So I should probably explain what it actually is that I do, shouldn’t I? I’m a private detective, but I started out as a physics student. I was planning on a relatively dull career in academia, as a matter of fact – I was interested in doing some work in gravitational physics, which was hardly a cutting-edge whizz-bang area, and the Brian Cox career path had yet to be invented. My plan was to finish my Master’s, get a doctorate, then settle into a life of producing three or four papers a year which nobody would read.

But I made two big mistakes. The first was putting a chemistry module down as one of my optional modules, because I didn’t like the look of electronic engineering. The other was actually paying attention.

A chance remark in an organic chemistry lecture about an unusual property of thiotimoline caused me to think about what would happen to the shape of the molecule in a Gauss-Riemann geometry. I put that together with a couple of other things – which I’m not going to mention here, obviously – and suddenly found I had worked out a way to travel through time. And not one of those “build two black holes ten thousand light years apart and rotate one of them” jobs. This required practically nothing – you probably have most of the equipment to build a small time machine yourself, though you could probably only go back a week or so on a domestic power supply without blowing a fuse.

I posted something on USENET, not saying exactly what I’d done – I didn’t want to pre-empt publication and risk that Nobel prize – but posting a couple of the calculations in a different context, as a gedankenexperiment, just to make sure I hadn’t done anything incredibly stupid.

Two hours later, a man I didn’t know, in an immaculately-tailored suit, one that fit so well that the gun he had in his pocket was extremely conspicuous, showed up at the door of my room in Halls and asked me to take a walk.

As we walked through Sackville Park, he explained the situation to me.

“You’re not the first to figure it out, you know. Feynman knew the trick, and Von Neumann. Godel probably did as well, though by the end he didn’t know much of anything. We get about one undergrad every three or four years figuring it out now.”

“So why haven’t I heard of it before?”

“Oh for God’s sake, man, I thought you were meant to be clever. It’s too dangerous ever to be made public.”

“Dangerous? But I’ve proved that changing history and paradoxes are both impossible. This would only work in a universe with a single consistent history.”

“Exactly. Think about what that means, for a moment, man. Say you want my PIN number. You say you’ll try 1111, and if it works, write it down on a piece of paper and send it back to yourself five minutes earlier. If it doesn’t, you write 1112 and send it back to yourself.” He sat down on a bench. “The only consistent history where that works is the one where you instantly get a piece of paper with my PIN on it. All cryptography becomes useless. All national secrets are instantly open to anyone. The whole fabric of civilisation comes under threat.”

“So, what, you want me to stop investigating this stuff?”

“Not at all. We know that you can’t get the truly curious to ever stop experimenting. You want to build a time machine for your own personal use, we can’t stop you – the components are too easy to get hold of. What we want you to do is to sign the Official Secrets Act – you never tell anyone else how to do it, and any attempt to misuse the technology gets you convicted of high treason. Also, you quit university, today. We don’t want you slipping bits of these ideas out, even by accident.”

“Quit university?!”

“Yes. Drop out. Find another job. Whatever you want – the government will pay you thirty thousand a year to keep your mouth shut, anyway, and you can carry on your research in your own time, so long as you pass all your work on to the government. That’s the deal, take it or leave it.”

“You offer that to everyone who figures this out?”

“Yes, it’s our standard offer.”

“And has anyone ever turned you down?”

“Oh, one or two, one or two…” he stood up,“I’ll be round tomorrow with your copy of the Official Secrets Act.”

As he went, he patted the statue that he’d been sitting next to on the bench. The statue of Alan Turing.

I did as he asked.

So now, I work as a private detective. Not because I need the money as such, but just to give me something to do with my brain now that physics isn’t an option. Not that most of my cases require much of a brain. But a few require a little investigation, and that’s where I have the edge over my competitors. With my personal-sized time machine I can only go back in time a week or so, and I have to be careful not to give myself too much information about the future (the government keep a very close eye on trans-temporal communication – any sudden lottery wins and I’d be the richest man in the graveyard), but it does mean that if someone says their husband came home late last Wednesday, for example, I can go back and follow him and see where he went.

Those are the neat cases, of course. This one was worse. This time someone was dead, and it was my fault, somehow. And I was going to have to go back and meet this man, knowing he was going to die, and knowing there was nothing I could possibly do to stop it.

It’s days like that that make me wish I’d gone for electronic engineering after all.

So here’s some links:

Millennium Elephant cautiously welcomes Nick Clegg’s speech, but thinks the Lib Dems need to take a different attitude towards people on benefits. I agree.

The Aporetic on Gingrich’s… interesting… choice to refer to the Lincoln/Douglas debates

Kristine Rusch on how self-publishers are ignoring readers.

Autism And Empathy on how claims that people with autism have no empathy are a human-rights issue.

Two great posts from Teatime Brutality, on Avengers vs X-Men and Mass Effect. Warning as always with this tumblr that while those posts are safe for work, others on that blog definitely aren’t.

James Graham wants to know why landlords aren’t “in this together”.

And Charles Stross continues his series on SF worldbuilding with a post on ‘unknown unknowns’

But until today, they hadn’t released a proper album of new material since 2003′s Stew album Something Deeper Than These Changes. To put that in perspective, not only was I single, unemployed and in my twenties when Stew’s last album came out, but I actually went into a shop and bought the CD. An actual shop. Like people in the olden times used to do. So you can imagine how much I’ve been looking forward to this.

This is not to say that they’ve not been busy. A number of ‘official bootlegs’ have come out over the years (and been deleted too quickly for me to buy copies). Stew’s worked as a jobbing songwriter, doing everything from a song for Spongebob Squarepants (Gary Come Home) to one for my wedding (he used to take commissions for songs by email. The song he wrote for our wedding, Now’s Eternity, is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard even without the special context for me). Stew and Heidi wrote a piece for The Asphalt Orchestra, and Stew’s put out a CD of music for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Various tracks have been made downloadable over the internet.

