![]() Of their world tour that was also well-captured on the live album One More From Talent still maintains it’s lyrical influence. Where well in the future to how great The Kinks were and how Ray’s songwriting Merit and sheer excellence of this high pitched classic from 1981, even decadesĪfter it’s release, the question becomes an even brighter direct response some. Rate excellence, full fledge zeitgeist, charismatic style, wit, melodic virtuosity andįlawless talent that Ray Davies had? Well the answer may lie within the timeless “Supersonic Rocket Ship” offers a utopian escape from the pretences and struggles of modern society that Davies spends so much of his music lampooning, again playing with calypso and reggae beats in a way that feels a little bit less awkward than his dubious accent on “Apeman”.Don’t you wish we had a rock composer who had the band-led empathy, first ![]() “Celluloid Heroes”, perhaps oddly for a closing track, feels like the opening of a brilliant musical, but is triter than much of their best work (the 2009 version with the Crouch End Choir is probably better than the album one, for our money.) There are some great pantomime character studies such as “Maximum Consumption”, on here, but the album’s most famous song is also, probably, its most interesting look at the pitfalls of fame. It’s campy, it’s oddly glam, it’s no less forensic about the human condition, but it's perhaps the least interesting psychological study the band offer, considering that we’re not at any loss for songs about how hard it is to be famous. This 1972 album is seen as the moment Davies dived even deeper into vaudeville and music hall as inspirations. ‘Supersonic Rocket Ship’ (from Everybody’s In Show-Biz) ![]() There are wistful portraits of small dreams in songs such as “Oklahoma USA”, and there’s the dyspeptic noir of “Holloway Jail”, but “Here Come The People In Grey” is a particularly interesting use of the album’s style: what starts as the story of a man suffering under the thumb of modern Britain when a borough surveyor takes away his home turns into a political piece as he moves off the grid with his girlfriend and says, “We’re gonna buy me gun to keep the policemen away.” It is a strange look at how American individualism could sound coming from a very ordinary English man and it’s this dissonance of two cultures clashing that makes this song so interesting.ġ4. After the deeply English soundscapes of the last few albums, Muswell Hillbillies toys with the formula by mixing assessments of our fellow countrymen with the sounds of bluegrass. Muswell Hillbillies, probably the last England-under-the-microscope album The Kinks' produced, was a commercial failure but a critical darling (which is something you can apply to pretty much every one of The Kinks’ greatest albums). ‘Here Come The People In Grey’ (from Muswell Hillbillies) "They say their lines, they drink their tea, and then they go / They tell your business in another Shangri-la” is such a perfect description of suburban mundanity that it beggars belief.ġ3. It takes the idea of a particular idyll, the “Shangri La” of the comfortable atomic family in a comfortable house, and explodes it for the hypocrisy and insecurity at its core. Inspired by Ray and Dave visiting their sister, Rose, after she moved with her husband to a designed community in Adelaide, it does what The Kinks do – and Arthur does over and over again – best. Their focus on microscopic analyses of our nation’s best and worst qualities doesn’t make for stadium anthems and immortal singalongs, but it does make for work that deserves to be held next to Rudyard Kipling or John Betjeman and “Shangri La” is one of the songs that deserves that comparison most. It’s hard not to keep referring back to some of the great poets of Englishness (or, indeed, wider Britishness) when talking about The Kinks. It is so deeply macabre, and they’re having so much fun with it, that it’s a real sign of what’s to come. It’s bluegrass, it’s Threepenny Opera, but it’s also a distinctly English song about disenfranchised rural youths escaping to the city. But "Big Black Smoke” – cut from the original album, perhaps in part because Pye Records wanted to quash Ray Davies’ use of sound effects to connect the songs – is just such an odd, brilliant song. It’s often described as a concept album, in part because it is filled with very acerbic, well-observed character studies of those who have (“Sunny Afternoon”) and those who don’t (“Dead End Street”, originally a single that’s been added into later reissues). ![]() Face To Face from 1966 feels like the moment something changed for The Kinks: almost entirely written by Ray Davies, who had a nervous breakdown just before they went into record, the album is much softer and more anglicised than the albums that come before it. ![]()
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