So the best we can do is to judge the album on its own merits, except that the music was never primarily intended as an album, and so much of the music doesn’t really work as a separate listening experience either.

Possibly the best thing for a listener who wants a good musical experience is to listen to just the highlights from the album. The songs God’s Children, The Way Love Used To Be, Moments and Dreams were released as an EP, and that EP is as good as anything the Kinks were doing around this time. The best of this music is better than the best of Lola Vs Powerman, but it’s surrounded by instrumental filler.

That said, even the filler is perfectly listenable for the most part — it’s just not interesting, either as music or as a stage in the Kinks’ artistic development.

For these reasons, this will be the shortest of these essays by some way. It’s a shame, though, that Davies didn’t get to have his work treated with enough respect that we could hear what it sounded like in its proper context.

The Album

God’s Children
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Generally considered the highlight of the album, God’s Children is one of Davies’ return-to-nature songs, this time arguing that “we are all God’s children” and that “Man…didn’t make you and he didn’t make me/And he’s got no right to turn us into machines.”

Musically, this is very Dylanesque, with a simple I-IV-V chorus, and verses that aren’t much more complex, and a string section essentially acting as a pad in much the same way Dylan would use a Hammond organ.

It’s not a completely thought-out song, but there’s an emotional honesty to the track that makes it work.

Lola
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: instrumental

This, on the other hand, really doesn’t work at all. A nearly five-minute instrumental version of the band’s recent hit, performed in the pseudo-funk style that is stereotypically used in 70s porn films, all chittering hi-hat and mildly distorted guitars, but with the vocal melody stated by a Hammond organ in a way that sounds incongruously like the work of Reggie Dixon.

The Way Love Used To Be
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A rather lovely little ballad, this is by far the best thing on the album, and is also far better than anything on Lola Vs Powerman. Based around a simple fingerpicked folk-style acoustic guitar part, doubled by piano, but with a string section that has some of the best orchestral arrangements of any Kinks album, dominated by cellos, with a very thin, barely audible, violin line at the top, this is musically simple, play-in-a-day stuff, but it’s the right kind of simple. This could easily have fit onto Colin Blunstone’s One Year, which is praise as high as it comes.

Davies’ marriage was going through a rough patch at this time, and this song about wanting to get away from the cares of the world and “talk about the way love used to be” is the work of a man who desperately wants to fix what is broken. This is possibly the best Kinks song of the post-60s era, and doesn’t really admit of much analysis — it works so well because of its simplicity.

Completely
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: instrumental

A ditchwater-dull blues instrumental based loosely on the melody of Amazing Grace, this plods along for three minutes and thirty-nine seconds of nothingness.

Running Around Town
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: instrumental

A nice little fragment, this starts as a rather frenetic, jug-bandish reworking of the melodic theme from God’s Children, performed on acoustic guitar and harmonica, before easing into a slow, arpeggiated, guitar/piano/harmonica fade.

Moments
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Stylistically rather odd, this is a mix between French chanson and the kind of 70s divorce rock that one expects to hear sung by a jumpsuited Elvis, occasionally hitting on something that sounds almost like Jake Thackray.

Based around the old Davies trick of the descending scalar bassline, this seems not properly thought out, an emotional expression (a confessional about his failing marriage — “I said I’d never do you wrong but then I go and do the same again/I don’t know why”) that hasn’t been completely fitted into the formal structure of the pop song. Unfortunately, Davies’ overly-mannered vocal here distances that emotion enough that the song doesn’t quite come off, but it’s a brave effort.

Animals In The Zoo
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A three-chord rocker based loosely on a Bo Diddley beat, but with Davies doing his Carribean accent again, this is another of Davies’ songs about needing to get back to nature — “You’re locked up but I’m on the loose/But I can’t quite tell who’s looking at who/Because I’m an animal too”. It’s the kind of thing you’d write if you wanted to write something that sounded a bit like early 70s Kinks, and is catchy enough, but tellingly wasn’t included on the EP of the better material from the album.