But mostly, they’ve been doing theatre work – in particular, the wonderful Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Passing Strange, for which Stew wrote the book and lyrics and starred in, which Stew and Heidi wrote the music for, and for which Rodewald was musical director. The soundtrack album for this is a de facto Stew album, and one of the very strongest, and a film of the play, directed by Spike Lee, is now available on DVD.

But this has meant that those of us outside the US – or even, for the most part, outside New York, have been deprived of much from them for the best part of a decade now. Until Making It, which is their break-up record.

During the theatre run of Passing Strange, Stew and Heidi’s personal relationship broke up, and they had to keep performing on stage together while their private life was falling apart. Making It is the album that came out of that, and it sounds like the kind of album you expect from a couple who split up before making it.

(In fact, Making It is another album of songs from a theatre show, like Passing Strange, but where that was a full-cast recording, this only features Stew and Heidi on vocals.)

Thus, while the album is as good as anything they’ve done, there’s little of the joy of some of their earlier albums, only concerns. There’s nothing as light or laugh-out-loud funny here as Ken or Man In A Dress or Into Me, and in some ways that’s a shame, as those songs are always the best ‘in’ to a Stew album. Stew is a very subtle lyricist, and for someone like myself who’s more musically oriented it often takes many listens for me to really get what he’s doing in his more serious songs.

Which is not to say there’s no wit in this album – very far from it. But lines like “When did you first realise there was a problem with your relationship?” “When she left me” are a far cry from the playfulness of some of Stew’s earlier work.

At times, in fact, this can almost sound like the Beautiful South, with very pleasant melodies but utterly bitter, nasty lyrics sung as male/female duets – on possibly the best song, The Curse, Stew and Heidi both sing the exact same words, but just the different inflections, from two singers on opposite sides of the event, give very different impressions of what went on. But the music has far more bite than that, and also features things like some of the best saxophone skronking in rock music since the first two Roxy Music albums (on Speed, a song about methamphetamine).

Some of this material will be familiar to fans – Black Men Ski has been circulating on the internet for nearly six years now, and is utterly brilliant (I actually used it as one of the through-lines in my chapter on Mister Miracle in An Incomprehensible Condition, it has so many good lines in it about race and society), while Tomorrow Gone is a remake of a song from the last Stew album, Something Deeper Than These Changes.

I’m not doing a very good job of selling this album, I know – it only came out today, and it takes at least a year for me to get enough of a sense of perspective on a Stew album before I can talk intelligently about it. What I will say is that Stew is one of the great songwriters of all time – up there with Jimmy Webb or Ray Davies or Paul McCartney or Jake Thackray or Arthur Lee. (I’m referring to Stew as the songwriter here, but Heidi may well have contributed – she is an excellent songwriter herself, and has often collaborated with Stew. I don’t have access to the songwriting credits, and don’t want to underrate her contribution. The fact that Stew and Heidi still work together after their split shows that they are better as collaborators than either would be alone).

I have absolutely no doubt that this will be one of my two or three favourite albums of the year, and it’s almost certain to be the very best, once it’s had more chance to grow on me. It’s not the best introduction to Stew’s music – that would still be either Joys And Concerns or Guest Host, both of which are far more immediate, but it’s a subtle, heartbreaking album, but with an underlying touch of hope.

Stew and Heidi are currently working on a musical adaptation of the great graphic novel Stagger Lee, and I can’t imagine a better match for them. I hope a soundtrack or DVD of that will be forthcoming very soon, but I also hope we don’t have to wait another nine years for the next album like this.

But it’s worth the wait.

THE BEACH BOYS
featuring Original Members:
Mike Love, Brian Wilson, Al Jardine, Dave Marks & Bruce Johnston
with
* John Cowsill, Jeffrey Foskett, Scott Totten, Darian Sahanaja, Paul Von Mertens, Scott Bennett, Probyn Gregory

All dates are subject to change without notice. Most shows go on sale 90 days before concert.
*Backing band subject to changes.

For those who don’t know who these people are, as some of the people reading this won’t:
Mike Love – nasal-voiced frontman, wrote the lyrics for some of the biggest hits, has been the only consistent member of the band.
Brian Wilson – used to sing the falsetto parts but doesn’t any more. Wrote, arranged and produced nearly everything the band did that was any good. One of the two or three greatest living songwriters.
Al Jardine – rhythm guitarist, and strongest vocalist of the living members. Sang lead on Help Me, Rhonda, Cottonfields, Then I Kissed Her and Lady Lynda
David Marks – guitarist, played on the band’s first four albums before leaving in late 1963. Rejoined briefly in 1997-99 and toured with the band in 2008.
Bruce Johnston – joined the band in 1965, and is the only Beach Boy other than Mike Love to be in the currently-touring ‘Beach Boys’ band. Most audible on backing vocals on California Girls and God Only Knows. Also wrote I Write The Songs, for Barry Manilow.
John Cowsill – wonderful drummer and very good singer. Currently tours with the Mike/Bruce Beach Boys, but used to play with his family band The Cowsills, famous for hits like The Rain, The Park And Other Things. The best drummer ever to play with any version of the band, and a genuinely lovely bloke too.
Jeffrey Foskett – onstage band-leader, falsetto vocalist and rhythm guitarist with Brian Wilson’s band. Great singer, but also something of a security blanket for Brian Wilson.
Scott Totten – lead guitarist, musical director and one of two falsetto vocalists for the Mike/Bruce Beach Boys. Very talented man who has improved the touring Beach Boys a great deal since he became musical director.
Darian Sahanaja – Musical director of Brian Wilson’s band and keyboardist. Will probably be in charge of rehearsing the band and ensuring they sound as close to the record as possible. Also a hugely talented songwriter in his own right, with his band the Wondermints.
Paul Von Mertens – Woodwind player with Brian Wilson’s band, also provides all the string and horn arrangements for Wilson’s recent records and live shows. If there are any additional strings on stage he’ll conduct them.
Scott Bennett – keyboardist and vocalist with Brian Wilson’s band. Also co-wrote much of Wilson’s most recent album of original material with him.
Probyn Gregory – insanely talented multi-instrumentalist. Can play guitar, but given the number of guitarists on stage will probably mostly play trumpet and French horn, with maybe a bit of banjo, keyboards, tannerin or glockenspiel thrown in. Member of the Wondermints with Sahanaja.

