1969@50: ARTHUR (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) - THE KINKS

Where could you go after Village Green? You'd just created a picture of everything you love about the England you knew and wished for and then everything that was wrong with it and even crushed up the last grains of nostalgia that only gets in the way. You still can't tour the big market because of that mysterious performance ban. More of the same? That's never been good enough. A movie? I would have loved that (do it in the style of the Dead End Street video with Ken Loach behind the camera). Too much can go wrong. What is as grim as it is funny and, however bleak it gets, still has mass appeal? British TV. Right up to the '90s the U.K.'s television broke ground as a matter of course. Yes, there were plenty of endless soaps, naff game shows and unendurable variety shows but there was also Nigel Kneale, Denis Potter and Dr Who; there was Play For Today and talk shows that could really get into the shadows. You wanted more power to dig into the best and worst of where you lived, if you were Ray Davies and co. you went to TV and a new dimension. Actually, they went to Ray but he was in. And then, at the eleventh hour it all fell apart. Then again, there was this album.

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.

1968 at 50: THE KINKS ARE THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY

I had a few runs at this one and I ended up erasing all of them. Some were failed attempts at putting the album in context with the rock music bombshells delivered towards the end of 1968 like the White Album or Beggar's Banquet. Other approaches tried to incise the tracks and examine their vitals. In the end they all started feeling fake as they didn't have anything to do with the way I found the record and how it got into me and changed everything.

First, I didn't hear the whole thing until about 2007 when I found a discounted copy of the 3 disc deluxe cd release and thought, "why not?" Apart from Animal Farm I hadn't heard a bar of any of the tracks. I loved that one but it was like the great singles in that I assumed it was surrounded by filler in what looked dangerously like a concept album.

I'd got into the '90s rereleases of the earlier LPs on cd but it wasn't until I got a later box set that I really started listening to them as whole albums. There's a general progress to them which is typical of all the innovative U.K. bands of the '60s: the first sprinkle a few awkward originals among the covers of the live set and then, disc by disc, the best of this finds form as the central songwriter emerges and by the middle years you get albums that strive to cohere, that become whole statements.

By '66's Face to Face, The Kinks were putting out such statements, song cycles that told of their lives and times with all the energy of the first albums but with increasing confidence and artistry. By the following year's Something Else song form itself was being challenged and arrangements more adventurous, the songs deeper. By this one, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, they are a band in total control of their skills and, while there is a little extra coherence in lyric subject matter and some deft use of motif, this is less a rock opera than a good solid album.

Is that faint praise? Well, most albums by anyone have filler tracks or embarrassing ones or others still that feel like aural indigestion, the skippability of a record that drives all teenagers to hear their favourite records as edits. Good solid records get left on ... like this one.

Why? Because from the opening declaration with its basic but cruisy harmonies to the stories of steam trains as cranky old die hard rockers to the joys and silliness of family life as seen in photo albums to local "witches" resigned cats and so many more flawed and strongly drawn characters, the set never feels overburdened by self importance, never crowded. Each successive song feels welcome and their sequence is perfect. After the breeze and humour of the opening track Do You Remember Walter thumps to life with a tale of bittersweet friendship drift. Johnny Thunder's spidery acoustic guitars seem light and  relieving Picture Book's bounce. And so on, every new handshake and smile is enough for you to remember a name. It's the best school fete you've ever been to.

On the music front there is something so barely detectable that it might be nothing more than the kind of figure that all songwriters happen upon and for a time use in almost everything they write. It's a descending arpeggio, think of the notes of a chord played one after the other rather than together. The bugle tune Taps uses this for most of its length. Ray Davies puts it everywhere, not just an arpeggio but one falling through the notes from the highest to the lowest. It's the banjo-like figure on the electric guitar in the first bars of the opening song that feel like a sunny day. It's heartfelt in Walter and closes all hope with resignation: "mem-or-ies of people stay the same". It's the ba babba dah ba ba ba of the chorus in Johnny Thunder. It's stately in the main riff to Animal Farm. It's light and playful in Phenomenal Cat and in Monica it's open ended. These are just the examples I recall at first thought. I would bet there are many more, maybe buried in bass lines or formed by the interplay of vocals and instruments, but these are enough. This is not like the more classical use of motif Pete Townshend would use the following year for Tommy, an avowed rock opera, it's much more intimate, something you might only realise after many listens. It's another thing that lifts the album from routine practice, just another bunch of songs, and puts it on its own shelf.