Just Friends
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

One of the strangest, and strongest, things on the album, this shows the growing influence of Kurt Weill on Davies’ songwriting — an influence which would come to dominate the Preservation album.

Starting with a statement of the melody, played presumably on a celesta, but sounding like a music box, this waltz-time piece then goes into a speak-sung Weimar cabaret style performance, alternating between Davies singing, backed by strings, and a tinkling solo harpsichord answering Davies’ phrases.

In this section, Davies sings in a light, pre-war vocal style, with lyrics that show the character he is playing is trying to reassure but is very, very scary — “I shall not molest you, I shan’t rape your brain”. He then takes on a slightly less sinister persona, this time in a comically vibrato voice reminiscent of Rudy Valee, to repeat the same sentiments over a faster-moving string part.

The track then moves into a baroque instrumental orchestration of the main theme (though perhaps with too simple a string part to have the true baroque feel), led by a harpsichord. The whole thing feels curiously like the work Randy Newman was to do a year or so later, both in the orchestral style and in the use of the unreliable, creepy narrator.

Whip Lady
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: instrumental

Forty seconds of rather interesting minimalist music built up from several layered piano parts playing simple repeating motifs in 6/8 (with a guitar and bass coming in toward the end), followed by forty seconds of loud rock music with some technically impressive drumming.

Dreams
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The most complex song on the album in terms of structure, this is still a comparatively weak song by Davies’ standards.

We start with a verse over slow arpeggiated keyboads (based around I and V7 chords with the occasional IV thrown in), doubled with acoustic guitar as on several other tracks around this time. The second verse, following immediately after, is the same melody and chord sequence, but over a sluggish, grinding, rock riff.

There then follows a quick drum fill, leading into a slow ten-bar keyboard solo, based around yet another descending scalar bassline, with a feel that seems to be going for Bach, but is let down by a guitar- and drum-heavy mix.

We then get a seven-bar chorus, with a IV-I chord sequence underpinned by another descending scalar bassline, before suddenly going into an instrumental break consisting of slowly arpeggiated I-IV-V-I chords played by a piano with an organ pad.

We then get a heavy rock version of the verse, a second chorus, another verse, then seven bars of the arpeggios, played at twice the earlier speed, on harpsichord, before the heavy rock style comes in for one final verse and then a repetition of the verse riff to fade.

The song shows some of the ambition of a Shangri-La or Autumn Almanac in its arrangement and construction, but alas has a paucity of musical ideas, and outstays its welcome.

Helga
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: instrumental

A generically “Meditteranean” instrumental, with wordless vocals from Davies, this features Spanish guitar and what sounds like a bouzouki, playing a 6/8 melody that owes something to the theme from Zorba The Greek, El Paso and to The Last Waltz.

Willesden Green
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: John Dalton

This is notable as the only track in the Kinks’ entire career to have a lead vocal by a band member other than one of the Davies brothers, as John Dalton performs what seems to be an inept (probably deliberately so) attempt at an Elvis impression.

The song itself is a parody of Detroit City, a country song by Bobby Bare that had been a UK top ten hit for Tom Jones in 1967, and has the same melody and, like Detroit City, a lyric about missing one’s hometown when far away and wanting to get a train back, including a recitative section in the middle.

The joke of the song is that while the singer in Detroit City lives in Detroit and misses the cotton fields of the South, the singer in Willesden Green has only moved as far as Fulham and Golders Green from his home area of Willesden (all three of these areas are within a handful of miles from each other, all within London).

This combination of country music and focusing on a specific area of London would be used more seriously on the band’s next album, Muswell Hillbillies, but here it’s just played for laughs.

God’s Children – The End
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: instrumental

Twenty-seven seconds of reprise of the opening track, with the melody played on an acoustic guitar, closes what is the least interesting Kinks album up to this point.

Do you know much about Chuck Jones?

The cartoon man?