This is pretty much exactly the band I’d have chosen. I’d maybe have chosen Matt Jardine in place of Foskett, and I’d add Nelson Bragg or Mike D’Amico on percussion and Nick Walusko on guitar, but this is a band that knows and respects the music and can play it well. It’s also a band that wouldn’t have been put together just to go through the hits – though they can play those.

This will be good.

First, you need a word processor that will output in both .doc and .pdf format. Microsoft Word will do both these, I think, and I know that LibreOffice, AbiWord and OpenOffice.org will. I actually use LyX, because it produces beautifully typeset work and you don’t have to fight it the way you do MS Word. If you use LyX, the book Self-Publishing With LyX (free PDF version) is a godsend.

First, we’ll look at print publishing. Export your book as a PDF, with all fonts included in your file – if you don’t do this, there may be typesetting errors with your finished book. Most typesetting advice will tell you to use a ten-to-twelve point serif font, but I use a fourteen point sans serif. This is because my wife is visually impaired, and she finds this much easier to read. I suspect this will be the case for other visually impaired people, and I don’t want to exclude anyone from reading my books. So long as you use a simple, plain font for this, not Comic Sans or anything equally horrific, your book will look professional enough.

You will want to set fairly generous margins on your pages in the PDF, to allow for the pages to be trimmed. I use the margins suggested in Self-Publishing With LyX – Top: 2.5cm, Bottom 2.5cm, Inner: 2.5cm, Outer: 2.0cm . If you’re using Microsoft Word or one of the Wordalike Free Software word processors, lulu.com have a template you can use that will make your pages the right size, but when I used this (on my first two books, before I discovered LyX) I found it extraordinarily fiddly to use with LibreOffice, and next to impossible in AbiWord. I don’t have a copy of Microsoft Word, so I have no experience with that.

Once you have your PDF, you next need your cover. If you can’t draw yourself, you have a couple of options. One that some writers take is to browse stock photo libraries, and pay a small amount (usually in the tens of pounds) for rights to use a picture. You can, however, also search Google Images for images that have been freely licensed for commercial reuse.

One thing to remember, as well, is that all images created by branches of the US government are automatically in the public domain, so lots of military, scientific or space photographs, as well as photos of various politicians and so on, are completely free to use.

Now create an account with a print-on-demand publisher. I have heard very, very good things about CreateSpace, but I use lulu.com myself. This is partly because CreateSpace are an Amazon company, and I don’t want Amazon to have a monopoly or to put my eggs in one basket, and partly because Lulu also offer very good quality hardbacks, and I like to have nice copies of my books.

Once you have an account, click ‘start a new project’ and follow the steps it tells you. You will want your book to be available as a trade paperback (this is a normal paperback of a standard size – Lulu also do larger, coffee-table style books), as a hardback, and as a PDF (don’t add DRM to your PDF – DRM doesn’t deter so-called ‘pirates’ and does deter actual readers). Lulu have an easy-to-use cover designer that will take your image, resize it to the right dimensions, and let you add the title, author name, back-cover blurb and so on. You will get a PDF copy of this completed cover – take a screenshot of the front cover and save it as a JPG, and you can use it for your ebooks.

While Lulu do publish ebooks in non-PDF format, I’ve had nothing but horrendous experience with them in that department, so don’t put your ebooks out through them, other than PDF versions.

You can either buy an ISBN for your book or get one assigned by Lulu. There is no reason I know of not to use Lulu’s. Once you have an ISBN assigned and have bought and approved a proof copy of your book, you can choose either Lulu’s ‘ExtendedReach’ service (which is free, and gets your book on Amazon and into bibliographic databases so other stores can choose to order it) or their GlobalReach service (which is expensive but gets you onto other sites like Barnes & Noble). Interestingly, they seem to be experimenting with merging these two services and making them both free, but I don’t know if that will be going ahead.

Now you’ve got your physical book sorted, it’s time to think of your ebook. For this you’ll need your book to be in Word .doc format. (If you have a choice of which .doc versions to output as, choose Office 2003. DO NOT choose either Windows 95′s version, which doesn’t have all the features you need, or docx, which the major sites don’t yet support). There are many programs that will allow you to produce your own good-quality epub and mobi files, but if you want to get on the major sites you actually want them to convert the files for you at the moment.

Read through the Smashwords Style Guide (free ebook in various formats here) and follow its instructions precisely, paying special attention to the section on Table Of Contents. Then create an account with Smashwords and upload your correctly-formatted .doc file. Smashwords will then convert your book into every format in which you wish to sell it. Select all formats except .mobi (the Kindle format, which we’ll deal with separately) and PDF (Smashwords’ PDF copies look horrible, sell PDFs through Lulu instead).

Smashwords will assign you a free ISBN for your ebook, and will sell DRM-free copies through their own site, but their real advantage is that they will get you onto other online bookstores. They’re the only simple way to get on iBooks, Kobo, Diesel and Sony’s bookstore. They’re also the only way for people outside the US to get on Barnes & Noble’s Nook ebookstore. (People in the US can use Barnes & Noble’s PubIt). These sites between them account for something in the region of 20% of the ebook market.