Village Green has a lot to say about memory. The premise of the title track is the band identifying with a list of causes and imaginary community groups following a two line pattern of "we are ..." and then "God save..." At first the litany things from the past like china cups and things they want stopped like office blocks give a worthiness to the song but it's more about the virtues of being involved than the individual institutions or qualities (did a successful rock band from the '60s really value virginity?) The distance between old friends in time and space in Do You Remember Walter is painful, alternating between sadness and anger against inevitability. Village Green the song is a mix of tourist's idea of English quaintness and a story about a lost love who has long been in a marriage that seems a happy one. The boy who left town and has come back in a could of denial. Wicked Annabella is a kind of local myth used to terrify the children into eating their greens and going to bed early. The Phenomenal Cat remembers the pleasure of his youthful travels as he lazes into obesity and age. Family holidays and local fairs and anything else that might well stir the recollection of the good old days. But there's no nostalgia here.

The old steam train who doesn't want to grow up and accept his place in history is as deluded as the guy in Village Green. The adult recalling Annabella is stuck with the false image. The beauty in the life described in Animal Farm feels like a poignant or even desperate fantasy. Big Sky has God as an apathetic observer. All of My Friends Were There is a story of a public embarrassment and is related without fondness.

If anything this album is a warning against nostalgia from a Britain whose unconvincing attempt at the summer of love was starting to look like a winter of rioting and mud. The thing is that the package is delivered with such warmth. The smiles are wry and the frustration clanging but if there's wistfulness it is spiced with disappointment. And served up in some of the most gorgeous songs Davies ever wrote with a band (the last album of the original lineup) at its creative peak working as a strong solid unit. And the coherence stretches for days as, despite a greater range of musical traditions observed (from proto metal to music hall to more of Davies' always puzzling love of calypso) the record feels whole, a journey of stories rather than the reverse. It is, for me and many others, the apex of the band and it's chief songwriter.

So what was the everything I said this record changed?  Mainly it's to do with how my view of the Kinks changed. Having revered Davies' songwriting since I found it during the punk wars I had given him so little credit for a greater vision than a few sides of singles on a compilation album. It made me go back into the catalogue and hear the motivation in the earlier albums. It made me give up on the notion that great albums are made of consistently great songs but can as easily achieve that greatness through expert sequencing, highlighting the strengths of tracks that might have been lost if given too much or too little prominence. If anything, Village Green reminds me not so much of the albums around it as the novels written by writers with indestructible senses of vocation. Forget putting it next to Sergeant Pepper when you can jam it in with George Orwell's Coming Up For Air, a starkly anti-nostalgic tale of a crushing return. Village Green changed the way I think of albums full stop.

1967 at 50: SOMETHING ELSE BY THE KINKS

Studio chatter in the background ("this is the master") Dave Davies murmurs, "nice and smooth".  A backwards count-in over backwards high hat and the song begins. "Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa faaaah." The first thing you notice is the dramatic lift in audio quality. Pianos sound full, the guitars have rounded tone and sit perfectly in the mix as do all the vocals (though they can get a little drowned at times). The contextual mini soundscape that opens the whole album seems to telling us to pay attention as we're really doing it this time. And do it they do.

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.

1966 at 50: The Kinks' Face to Face

Made from industrial strength disaster, Face to Face was the Kinks' strongest set to date. The band ended their 1965 tour of the US in disgrace with a ban that would keep them from maximised international success for years. The reason for the ban is obscure to this day but involved mismanagement and the constant internal violence that seemed to plague the band from the moment of their success. Songwriter in  chief, Ray Davies, suffered a nervous breakdown in the months leading up to this set. He was entertaining the idea of doing a Brian Wilson and sending out a substitute singer to better handle the menacing confusion of adoration and hostility that playing to audiences meant. He just wanted to write his songs and play them with his mates. Well, it's more involved than that but that is in effect where he found himself at the beginning of 1966. And that is where he wrote, sang, played and oversaw the album Face to Face.