He created Road Runner. When people think about cartoons, nine times out of ten they think about Warner Brothers cartoons. When they think about Warner Brothers cartoons, nine times out of ten they think about the ones made by Chuck Jones. All the things we think we know about the Warner Brothers universe… the nature of Bugs Bunny, the nature of Daffy Duck, the rules of the chase as applied to Wile E. Coyote… they’re all down to Chuck Jones. He didn’t invent all the characters, but he defined most of them. He deliberately and consciously honed in on what made the characters work, on their most primal dynamics. The Bugs and Daffy cartoons that stick in people’s minds are almost all his. Then he did the same strip-down job to the cartoon medium as a whole, and the result was the original Road Runner series. Road Runner is culture in its purest form… I’m sorry, I’ve just realized how stupid that sounds. Never mind, it’s true anyway. It’s the whole cartoon medium in a nutshell, boiled down to one never-ending chase with rules that feel like they’re instinctive to us these days. Nobody seems to have noticed that Chuck Jones quite simply created the most powerful and inescapable myth of the twentieth century. Because when you get down to the fundamental truth of an idea, you’ve got something that’s got power. Genuine power. People sometimes talk about this in a very disparaging way, like it’s a case of bringing things down to the lowest common denominator, but that’s the opposite of what you’re doing. It’s like you’re honing the culture to a razor-sharp point. You’re creating something that’s primal and… kind of dangerous. Myths… real myths, not that wanky market-driven Anne-Rice-stroke-Neil-Gaiman shite you get these days… aren’t stereotypes or cliches. They’re just inescapable, which is why Chuck Jones is possibly the greatest creative genius who ever lived. And yes, the characters out of Queer as Folk are minor myths as well. Their environment’s quite a specific one, but the same principles apply. I mean, they should last a decade or two. Wile E. Coyote will probably survive for centuries.

I think this is truer than it looks (although we can argue if the true talent was Jones the director or Michael Maltese the scriptwriter and storyboarder). I’d argue that the Road Runner cartoons are *slightly* imperfect, though, in that in some — not all, but some — it’s made clear that the Road Runner knows that the Coyote is trying to capture it, and in some the Road Runner even causes the Coyote’s defeat. For the Road Runner cartoons to achieve true perfection, you need to have the Road Runner oblivious to the Coyote’s machinations, and have the Coyote defeated only by his own schemes backfiring. So the cartoons could be sharpened more than they have been, but they’re still magnificent.

And roughly ten quadrillion times better than anything Friz Freleng did.

(MindlessWho post will be up shortly)

Matthew Rossi on the result of the North Carolina plebiscite against equal marriage

Bleeding Heart Libertarians on some more positive news — the passage of a trans rights bill in Argentina

Millennium on the failures of the coalition
How ignorant doctors kill patients

Alex on Terror Of The Autons
And a new blog linking to lots of Beach Boys bootlegs, for those who like that sort of thing.

The reunion tour, on the other hand…

THAT they seem to be doing right. Two thirds of the set is pretty much what you’d expect, all the hits, many of which I love (Good Vibrations, Don’t Worry Baby, many more), but almost as many of which I could quite happily never hear again (Barbara Ann, Kokomo, Be True To Your School).

But fully a third of the 45-song (and growing — it started as 42) setlist is the more artistic stuff, and as a proportion that’s growing daily. Which means that there is a good hour of the show dedicated to stuff like this:

THAT’S worth travelling to Italy for. Even if they do play bloody Barbara Ann.

I did take detailed notes of the first half of the conversation. Unfortunately, one of the participants then said that a lot of what they’d said was off the record, and as I didn’t take perfect notes as to who said what (and took no notes at all for the last half), I’m going to be deliberately vague about a lot of stuff here, and try to ensure that I don’t tell tales out of school.

So I’m going to paraphrase here, and give MY INTERPRETATION of what is going on. This is *INFORMED BY* the conference call, but in paraphrasing and eliding details I may have got things wrong.

First things first, the so-called ‘draft bill’ going round is nothing of the sort. It’s a Home Office briefing document, and one that was written fairly early in the process. The draft bill *has not yet been written*, or at least has not been finalised.

It appears that the original intention of those who proposed the bill in the first place was to have something very like the worst rumours that have been out there, but that this has been *definitively* quashed by Lib Dem activists and MPs. It sounds to me like the Home Office (or elements within it) wanted to sneak one past us, and they couldn’t.