Smashwords will claim that they offer distribution to Amazon, but they don’t. Disable this option just in case this changes, because you’re going to put your book out through Amazon by yourself – no reason to give Smashwords a cut.

You will want to price your book on Smashwords at between $2.99 and $9,99 – this is not because of anything to do with Smashwords itself, but because Amazon price-matches with other sites, and that’s the price range in which you get the best royalties on Amazon.

Smashwords is a great service, but has two major disadvantages. The first is that they pay quarterly in arrears – so if they receive money from a sale on Apple’s store in February (and Apple take their time to pay Smashwords), you won’t see it until June. The second is that for non-USians they require you to jump through a lot of hoops in the US’ insanely complex tax system if you don’t want to lose 30% of your money, and this takes time. The combination of these two things mean that even though I’ve had books up on Smashwords for a year, I am yet to see any money from them. But when it does finally arrive it’ll be a substantial chunk.

Finally, you’ll want your book to be available on the Kindle. This is the simplest of all these options by this point. Take your Smashwords-formatted .doc file, remove the line about ‘published on Smashwords’ that you inserted to meet Smashwords’ requirements, add page breaks at the end of each chapter (Kindle like page-breaks, Smashwords don’t). Then create an account at kdp.amazon.com and upload your files.

Amazon will try to get you to join a program called KDP Select with your books. DO NOT JOIN THIS. It is a very bad deal for actual writers (as opposed to delusional fools who want to strike it big with a single bestseller), it limits what you can do enormously, and some of its provisions (like turning the money made from lending into a zero-sum game in which you have to compete with other authors) are actively evil.

You should price your book between $2.99 and $9.99, as outside this price range you only make a 35% royalty, but you get 70% if your book’s in that price range. Some people will advise you to sell your books for 99 cents to ‘get noticed’. This was possibly good advice two years ago, but when there are literally millions of books selling at that price (and people giving books away as part of the KDP Select programme), any advantage the low price may have had is gone, so you might as well charge an amount where you’ll see some money. (99 cents is, however, a fair price for a short story if you’re publishing those).

Do not enable DRM – all DRM does is put customers off, it doesn’t deter illegal copying. Enable text-to-speech unless you hate blind people and want them to suffer.

Finally, get an Amazon Author Central account. You will, in fact, want to set up two of these, one on the US site and one on the UK site. From a reader’s point of view, an authorcentral page allows you to see everything an author’s written in one place, as well as a bio of the author (see my page for an example of how this works) – useful if you’ve written multiple books and people want to find them all. From an author’s point of view, it gives you some extra tools to manage your books.

And that’s it. Once you’ve done this, post a link on your blog or website saying your book’s out, then forget about it until the money comes in, and write the next one, and the one after that.

The band’s early singles set the pattern for this album. Long Tall Sally was a semi-competent cover of an American R&B classic, You Still Want Me, the band’s second single, was decent Merseybeat-by-numbers, and You Really Got Me, their third, was one of the greatest singles of all time, a crunchy garage-rock track with one of the best riffs ever committed to record.

And the album is as much of a mixed bag as the singles. Like many British bands in 1964 and 65, the Kinks were attempting to sound like the American blues music of a previous generation. The problem is that like many of those bands, the Kinks were not particularly strong either vocally or instrumentally, and simply couldn’t carry the weight of this material. When Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley sing “I’m A Man”, the implicit meaning is “so don’t call me ‘boy’”. When white teenagers from the Home Counties sing the same material, it comes out sounding more like “I’m a grown man, now, mummy, so you can’t make me tidy my room!”

The best of the British R&B-oriented bands, like the Animals or the Zombies or the Spencer Davis Group, got away with this by having astonishingly good vocalists – and all of these bands soon moved away from the R&B sound. The Kinks, too, would make this move very soon, but in 1964 there was little to impress on their first album.

And while they don’t add very much to the sound, it should probably be mentioned that among the session players who played on this album are Jimmy Page (who added acoustic rhythm guitar on a couple of tracks but did not play any leads, despite some reports to the contrary) and Jon Lord.

The Album

Beautiful Delilah
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
The album opener is a perfect example of where most British blues bands of the time were going wrong. A cover version of one of Chuck Berry’s more minor works, this misses everything that makes Berry’s original worth listening to – the wit in Berry’s vocals, and his distinctive guitar work.

It does have a punk energy, especially in Dave Davies’ incoherent vocals, but even so it sounds forced. This is garage band music in a bad way – it’s the work of teenagers who aren’t very good yet, and who love R&B music without knowing what it is they love about it.

So Mystifying
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This is a much better attempt at the same kind of thing. It appears to have been written off the Rolling Stones’ version of It’s All Over Now, but has a more country-blues flavour, reminiscent both of early Chuck Berry tracks like Maybelline and of Carl Perkins rockabilly. The lead guitar part, in particular, has some unusual choices that point the way forward to the band’s later experimentation with country music on albums like Muswell Hillbillies.

The song, and the track, are still not especially good, but even on a by-the-numbers blues track like this Ray Davies is starting to develop a distinctive voice which suits the band far better than the cover versions they do.

Just Can’t Go To Sleep
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A simple exercise in a girl-group style, this is the kind of thing that bands like the Swinging Blue Jeans were having hits with at the time, and is a very competent piece in the style, but completely unmemorable except for the key change down a tone for the middle section, which is an unusually-long twelve bars. The hook line sounds like an early attempt at the hook for Stop Your Sobbing.