With the British invasion the notion of rock groups who didn't also write their own songs was cast into antiquity. The Kinks, like the Beatles, Stones and everyone else, recorded their first LPs as their stage shows plus a few originals if you were lucky. Albums were singles extenders, higher priced platters of more of that sound in which the glamour shot cover art was about equally important as the tones on the grooves, product for purchase. The Beatles upped the ante in '64 when the Hard Day's Night album not only pushed their songwriting further but was composed entirely of Lennon McCartney originals. And then at the end of '65 produced Rubber Soul which threw down a gauntlet by not only being good but cohesive. It felt like a whole package, not just a group of songs. Face to Face is the first Kinks album of wholly original material. But it's more than that. While the R&B influenced rockers are still plentiful there's a lot more here.

We start off with an old telephone ring. A posh voice answers: "Yes, hellair whoo is thet speeeking pleeeese?" And BAM Party Line bursts forth. It's a Dave Davies number with a big shrill lisping yell and clanging guitars. It's about confusion and the words swing between trying to connect to someone else out there and the party lines that form during elections. Whether cobbled together or not it's a pretty indicative statement for the rest of the album in which brother Ray is going to lay his pysche bare and hone all those lashing attacks on the society around him. Confusion and anger you can dance to. Odd thing: the main verse melody of this song is identical to the song Connection on the Rolling Stones' Between the Buttons album from the year later. Don't recall anyone else pointing that out (though it might have happened at the time).

Rosie Won't You Please Come Home? begins with a descending progression through a minor key. Ray comes in with a plaintive high voiced melody, pleading for his sister to come back. This isn't a fictional character like Eleanor Rigby. Rosie was really his sister. Her departure for Australia in '64 had a profound effect on him. When he learned of it he ran to the seaside and screamed. Here he uses that to dive into the well of longing. She's not dead, just a long way away and no longer the reassuring hand on the shoulder or tales of fun in the West End or lessons in working the world. The rest of the family is there but he still feels alone with no one there to get what he is. The words are plain, often bathetically funny. She's never coming back because once things change they will never revert because when they do they feel fake and tokenistic. This is atypical for a rock band to come out with so early in an album but Ray was hinting at all sorts of things in those oddball numbers he'd throw in before like The World Keeps Going Round or See My Friends, strange melancholic daydreams. Even singles like Tired of Waiting have a heavy middle. Amid all the rave-ups like Till the End of the Day there was Ray, staring out the window lost in a rainy day.

Dandy starts with a chugging acoustic guitar and picks up with a Kinks trademark swagger. The young Lothario of the title runs around Swinging London like a stray tom cat on the make, hearing the stern warnings of friends and parents with equal disregard as he slinks around the windows and the backdoors winning and breaking hearts. He's one of the new youth of the 60s, uncrushed by national service and earning enough to keep his wild oats sowing as constantly as possible. He is fun and he is damage but, guess what, he's alright. I like the cover of this by Herman's Hermits a lot, it's fuller in production and the zingy middle eight has a real snarl to it. But it's also short of the acting that Davies gives it, he observes from only a few years' experience over his subject but it's enough to describe him perfectly and give a yell of support that mixes a supporting cheer with a croak of regret. His own days of dandyism are leaving and, like everyone approaching their mid twenties, thinks that his fifties might as well start in a few months.

