it sound so good that we get into a forgiving mood. Even an Australian from 1969 could have told them they'd been sold a pipe dream but the point is not the reality at the other end of the boat voyage but the promise of escaping stagnation. The band play out the single chord ground (it approaches psychedelia) and we land on a low piano chord. End of side one.
Side two begins ice cold with a slow minor key arpeggio on acoustic. Ray Davies comes in with a gentle whispering vocal: "Now that you've found your paradise this is your kingdom to command. You can go outside and polish your car or sit by the fire in your Shangri-La..." A sombre French horn responds to the next lines about what this suburban sterility has replaced. A gorgeously harmonised second section bids Arthur to sit back and relax into his superannuated comfort before the soaring chorus of the name Shangri-La takes us into a swooning state. But this is a Kinks song. As Ray's melancholic tremulous last La closes we bash into a rock progression that crashes into a near metal rant: "All the houses in the street have got a name 'cause all the houses in the street they look the same..." Nothing's nothing. All the shoulder-crushing burdens of a work life just take different forms and the downward push keeps downward as the band sing Shangri-La la la la lala la ... But then we're brought back by a grand brass foundation to the slippers and rocking chair. But is that really so bad? He's in his place and knows it. He can't go anywhere. You might scoff but he's blissing out on cocoa. "Shangri-Laaaaaaaaa. Shangri-Laaaaaaaa..."
I bought a Kinks compilation in the late '70s. It was a double and, as I later learned, was part of a series that had identical covers but for insets of the different bands and the word file in the title. The Kinks File had a great selection covering the Pye label years and however cruddy the masters used (very tired bass-free horrors which, if heard by any vinyl-forever nong, would change the notion about LPs' superiority) but it was this song that really just stopped me in my tracks. The delicate beauty of the melodies or the perfectly-judged brass arrangement might have been enough but the songcraft just won it. We go from pitying Arthur in his Emo-Ruo type home with all the ghastly little problems that seem to shrink him but in the end, however trapped we believe him to be, we just can't touch him. Heart-rending but elating, it's just brilliance.
Mr Churchill Says extends Yes Sir, No Sir but in a lighter vein. Slyly bending guitar notes slink around Ray's voice as he repeats the forceful rhetoric of the Blitz, countering with the warmer sentiment of Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again. A brightly distorted guitar chord progression starts up under an air raid siren. Ray sings about the scene of a German bombing. A brisk instrumental which might be panic or rebuilding finds Dave Davies is great form playing a fluid Spanish flavoured solo over a shuffling 2/4 backbeat. The band return for a proto rap, repeating the words of Churchill as the scared kids remind the others of absent teachers' threats. Quick fade. Violence and leadership and destruction. Worth it or just more passing time?
A harpsichord introduces us to a woman who "bought a hat like Princess Marina" which she wears while dusting the house and scrubbing the floors. An unnamed he buys one like Anthony Eden which also gives him a lift, if only unto himself. But they and everyone else are doing it tough enough to recall Depression-era songs and to cry: "this poverty is hurting my pride." Suddenly the band picks up and cracks open a cabaret shuffle and returns to the tune of the opening verses. She's still in the hat, feeling like a Princess though the cupboard is bare. And she don't care. By this stage we might be noticing that the same melody that sounded like an Anglican hymn at the start fits perfectly into a winking music hall singalong by the end. This is a counterpart to both the carefree joys of Driving and the frown of Brainwashed on the previous side. This is a Kinks song, though, so it's allowed to sound like a knees up and sad at the same time.
Young and Innocent Days begins with a beautiful acoustic guitar interplay between Ray and Dave. The lyric about longing for the vision of youth is not nostalgia (we've already seen where that goes for Arthur) but more a kind of grief for a view of the universe that is not so manhandled and bruised. A brief instrumental section is born on grandeur with some big piano octaves low on the board but we return to the quieter reflection and end with the interlocked guitars gently meandering down the scale.
Nothing to Say sets up a call and response chorus as a man recalls a happy childhood to his father but now a father himself finds that Dad is silent on anything that might care about. The son tries drawing the father out but "all the words that you spit from your face add up to nothin' ". Another visit over and even less to show for it than the last one. The upbeat rock of the song with is gospel choruses only accentuates the emptiness and sadness of the silence between the generations. Arthur closes the door as his son's family leave. Fade.
Arthur begins with a playful shuffle. Dave's vocal recaps Arthur's life from his youth and ambitions to the unremarkable place he holds in a world that's passed him by. He's seen wars rise and empires fall and felt the press of authority and suffered from the class system. Then finally, in the affluence that arrived so late in his life, he could do nothing with it but get comfy and snooze. But the clapping gospel gallop of the song is not mocking him for a single beat. They love and understand Arthur. Of course, it's too late now to change his life but at least, finally, someone is telling him something other than get in line or pay your bills or abandoning him. The lesson of his life is his life, if we but heed it.
This album found The Kinks at a hopeful point. The tv movie fell through but Ray did go to the US, produce a Turtles album and dissolve the performance ban which re-opened the biggest rock music market in the world up for them. They toured, more soberly this time, and were well received. Arthur did better there than in the UK where people would be more likely to get it many references to conditions during and after the wars. Maybe they'd had it and its newness to Americans and their very different World War II were able to dance to the music.
If the production had lifted from Ray Davies taking over from Shel Talmy's one-take wonder style, it was now peaking. The sound of the band on this record is stellar. Dave Davies' attention to the tone he's getting and the choices he's making are compelling. And everyone's playing better. Extra instrumentation aside, this set sounds like a magnificent live performance with inspired vital playing.
And then, this is a Kinks album, there are the songs. Far less immediate with fewer radio-friendly choruses and more complex structures and shifts in tempo and tone this is not a pop album like any of the previous ones. They'd kind of got to the top of that with Village Green. And this was meant to be part of a movie. That it wasn't and survives as an album without the pictures (and only the barest of indications of what they might have been) is testament to the drive of Ray Davies himself who showed that he could change his factory's production from canon shells to kitchen appliances and come up with something as strong as this production.
And finally, there are the songs. Nothing as lovable as a Waterloo Sunset or Animal Farm but a lot of commentary from the heart, commentary on the lives of people who were unsung and trampled by history. And if those ordinary folk who dolled themselves up to forget about their empty bellies or took a little comfort in country escapes in their second hand cars were spiky here or growling there it was because they had crawled out from punishing servility and the terror of warfare. Ray loved and understood them because Ray, more than anyone else like him, more than Townshend or Lennon or Jagger, had compassion, wrote his songs with compassion. That's why it's such a pity the movie wasn't made because it would show us that his kinship was less with those rockstars than with the quietly industrious people who worked to make British television strong enough to leap across the decades and slap us into sense. Well, it didn't happen but then we still do have this album.
Listening notes: The 2016 Hi-Def remaster of this album available at online shops like HD-Tracks or Pro Studio Masters (not affiliated with either) is simply the best I've heard this record. The audio image is clear and deep with a lot of air around all the instruments. A fresh remix is due out at the end of the month as of writing which promises to address the overpanning of the late '60s stereo but for now this is my recommendation.
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