Long Tall Shorty
Writers: Don Covay and Herbert C Abramson
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

This song was originally recorded by Tommy Tucker earlier in 1964 as a follow-up to his hit single Hi-Heeled Sneakers, and has almost exactly the same melody as that track. Probably the best of the R&B covers on this album, this has some very creditable harmonica playing from Ray Davies – nothing technically challenging, but with far more feeling than much of the music elsewhere on the album. It’s still fundamentally pointless though, especially in comparison with Tucker’s much more interesting original.

I Took My Baby Home
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Easily the catchiest and most commercial sounding of the tracks so far, this is a simple three-chord formula pop song of a kind that almost every band did dozens of during the sixties (probably its closest relation is I’m A Fool by Dino, Desi and Billy from a couple of years later, but every Merseybeat band had a few songs like this). The arrangement is more inventive than normal for this kind of song, though, with all instruments except the drums dropping out for the “I wo-o-o-o-on’t” line, and some quite complicated drum fills.

This was the B-side to the band’s first single, Long Tall Sally, and should really have been the A-side, being both a better performance and more in tune with the music that was having success in early 1964.

I’m A Lover Not A Fighter
Writer: Jay Miller
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

A cover of a Cajun blues song by evil racist scumbag J.D. Miller, this features some very nice guitar picking from Dave Davies, but is unfortunately spoiled by his lead vocal, which has all the subtlety of a rutting rhinoceros.

You Really Got Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

It’s almost impossible to describe how much this track stands out from the dross around it. On paper, this should be more of the same – a simple two-note riff, played in three different keys, and a lyric with a 35-word vocabulary (significantly simpler than the average Doctor Seuss book). In fact the lyric originally only had thirty-four words in it, but Davies was persuaded to change some of the ‘yeah’s to ‘girl’, to avoid any possible implication of homosexuality.

The sound of this, though, is extraordinary. Forty-eight years later, this still packs a punch unlike anything else in the charts at that time. At a time when record companies were turning down tracks on the grounds that the guitar was distorted, this is recorded with a guitar put through a speaker cone that had been slashed with a knife. Everything about this track is designed to evoke adolescent sexual tension in the extreme – the riff, the repetitive single-note piano parts, Dave Davies’ long “yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah” backing vocals, Ray Davies’ screaming, lustful vocals on the high notes. And nothing like Dave Davies’ finger-twisting guitar solo had ever been recorded before.

Angry, frustrated, raunchy, this is the precise moment when rock – as opposed to rock ‘n’ roll – was invented.

Cadillac
Writer: Bo Diddley
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

And we’re immediately back into the realms of R & B covers, although Bo Diddley’s thuggish simplicity is more suited to the band at this stage of their development than many of the other covers have been, and this isn’t too bad at all.

Bald Headed Woman
Writer: Shel Talmy
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

One of two covers of tracks by the folk singer Odetta, included on the album so that producer Shel Talmy could claim a ‘trad. arr.’ writing credit. The band do as competent a job as could be expected for a song so firmly out of their normal stylistic range (it sounds more like a work chant than anything else), but this is pointless.

Revenge
Writer: Ray Davies and Larry Page
Lead Vocalist: Instrumental

As is this, a by-the-numbers harmonica-led instrumental presumably included so that Larry Page, one of the band’s managers, could get some songwriting money too. It’s actually quite an advanced-sounding track – it could easily be a backing track from Love’s first album, two years later, but it sounds like a backing track for which someone’s forgotten to bother to record a vocal, rather than a proper instrumental.

Too Much Monkey Business
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Another missing-the-point Chuck Berry cover, again of a song which depends almost entirely on Berry’s delivery for its effect, this one is even less successful than Beautiful Delilah because of the frankly incomprehensible decision to double track the lead vocal. For a wordy song such as this, so dependent on diction, this is fatal. Dave Davies’ guitar solo is quite nice though.

I’ve Been Driving On Bald Mountain
Writer: Odetta Felious
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

The second of the Odetta covers, though on this one Odetta has regained her songwriting credit as the song isn’t actually traditional. The backing track is quite pleasant, in an acoustic hootenany kind of way, but then Dave Davies does his usual tuneless punk hollering over the top. He got much better as a vocalist.

Stop Your Sobbing
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This is the second really good track on the album, and one of Ray Davies’ very best early songs. A simple Merseybeat track, this has a gorgeous melody and one of the catchiest hooks Davies ever came up with (“better stop sobbing now”).

It’s also more emotionally ambiguous than the rest of his early songs, paving the way for the more interesting work he’d be doing later on. The protagonist wants to help his girlfriend get over whatever is causing her to cry, but he’s also implicitly threatening to leave her if she doesn’t. There’s a weird unresolved tension here between the sympathetic and the extraordinarily callous, that makes this the most emotionally realistic song on the entire album.

This track is also the first to feature Rasa Didzpetris on backing vocals. Didzpetris was soon to become Ray Davies’ first wife, and as Rasa Davies her vocal lines became an essential part of many of the Kinks’ most memorable records.

While this was never released as a single, The Pretenders released a version in 1979 that was a minor hit.

Got Love If You Want It
Writer: James H Moore
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

And we end with another cover version of a blues standard. This one is better than the album standard, because Ray Davies plays with his vocals here in a way he hasn’t on the rest of the album, and wins over on sheer strangeness. There’s some ferociously good drumming on this track too.

Bonus Tracks

I Believed You
Writer: Ray and Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

An early demo recording, before the band had settled on the name The Kinks, this was recorded under the name The Bo Weevils. A much more sophisticated song and performance than most of what we can hear on the actual album, this could easily have been a hit for a band like The Zombies. It suggests that many of the problems with the first album can be laid at the door not of the band themselves, but of producer Shel Talmy, with whom the band didn’t get on, and who notably didn’t produce You Really Got Me, although he was credited with it.