A gorgeous acoustic guitar figure opens Too Much on my Mind. A loping bass below it swings up an octave (skillfully avoiding fret noise) and Ray comes in, taking us through what it feels like to have too many thoughts. His delivery is aching and reminds us of how strongly emotive his vocals are. Never is this more poignant than when he's on intimate ground. The middle eight of Set Me Free still sends shivers when I hear it breaking between self-annihilation and menace and it's as soft and quiet as the worst kind of resolve. Here, he sounds like he hasn't slept for days, forging out only the statements he knows to be true and none of them are pleasant. The song could easily be a wistful love gone wrong lament and no one would think the worse. But Davies uses this setting to talk about his breakdown. He isn't Syd Barrett, he doesn't go in and scream or record seventy takes of one part, he arranges his song to the last bar, oversees the performance and takes the mic in character. He's not in the pit when he does this but remembers it perfectly and the symptom he chooses is one that everyone who listens will know: insomnia. The strength it takes to front up to a microphone and play it vulnerable impresses here. Not melodramatic just drained, defeated, behind him the lilt of the beauty he knows he has created and which abandons him at his worst. But as the artist he is he waits and gets to work when he is once again able.

A bright harpsichord arpeggio bursts out and Ray's wry vocal comes in with the band telling us about one of the most important and unsung aspects of rock recording in the 60s, session players. The one in this song thinks very highly of himself, letting everyone know why they should think highly of him for what is really just doing the same job as anyone else minus the inspiration or feeling. He plays his notes and goes to the next job. Davies' taunting calypso inspired tune is thought to be a dig at Nicky Hopkins but I don't buy that. Not only is Hopkins playing on the track (that's his harpsichord, sounding pretty intentionally perfect and emotionally flat) but graced plenty of Kinks records thereafter as well as all but being the keys man on British records from the mid '60s to his death in the '90s, celebrated for both high skill, inventiveness as well as an egoless ability to fold in with the music as it was. Ray hinted that this song began by being about Hopkins and more recently Jimmy Page was thought to be the target (due to a fan-authored contraversy about who played the solos on early Kinks hits). But all this really has to be about is a session man, strolling from studio to concert hall, lending his grade five piano skills to advertising jingles and walloping rockers as London swang around him inventing its own fresh fun.

A thunderclap and ominous chord grinds on acoustic guitar and piano. As Ray comes in with a voice choking with dark awe as the summer day before him removes its mask to reveal the darkness that is always there underneath. Add a little rainwater and the hope sags, predators natural and supernatural emerge from the shadows and strike. If Too Much on My Mind was a calm recounting of an emotional extreme there is little in the way between the observer and his fear this time. Dave's guitar plays simple descents, plugged into the tremolo of his amp so that even the weaponry of rock music trembles with nerves. "Everybody felt the rain." Sure, but only Ray felt it when it wasn't falling.

Just as with the previous confession we follow with a rocker. A House in the Country blends a ramshackle Chuck Berry groove with the kind of hectoring vocal line that made Dedicated Follower of Fashion great and a relentless eye for detail that lifted the angry Well Respected Man above its peers. Here, it's funnier as the uppercrust brat who ascends to his position because his sherry-filled Old Man fell down the stairs and broke his neck. A series of bamming verses crunched together with Dave Davies' twenty-years-too-early new-waveish chugging chords, everything is kept in a party spirit. But Ray is not letting this undeserving goose off lightly. As everywhere around him the Carnabitian Army marches on, he's got even less of a connection between the joy of swinging London than the session man who at least gets close to the centre of the vibe.

Ray Davies didn't like the bright pyschedelic look of the cover art with its pink butterflies and fashionably moustachioed dandy, preferring something more subdued. The Kinks origins had included dressing up in hunting pink and playing rough edged R&B to the darling set. They carried a foppish image well up to the first hits and found it hard to shake. This could have flet as either a taunt or a clueless fit-up by the record company. While there seems to be a gulf between the content and the dayglo Chelsea images if you see latter in the spirit of the former it's far less a celebration than a sneering extension of some of the jibing, satire and outright anger driving this set.