Despite the rumours, the stuff about blocking porn by default will *NOT* be in the draft bill.

The main point, however, is this:

The draft bill will probably be bad, *but that is not the end of the matter*. When it comes out, it will look horrible, and people will scream about it. When that happens, it will be a good thing if you let your MP know exactly what problems you have with the draft, but *do not panic at this stage*.

The bill will be going in front of a Parliamentary Committee, which Huppert is on, and which will be *extensively* modifying it. They will be doing so on the basis of advice from technology companies about what the actual technical implications of the bill will be (Huppert is probably the single most technologically clued-up person in Parliament, and he freely admits that he needs expert advice from people who know more than him. Much of the sheer awfulness of most legislation relating to the net (IN MY OPINION – this part did not come up in the call) arises from the fact that it’s written by middle-aged arts graduates who don’t know what it is that they don’t know, so the fact that they’re actually going to ask people with a clue is itself a major improvement), advice from civil liberties groups (Huppert mentioned Liberty, No2ID and the Open Rights Group as people whose opinions they will be asking for), and from non-affiliated individuals whose opinion will be useful (he mentioned Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales here).

The end result will be something far, far better than the draft bill. We can’t know what that something better will be yet, obviously, but the general rough lines will probably be:

Far fewer people having powers to order interception of communications (did you know that right now everyone from the police to your local council to the postal services authority can legally get access to records of every phone call you make and email you send? Not the contents of the message, but who it was to — and they can do it without a judicial warrant, and without you ever knowing.) — the ideal will be to have it be that only the police and security services can do this, and only with a judicial warrant, though we may not get that ideal.

An “air gap” whereby the police can’t directly access the databases held by ISPs or websites, but can only request data from those companies.

And then, and only with those additional restrictions, the ability for that smaller group of people to access contact data — data of who you’ve contacted through, eg, Skype — in the same way that the current larger group of people can access details of who you’ve emailed or phoned — if and only if that can be done without storing or decrypting the contents of the messages. If it can’t (and it is my understanding that it can’t, but I don’t know enough networking stuff to be sure) then that won’t happen.

The end result *should* be that a bad bill goes into the process, and a bill comes out that, while not good from my point of view, will mean that overall there is less state intrusion into people’s private correspondence, not more, and that what state intrusion there is will be for, if not good reasons, at least better ones. I can accept as plausible an argument that there might be circumstances in which the police or security services might need to know who talked to whom in order to prevent a terrorist atrocity. I don’t accept as reasonable the current situation, where councils can (and have) check people’s email records and have them followed because they’re suspected of letting their dogs foul the pavement.

If my understanding of what was said at last night’s call is correct, while the draft bill will be bad, the result of the scrutiny process *should* be that at the end of it we move from the current situation (where we have legislation in force already from the last government that frankly puts most of the structures for a totalitarian surveillance state into place, ready for any unscrupulous politician to use) to one where the worst excesses of the last government are rolled back slightly, though nowhere near as far as I’d like.

So while I can’t say I’m at all happy at the proposals, I have enough faith in Huppert’s record on both civil liberties and tech stuff that if he says the end result will be an incremental improvement, rather than things getting worse, I’ll take his word for it, at least until we see the bill after the committee’s scrutiny.

Other people who were on the call — could you please clarify or correct in the comments? I think I’m giving the correct impression here, but I’m terribly worried I’ve got hold of the wrong ends of several sticks…

There are some things that have become ubiquitous throughout the multiverse, and Powerpoint is one of them. I’m reliably informed that Bill Gates hired a level three magic user to embed a charm in the software code, so that anyone who had more than three subordinates in their job would automatically find themselves using the thing. Well, I say reliably informed, Tony The Liar told me, but I still like to believe it.

So I had to sit around a table in a conference centre, drinking foul coffee out of tiny china cups with a lad called Terry from Birmingham who’d been assigned to look after the Queen of the Fae, and a nice-looking sort from Leeds called Sandra, whose first words to me had been “I have a black-belt in jiu-jitsu” and who sat as far away from me as possible (the Wallace charm strikes again) and was bodyguarding the Longagovian ambassador.