I’m A Hog For You Baby
Writer: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Another Bo Weevils demo, this one is a fairly poor-quality recording of a Coasters cover, but it still shows the band as far more assured than on the Kinks album, with some very good lead guitar and with the band members doing a variety of silly voices in the style of the original. Where most of the R&B covers on the album show an utter lack of comprehension, this one is a sympathetic cover of what is, ultimately, a fluffy piece of nothing.

I Don’t Need You Any More
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A demo from January 1964, in very rough quality, this is a decent enough pop-rocker that would have made a perfectly acceptable album track had it been taken any further.

Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy (demo)
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This is a demo, recorded toward the end of 1964, for what would become the band’s sixth single. I’ll deal with the song more when I look at the Kinda Kinks album, but what I can say is that this demo shows every element of the finished record was conceived very early on – the arrangement barely changed at all, although the performance on the finished track is much tighter.

Long Tall Sally
Writer: Richard Penniman, Robert Blackwell and Enotis Johnson
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

For the band’s first single, they were persuaded to record Long Tall Sally, a Little Richard song that they’d never performed before, on the grounds that the Beatles were performing the song live (this was before the Beatles released their own studio version of the song).

On paper, an R&B song about a transsexual prostitute should have been perfect for the Kinks, but there’s no evidence they’d actually figured out what the lyrics were. While Paul McCartney got round the problem of not being able to understand Little Richard’s screeched vocals by gabbling, Ray Davies seems to have just made up some new lyrics for himself.

The song’s taken at too slow a pace – in fact the band are playing the riff from a different, slower, Little Richard song, Lucille, and for all their singing “we’re having some fun tonight” it sounds like they’re protesting too much. It’s not a bad track, as such, but nor is it a very good one, and it’s easy to see why this was a flop, only reaching number 42 despite a TV appearance on Ready, Steady, Go.

You Still Want Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The band’s second single, this was even less commercially successful than Long Tall Sally, but it’s harder to see why in retrospect. This would have been a great pop hit in 1963, the year of Gerry And The Pacemakers, the Swinging Blue Jeans and the Searchers. Unfortunately for the band, it was released in 1964, at a time when a harder, bluesier style was starting to come into fashion, and sounded like they were trying to jump on the bandwagon just after it had pulled away.

With five decades’ hindsight, though, this was a massive improvement on their first single, and shows that they were headed in the right direction. While this didn’t chart, the lowest chart ranking any of their next thirteen singles would have would be number eleven.

You Do Something To Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The B-side to You Still Want Me, this uptempo pop track is equal parts Merseybeat (in the verses) and Buddy Holly (in the middle eight), with some quite gorgeous Everly Brothers style harmonies from the Davies brothers, in a style they never really returned to. This is easily as good as, say, any of the hits the Hollies had around this time, and is in much the same style. Quite why this and its A-side were left off the album is hard to say.

It’s Alright
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The B-side of You Really Got Me is a standard Brit-blues riff-based track, possibly showing a little of the influence of Mose Allison, either directly or through contemporary bands like Manfred Mann. There’s no real song there – it sounds like something that evolved out of a jam session – but the performance and arrangement, with a prominent drum part and short spot of dead air when the entire band briefly drop out, are inventive enough that the track remains listenable.

All Day And All Of The Night
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The follow-up to You Really Got Me was very much a repeat of that single’s winning formula. Instead of a two-note riff, this time we have a three-note riff (F, G and B flat ). And whereas You Really Got Me goes up by a tone, then by another tone, this track goes up by a third, and then up by a tone into the chorus.

Otherwise, this sticks as closely as possible to the You Really Got Me template, and amazingly manages to capture lighting in a bottle twice. The band would very soon move on to more complex songs, but like their previous single this is one of the great pop-rock tracks of all time.

I Gotta Move
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The B-side to All Day And All Of The Night is again very similar to the previous B-side, a simple riffy blues track. By this point, the Kinks had become quite good at this kind of track, but there’s little of interest here other than the faint backing vocals, setting up a drone – a sound which would become of more interest to the band in the next year.

Louie Louie
Writer: Richard Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Apparently Ray Davies wrote You Really Got Me while trying to work out the three-chord riff to Louie Louie, which had been a hit for the Kingsmen in the US the previous year, so it was natural that the Kinks would record their own version, which became the opening track of their Kinksize Session EP. This version is now the best-known version in the UK, and is notable for the band getting the chords wrong (they play I-IV-V rather than I-IV-v). This recording in turn seems to have been the inspiration for the Troggs’ hit version of Wild Thing in 1966 – a record produced by the Kinks’ manager Larry Page.

I’ve Got That Feeling
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The second track on Kinksize Session, this seems to be an attempt by Ray Davies to write in the style of the Zombies, who had recently had their first big hit with She’s Not There. Much like that song, this is keyboard based, and based around a jazzy riff centred on an Am chord, though this continues the habit Davies has at this time of making riffs out of single-tone differences, rather than having the more expansive changes of the Zombies song. This is again reminiscent of the riffs to You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, but the choice is probably made because unlike the Zombies’ singer Colin Blunstone, Ray Davies was at this time an incredibly limited vocalist, and keeping within a narrow range was probably necessary.

I Gotta Go Now
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

At 2:53, the third track on Kinksize Session is longer than anything on the band’s first album. Which is odd, because it must have taken much less time than that to write, consisting as it does mostly of two chords and six words. And unlike in the case of You Really Got Me, this doesn’t appear to be a deliberate choice as much as it’s an utter lack of effort. I actually managed to forget this track while listening to it.

Things Are Getting Better
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This track, the last on Kinksize Session is actually a rewrite of Cadillac. Ray Davies forgets the lyric to the last line on the last verse, and what little lyric there is is written in an attempt at American dialect (our protagonist “hasn’t got a dime”). Davies would soon move away from this kind of imitation and find a voice of his own though.