The old Side Two begins with gushing surf. A Ventures style rhythm bounces up on the tom toms. The scratchy jangle of twin Davies guitars joins the shuffle. Dave breaks off to add mid range slides that sound more like the blues than Hawaii but that's the point. The narrator has won a Holiday in Wakiki and he jets all the way over the ocean to the big blue Pacific for a tan among the hula girls only to find that their grass skirts are made of PVC, the bamboo beach stalls are Coca Cola franchises, a genuine ukelele set him back a fortune and even the hula girls are New Yorkers of European descent. Everytime I hear this it reminds me of about half of the Brits I've met who have come to Australia for the fun in the sun, loaded up on Chinese made stuffed Koalas and boomerangs, and complain about everything being so DIY. You get a lot less of that these days but it always made me laugh. Ray recognised himself and managed to both whinge and own up to his naivete. And he gets to play with the language beautifully. It's justly recalled that Ray Davies could write a strong lyric about what he'd gone through but this gets close to the Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll he would have learned to read by:

It's a hooka hooka on the shiny briny on the way to Kona

And in a little shack they had a little sign that said Coca Cola

And even all the grass skirts were PVC

I'm just an English boy who won a holiday in Waikiki

A big brash riff starts up on the guitars but relaxes into an almost Latin afternoon groove for Most Exclusive Residence for Sale. This might be the sequel to story of the upper class twit in House in the Country but this is from another side of the Fab Britain in the '60s where any old kid could soar from dirt poor origins with a little verve and shove a common as muck accent into the ears of the establishment. This could be a David Bailey or a Mary Quant but it's one who didn't get that hard work was still needed to stay self made. He turns to the bottle and feels better until he sees the ad for the urban palace he has to sell to pay everyone off. It's a cautionary tale but there's a kind of solidarity in the lilt and the la-las at the end. maybe next time, mate, just don't throw it away again. There's a real thread here to the greatness that is to come on the storytelling albums of the late '60s like the following year's Something Else and the mighty and deathless Village Green in '68. If this bit of the album doesn't speak to you as much as the brighter tracks then walk on by, keep your voice down and don't knock. There are people living there.

Fancy begins with a delicate guitar figure blurring the line between a fourth and a major third when another comes in with a big whole tone string bend. This strange short number continues the work the band did on the compelling single See My Friends which established a distinctly Indian influence in British rock music that would hang around for the rest of the decade. This was months before George Harrison's very non-Indian use of the sitar on Norwegian Wood and Jeff Beck's splendid raga-like riff in Heartful of Soul. It might have helped that Ray Davies was not so much experimenting with the stuff of the mystic east but recalling hearing, for real, Indian fisherman chanting while at work on a tour stopover. Here, the sitars are almost defiantly left out again in favour of emulating the music with what the band knew, guitars. It makes for a compelling texture and its blend of mournfulness and meditation provide a comfortable bed for a musing about personal integrity and personal isolation which feels intentional and controlled. The drones continue as Ray's fragile voice grows strength and he hits the message. Is it trite, as he described psychedelia? Is it cod philosophy? To me it's in the voice that by the last two lines is full and assured, if describing a kind of gormless narcissism:

My love is like a ruby that no one can see,

Only my fancy, always.

No one can penetrate me,

They only see what's in their own fancy, always

Then we're way back in deepest London for some music hall jazz and Ray is singing about a girl on the scene. Little Miss Queen of Darkness has all the allure of the swinging London bird on the town with her golden hair and false eyelashes. She's friendly and puts on a smile, drawing the lads wherever she walks. But he sees her sadness and how it freezes her from intimacy. The more dolled up and sociable she gets the more awkward she will be. Ray gives an explanation for this about the one big lost love but there's more to this, even musically. as the second chorus builds and the snare roll leads us into the dance in the middle we keep waiting for a solo that never comes. For 16 bars we are left in the middle of the dance floor with the girl whose movements might as well be lumbar exercises. The third verse saves us from embarrassment and tells us why she's a no go and won't ever be a go go. We could accept the jilted lover story but if we do we also have to accept that it left her a nervous wreck only able to appear to connect to the life around her but never able to touch it. We leave her dancing on and on.

The name and the musical treatment, the noodley doodley jazz shuffle with the brushes on the drums suggest a sneer but I think their lightness is eerie. This woman is in a vortex she might never escape. The love gone wrong tale might well have been the trigger. Of, course I'm speculating here but -- but since I am I'll go as far as to wonder if this is from something Davies heard about around the traps or is this one more self portrait, a gender-deflected confession or, more innocently, an astute description of another's distress. Though it starts that way Ray really isn't sneering at the frigid dolly bird, he's recognising trouble, her kindred trouble, dancing, dancing on.