There were also people from the security services of each of the other worlds there to shadow us — a fat-looking gobboe from Fairyland, one of the few they have left there, an Elvish woman named Dralucia from the Misty Worlds, and there was a chair which looked empty but which everyone swore contained a magic user from Faraway And Longago who had transcended the need for corporeal form.

Personally, I thought the crafty sod had just used that as an excuse not to turn up, as a variety — no, I take that back — as a succession of middling nobodies came up in front of us to show us pie charts and tell us about the fire regulations and show us little embedded videos about the planopolitical situation that told us nothing we didn’t already know. I swear two of them had got each other’s Powerpoint presentation by mistake and not noticed.

Luckily, one of the other things that is constant across every universe is sloping off for a crafty fag, so I waited for the gobboe to go on a break, and then I joined him outside in the drizzle.

“Mind if I nick one off you? I’m trying to give up buying.”

“Be my guest.” he replied, pulling one out of the packet.

“Ta, you’re a hero.”

He looked at me very strangely for a moment, and then lit my cigarette with the end of his.

I stuck out my hand. “Bill Wallace. Good to meet you.”

He shook it. “Skjorvorvorvik. Faery security.”

“You do this kind of thing much?”

“Nah. The Queen’s not really big into the whole ‘peace’ thing. She’s far more into multiversal domination than diplomacy.”

“Sort of speak softly and carry a big stick type, is she?”

“More don’t speak at all and bludgeon them round the back of the head while they’re not looking, to be honest, so this is a pleasant change for me.”

I thought about this for a while. I thought about how we’d been sitting in an out-of-town conference centre of the type that managed to be just inside the ringroad while simultaneously being completely bloody inaccessible, in a small room with windows that didn’t open that was beginning to stink of spilled coffee and stale farts, listening to tedious little wanksplats explain the finer details of the Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations (2002) to us. And then I thought about his description of this as “a pleasant change”.

“You poor sod”

“Yeah,” he took a drag on his fag, “that about sums it up.”

“You OK to be talking to me, by the way? Won’t get done for consorting with the enemy because I’m looking after the Panjandrum?”

“Nah. You’re a neutral third party, ain’t yer? Anyway, if she asks, I’ll just say I was bribing you with a cigarette to pass on information about him.”

“Will she fall for that? Will she really think Earth police are that easily bribable?”

“Why not? I am.”

And with that, Skjorvorvorvik pinched out his cigarette, stuck it behind his ear, and headed inside, just as the drizzle turned into a downpour. I threw the rest of mine into a puddle and followed him.

Still, at least I wasn’t Charlie…

(part 3b, about Charlie, tomorrow)

Musically, the album is as inventive as ever, if in a heavier rock style than the band had had prior to Arthur, but lyrically the album is somewhat lacking, being self-obsessed in a way that the earlier albums hadn’t been. Fully half the songs are about how hard it is being a rock star and how managers, record companies, publishing companies and the rest of the music business are all out to make pop singers’ lives as difficult as possible.

Of course, for those of us who aren’t rock stars, this may seem a little hard to relate to — it’s hard to feel much sympathy for someone who is still, in the grand scheme of things, being paid vast sums of money for doing a job that is far more enjoyable than most people could dream of.

However, while it may be hard to sympathise, Ray Davies had a real reason to be angry. A contractual dispute with Eddie Kassner, his publisher, dating back to 1965 had meant that for the previous five years — the Kinks’ prime earning period — he had not received a penny of the songwriting royalties he was due. He’d eventually settled out of court in order to get any of the money at all, agreeing to a lower royalty rate and paying Kassner £30,000 (the equivalent of £653,000 in 2012 money) so he could get some of what he was owed. One can perhaps understand his frustration.