Don’t Ever Let Me Go
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This was apparently an attempt at a follow-up to You Really Got Me, wisely scrapped in favour of All Day And All Of The Night. It features the same riff as You Really Got Me, but married to a more conventional, and thus less interesting, song.

I Don’t Need You Any More
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

An utterly by-the-numbers garage rock track, with absolutely nothing of any interest about it.

Little Queenie
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Recorded during a live BBC session, and introduced by Brian Matthew (who is still to this day a BBC DJ, having been a broadcaster for 64 years), this is yet another attempt at a Chuck Berry cover. This time, they miss out half of the lyrics and don’t seem to really have understood the rest. The liner notes for the Kinks deluxe edition claim Ray Davies is singing this, but if so he sounds very like his brother Dave (although the two could often sound alike).

Overall, Kinks, and the material recorded around that time, is a sloppy mess for the most part, with occasional flashes of brilliance, though sloppiness was the norm for every band other than the Beatles or the Beach Boys at the end of 1964. 1965 would see the Kinks improve dramatically…

I’m also not going to be particularly kind about the first couple of albums. This is because, other than the singles, they’re not very good. This doesn’t mean that I’ll carry on being unkind, though – the run of albums from Face To Face through Everybody’s In Showbiz is near-perfect, and I’ll be saying so when we get to those.

The first post, on Kinks, will be up in a few hours.

For those who are interested in ideas, The Book Of The War is quite probably the single best thing ever to have come out of Doctor Who.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the BBC had taken control of the ongoing series of Doctor Who books, and put out a series featuring the Eighth Doctor. Much of this series was regarded at the time as being a bit rubbish, not least because a lot of it was – The Eight Doctors and War Of The Daleks, in particular, are just bad fanfic, written to explain away or rewrite things their authors didn’t like (and the fact that one of those books is by Terrance Dicks, the single biggest contributor to Doctor Who ever, doesn’t stop it being bad fanfic. Picasso was once asked to separate a pile of paintings into real Picassos and forgeries. After putting one into the forgery pile, someone said to him “But Pablo, I was with you when you painted that one”, to which he replied “No matter. I can fake a Picasso as well as anyone.”)

But some of them were extremely good. Those by Lance Parkin and Paul Magrs we’ll come back to later in this series of articles, but there was also a set of books, starting with Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles, which set up a fascinating plot thread – a war, at some time in the Doctor’s future, between the Time Lords and an unnamed Enemy. There was also a third party in this war, a renegade faction of the Time Lords known as Faction Paradox, and several smaller parties.

Unfortunately, the editor of BBC Books at the time decided to wrap this storyline up in a rather spectacularly dull way, and to write almost all of the elements that had been introduced in this story out of ‘continuity’.

But if you’ve read this far, you’ll know what I think about ‘continuity’, and Miles and several of the other authors involved evidently had the same view. Seeing no reason to waste a good idea, a series of Faction Paradox books and audio adventures was started which continues to this day, and The Book Of The War was the first, and one of the best, result.

The Book Of The War is the work of ten different authors – some, like Miles himself, or Simon Bucher-Jones, or Daniel O’Mahony, having written excellent books in the Doctor Who ranges before, while others, like Philip Purser-Hallard, were doing great work on the fringes of Who fiction without ever writing a ‘proper’ Doctor Who story. The book is structured as some combination of encyclopaedia, role-playing sourcebook and hypertext, and purports to provide background information on a war in time between the ‘Great Houses’, an ancient semi-godlike race of time travellers who kept the structure of history together, and their unnamed Enemy.

I say ‘purports’ because what this book actually is is an assault on the dull, literalist way of reading that most Doctor Who fans had.

While Doctor Who itself has at its best always attacked the idea of simple binary choices, that way of perceiving things pervades everything in our culture. Conservative or Labour, Mac or Windows, gay or straight, male or female, if you don’t pick a side, you will be assigned one anyway. Everyone knew that the Lib Dems were ‘really’ just Labour-lite, until they entered coalition and they’re now ‘really’ Tories. Bisexuals are ‘really’ gay people in denial or straight people trying to look interesting. And so on.

And so for a lot of the readers of the Eighth Doctor War stories, the single most interesting question had been ‘who is the Enemy?’ [FOOTNOTE A question which may contain its own answer...or may not.] They saw a war, and read it as having two sides, despite it originally being described as having at least four – the Time Lords/Great Houses, the Enemy, the Celestis and Faction Paradox – with many other factions such as The Remote later being described. So obviously the only thing of interest was who the Enemy ‘really’ were.

We get a lot of hints as to who the Enemy are in The Book of The War, and they do seem to point to an answer (the answer here seems to be that the Enemy are actually the Great Houses themselves, or a group within them, grown so bored and decadent that they have to invent a war with themselves in order to have a reason for existence). But it’s made clear that who the Enemy really are simply isn’t important – and indeed, the various books seem to suggest that Lawrence Miles, who edited this book and is more or less in charge of the Faction Paradox book range, has had different ideas as to who the Enemy are at different times. Indeed, it is entirely possible that each author of this book had his or her own idea who the Enemy were.

But further, the whole book goes out of its way to throw doubt upon the stories it’s telling. Attentive readers will be able to tell, for example, that the whole War itself is merely a feint for some larger plan, involving House Lolita, a single individual who is (we know from one of Miles’ short stories) the Master’s TARDIS (and the Master of course may or may not be the same person as the War King who is now in charge of the Great Houses, and his Presidency during the War may or may not be tied into Lolita’s scheme). There are at least three characters in the book who may or may not be the Doctor, all of whom are on different sides in the War.