A soul groove takes into Dave Davies' second lead vocal and an unambiguous love song. Some very nice tinkling from the Session Man and a pleasantly live vibe. You Look So Fine doesn't amount to much but doesn't try to. It fits perfectly in its place.

Then a strident almost military descent through a minor key lands with Ray lamenting his imagined lot as a rock star scoured by the taxman and abandoned by his trophy wife who has run back to her mother telling tales and taking everything he's got (which he rhymes, amusingly, with yacht). So he's going to sit back and get pissed on some ice cold beer and sing his blues. Sunny Afternoon is one of the most endearing of the Kinks mid '60s songs. It is musically pure with luscious acoustic guitar and falsetto harmonies that turn the crucial end phrases into small choral joys while the mock grimness of the situation marches on like time itself. A Kinks Klassic!

And then. I'm still surprised that the album doesn't end on the big single. There's just another one in the barrel here. Hang on, I'll get it now. I'll Remember starts with a catchy riff and launches into what now sounds like a previous phase of a band who have just spent over thirty minutes telling us that they've well and truly moved on. The clanging farewell is good natured, almost festive. A minor middle eight, a solo from Dave and one last chorus before a full stop. Done.

This is an album that breaks through disasters that might have prevented it and then even destroyed the band. But what a return from the ashes it is. There is more concept here then in albums by major players in the year to come as the twin threads of describing the grimmer side of the supposedly bright future that Britain was constantly telling everyone it already lived in and reports from the dark state this kind of observation facilitated. It is both a very personal statement and a full band effort.

The only aspect that mars the surface is the production. Shel Talmy bullshitted his way into becoming an independent producer at a time when few made that conceit work sustainably. Outside of the major labels and their stars like George Martin the choices for bands on wastepaper contracts at the low end of the food chain. Joe Meek beavered away, inventing as much as he recorded, handled his business less well but created real magic. And in the gap between this and the Joe Boyds to come was Shel, recorder of the Kinks, the Who and the Easybeats among others, the American in Blighty created some of the most persistently frustrating recordings of some of the strongest rock music of his era. As there are notable exceptions in the output (e.g. My Generation) I wonder how much of the teeth-grating tin tones he produced was down to difficulties with the bands themselves, including them insisting on bad paths and how much is just a blend of incompetence and cruddy studio facities.

Everyone got a little better for the next album (the great Something Else) but Ray is listed as co-producer and the pinnacle of the Kinks' '60s output Village Green is credited solely to Davies. It's a pity that whatever happened didn't happen a year earlier as even that level of improvement would have lifted this LP well beyond the state it comes to us now. It's Ray and the band and their songs that we hear but we must hear them through the clamour.

Still, the single that followed this album saw the band branching out with a brass section for the first time. Just like the Beatles but it wasn't Penny Lane it was Dead End Street. And that's one of the things I treasured about the Kinks as I foraged about for scant information on them as a teenager out of time in the '70s: the determination to look and keep looking.

Someone, I can't remember who, gave me a copy of the Nik Cohn/Guy Peellaert collaboration Rock Dreams in which Cohn's incisive observations were cast in bite size quotes against Peellaert's lavish fantasy paintings of rock stars from the '50s to the late '60s. And there, amid the pages of colour and glamour of swinging London with its rock royalty and paisley riches is the page for the Kinks. Ray Davies stands in a freezing, rained-on street with an imagined wife beside him who pushes a pram. A quote from Dead End Street is the only caption needed. Ray has an barely perceptible smile, staring back at us. I used to look at that page and a weird patriotism. Perhaps kinship is a better word but it went further. It felt like we were from the same country. Yeah, I know, that's the kind of crap that fandom doles out but that's a fandom I'd prescribe to any kid looking around.


Listening notes: I used the CD from the Kinks in Mono box set for this article. The sound quality is top notch but that also means it brings forward all the flaws and shortcomings of the production standards of the band's circumstances. Anyway, look for it.