Lola vs Powerman is a transitional album for the Kinks in a number of ways. It was their last proper studio album for Pye records, the label they’d been with from the start of their career — they recorded the largely-instrumental soundtrack to the film Percy and then left for RCA Records. It’s also the first album to feature new keyboard player John “Baptist” Gosling, and is a clear step toward the blend of country music and heavy rock the band would achieve on their last truly great album, Muswell Hillbillies, though it’s not quite there yet. However, the songwriting is tighter than it was on Arthur, with almost all the songs coming in under four minutes, and almost half being under three. When a song begins to pall, another one will be along soon, and there’s still a better than average chance it’ll be a good one.

In this piece I will have to deal slightly more with the personal lives of the band members than I like to, simply because the songs themselves are so personal.

The Album

The Contenders
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This track starts with a lovely little two-chord bluegrass harmony section, Ray and Dave Davies harmonising with each other over a dobro and banjo backing, sounding almost like the ‘rebel country’ music made by people like Steve Earle a few decades later, before crashing into a Canned Heat style harmonica-led boogie (and a key change from E to A), with some of the best harmonica playing on a Kinks record.

Lyrically, this seems to be in equal parts about Davies’ wish to escape from domesticity (his first marriage was rapidly heading towards collapse at this point) and about his ambitions for the band — he doesn’t want to be a manual worker or to go into a respectable job, but he’s “got to get out of this life somehow”. When he sings “We’re not the greatest when when we’re separated/But when we’re together I think we’re going to make it”, he could be singing to the “little mammy” of the first line (presumably his first wife, Rasa), but equally he sounds like he’s singing to his brother and the rest of his bandmates.

Strangers
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

So it’s appropriate that the next song (which is segued into — the album is sequenced almost without gaps between the songs) would be this outstretched hand from Dave Davies to his brother.

The first song that Dave Davies had had on an album since Something Else, this may be the best song he ever wrote. Around the time that Lola Vs Powerman was being recorded, Dave Davies had had a mental breakdown, but communication between the brothers had got so bad (and Ray Davies was under so much pressure himself) that Ray had not even been aware of this. However, Dave had managed to pull himself back from the brink with a variety of New Age beliefs, and now saw himself at the beginning of a new spiritual journey.

The song recognises that Dave Davies is starting from a place where all his previous certainties have been shattered, but that he can see a way forward — and that while his brother can’t see that way forward, he knows that he’s been in a similar situation, and wants to offer him help. He recognises that the two are drifting apart, but there’s a deeper bond between them.

With Dave Davies’ trademark metrical irregularity, but with a very simple backing track (two acoustic guitars, piano, organ, and what sounds like just a kick drum and floor tom), this is a wonderfully tender, touching song of brotherly love, and the best thing on the album.

Denmark Street
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A rather slight song about the music publishing industry (Denmark Street was the street in London where almost all the UK’s music publishers were based), this combines pub-singalong piano, country-rock and 1940s pop (one section sounds very like George Formby) into a style which prefigures quite a lot of the pub rock sound of the late 70s. Were this song slightly more funky, it could fit musically quite comfortably with the work of Ian Dury and The Blockheads.

Lyrically, however, it’s a nothing piece of fluff, just saying that music publishers don’t necessarily like the music they publish.

Get Back In The Line
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This is possibly the hardest song on this album to judge from the perspective of the twenty-first century, because it’s a very political song, but talking about something that no longer exists.

In the 1970s, unions were far more powerful in the UK than they are today. Between the decline of Britain’s manufacturing and mining industries, legislation brought in by the Thatcher and Major governments, and European law banning ‘closed shops’, unions in Britain today have little power and relatively low membership. In the 1970s, however, they were a major political force, and there was a growing consensus that they were using that power harmfully.

This consensus (which is the accepted view on nearly every side today) may or may not have been correct (I have relatives who were trade union officials at the time whose stories of some of the more prominent causes celebres of the time differ wildly from the accepted view), but that was certainly the belief among an increasing proportion of society at the time, and that clearly included Ray Davies.

So in this ballad, one of the best melodies he wrote on the album, he writes from the point of view of a working man trying to earn a living and being blocked by “the union man”.