The very text of the book itself presents itself both as fallible and as existing within the War universe – the text itself is corrupt, both in the sense of having (deliberate) mistakes in it, and in the sense that it reads as propaganda for one of the sides in the War – which one is open to question.

This corruption of the text exists from even the indicia, where we have “First printing September 2002. Almost certainly printed in Illinois” and “No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or biological”. It’s not often the copyright warnings in a book forbid you to even remember it – and of course this ties in with the material on biodata later on.

Parts of the book have been censored – every entry relating to the Enemy has been deleted, although the links to them remain. Other parts, parts giving crucial bits of information, are interrupted by a ‘conceptual entity’ called The Shift who lives in the relation between the book’s words and the reader’s mind. And then there are entries like this:

“YOU” DIVERSIONS [House Military: Culture] Of increasing interest and concern to the Houses is the concept of interactive propaganda: the interweaving of propaganda messages into the receptors of a target audience’s brain, or even directly into the audience’s local culture. This is a typical tactic of the conceptual entities, but since the enemy gained some understanding of the same technologies the “trick” has become more widespread and more aggressive. YOU, YES YOU – REALLY – YOU. YOU BOUGHT THIS, THEN? THEY’RE TRYING TO TELL YOU THAT THIS CAN BE HISTORY. THIS POLITE FICTION YOU’RE READING INSISTS THAT THE WAR WILL BE SOON BE OVER, THAT IT HAS A SPECIFIC “FIRST FIFTY YEARS”. WELL, IT HASN’T. IT ISN’T OVER. IT’S NEVER OVER. ONE IN EVERY THOUSAND PIECES OF INFORMATION IN THIS TEXT HAS BEEN RE-ENGINEERED. THE MATERIAL BEYOND THIS POINT IS PROGRAMMING HYPERLANGUAGE ONLY YOUR LOCAL IDENTITY IS ENDING. PAY NO ATTENTION. YOU WANTED TO KNOW WHO’D FIGHT FOR THE REBEL HOUSES? WHO’D BEAR ARMS AGAINST THE ENGINEERS OF HISTORY? YOU WOULD, would be a typical opening gambit in such cases.

After its appearance, the recipients of such messages would be told to await activation instructions. Often the level of paranoia induced by this would be sufficient to disrupt normal activities, the same exploitation of House anxiety also reflected in the principles of xenoprediction and mentioned in the “Probability” Doctrine. In some cases the propaganda thrust would be augmented by a secondary double-bluff, suggesting that the text did in fact originate from legitimate sources, which would then be undercut. THE PREVIOUS SENTENCES WERE A LIE, AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS would be a typically smug signing-off for such a message. It would then be followed by some vague, largely meaningless command such as WAIT, ACTIVATION LOCK ACCOMPLISHED.

The fact that almost any action could be construed as having obeyed the allegedly treasonous command is almost always sufficient to ensure that the messages aren’t even reported to the higher ranks.

Much of the book works on multiple levels, sometimes obviously like this, sometimes more subtly. There’s a description of a plot of a bad late-90s blockbuster film, for example, which reads like (and is) a parody of both Mulan and The Phantom Menace. It’s also a good description of the plot of some of Miles’ later Faction Paradox audio dramas, and itself gives another conflicting clue as to what is ‘really’ going on.

This is a book that’s full of ideas. Almost all of its several hundred entries would make the basis of fine short stories in themselves (and several of them made the background for Philip Purser-Hallard’s marvellous novel Of The City Of The Saved). There are digs at Richard Dawkins’ lack of imagination, expansions on the ideas of Teillhard de Chardin, parodies of Ally McBeal and reality TV, conspiracy theories, a subplot inspired by Godel, Escher, Bach and much more.

Possibly the closest comparison to this book is Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, but where that comic series takes ITC adventure serials, with their relatively limited scope, as its point of departure, The Book Of The War builds an entire mythology – or multiple mythologies – out of asides from Robert Holmes scripts.[FOOTNOTE - The Book Of The War is a much, much more mature work, too, far less concerned with a rather sixth-form idea of cool.] And this is definitely the Robert Holmes vision of Doctor Who, rather than any other, but fleshed out, and with the world foregrounded, rather than the character of the Doctor.

But most importantly, it’s a book that you have to approach as a critical reader. It forces its own unreliability to the foreground, and resists all attempts to fit its narrative into a simple binary, goodies vs baddies, format.

Or, at least, that’s what I think…

Apple’s new iBooks Author program has a EULA which states that you can’t use the program (essentially a jumped-up text editor) to write a book if you want to sell that book through any stores other than Apple’s! Sometimes people wonder why I only use Free (as in freedom) Software (well, other than Spotify…) and this kind of thing is why. When I write a book in LyX, I can do whatever I want, not just with the book but with the program as well.
But this is part of an incredibly stupid war that’s going on now with the major ebook stores trying desperately to get as many writers as they can to be exclusive (see also the even-more-evil Amazon KDP Select), so they can claim to sell more books than their competitors, even if those books are written by the kind of people who fall for things like that.

Andrew Rilstone has put out his latest book. This one’s on the Inklings, and I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time. Incidentally, if you buy his book from Lulu today or tomorrow, you can use the price code PRICETHAWUK to get 20% off. That applies to all Lulu books, so why not pick up some of mine, or my uncle’s, or Simon Bucher-Jones’ or Lawrence Burton’s or Chris Browning’s too? But do buy Andrew’s book – the parts of it that he’s posted on his blog are great.

Hammer are reissuing their 1958 Dracula with additional restored footage.

Bob Temuka on a rather different version of Cerebus

And Arkhonia continues his series of Smile posts with one on the great Van Dyke Parks.

Or at least, it’ll be up once the Mindless Ones site is back up after our strike in solidarity with the SOPA protest.