It may seem that this song, about British working-class life, has no place on an album which is mostly about the music business, but Ray Davies had had his own problems with unions. From 1965 through 1969 — the band’s prime years as a singles band in the UK — they had been banned from playing in the USA as a result of a dispute with the US Musicians’ Union, a dispute which had led to their career crashing into obscurity over there.

Davies clearly (and understandably) thought that the frustrations he experienced from the Musicians’ Union were much of a piece with the problems he was having with his managers, publishers and record company, and so felt a great deal of sympathy with those who were in the power of the unions in the UK.

Musically, this is the clearest example for a while of how Ray Davies’ love of descending scalar basslines is clearly influenced by Bach. Here the organ part gives the song something of the flavour of organ works like Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier or O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, though the melody is all Davies’ own. The bassline is more cleverly worked out than some of the earlier stepwise basslines have been, though — while in the chorus it’s mostly based around a descending scale in G, when the chord gets to Em, the bassline suddenly starts rising, getting to A — a tone higher than it started — before dropping back to D, which would have been the natural next note in the descent after Em, and continuing to go down.

This sudden rise to higher than the bassline has been previously, followed by a precipitous drop to lower than it was before, melds beautifully with the lyrics — the rise from E to A starts on the phrase “the sun begins to shine”, before the drop down and descent on the line “Then he walks right past and I know that I’ve got to get back in the line”. Rarely has Davies ever matched musical form with lyrical content to such devastating effect.

Lola
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The Kinks’ biggest hit for many years — their first UK top ten hit for three years and their first in the US since Well-Respected Man — was this track about meeting a trans person [FOOTNOTE In the song it's not made clear whether Lola is transgendered or transvestite, or even if Davies was entirely aware of the difference between the two, so I shall be using the term ‘trans' to cover both in this piece.] in a bar, and going back to have sex with her unaware she’s not biologically female — and then not minding too much when he finds out.

I’ve dreaded writing about this song, because it’s witty, clever, and one of the catchiest things Ray Davies ever wrote, but it also perpetuates some negative stereotypes about trans people. However, it also shows more respect to trans people than any other pop song I could think of, so I decided to ask some of my trans friends what they thought of the song. The poet Rachel Zall responded:

Well, speaking for myself as a trans woman:

Certainly it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t repeat and reinforce all sorts of tired transmisogynist tropes, or that the song doesn’t have a nasty hetero-cis sneer underneath it.

But for lots of folks, as you said, it was at least a mention that we exist that was framed in a non-hostile way, and for folks who’ve never heard themselves represented before, a song suggesting that one might at least be lovable to someone somewhere, even ironically, can mean a lot. (I mean, four decades later, can you name another love song to a trans woman? I can’t.)

Personally, for just that reason it meant a lot to me when I was a kid (along with “Walk On The Wild Side” and Rachel Pollack’s run on Doom Patrol), so I’m always a bit kinder to it than I can justify.

Having said all that, I think this speaks more to the desperation many trans women feel trying to find any even theoretically positive depiction of ourselves in popular culture. Divorced from the culture around it, the song is hugely problematic and hard to defend, but in context, it seems better than it is by virtue of being a small, sickly fish in an otherwise empty pond. Which is kinda sad, actually.

Which is about what I thought the reaction would be — the song is problematic now, even though at the time it was a fairly progressive song.

(And incidentally, no, I can’t think of any other songs about being attracted to a trans woman, off the top of my head — other than, actually, the Kinks’ later song Out Of The Wardrobe, which manages to urge tolerance for trans people while simultaneously being rather homophobic, a trick not many people have managed).

Lola was actually based on several real experiences the band and people around them had. Most of the Kinks were not entirely heterosexual, and Mick Avory apparently spent a lot of time in trans nightclubs. At various times, Ray Davies has said the song is about Avory, about his own (apparently non-sexual) meeting with Candy Darling, and about the Kinks’ manager Robert Wace going home with a trans woman, too drunk to care.

Oddly, the biggest problem this song had with getting radio play was not the subject matter, nor the ending of the song (with its implication of our protagonist performing fellatio on Lola), but the mention of “Coca Cola” in the lyric — the BBC were then not allowed to mention brand names, and Davies had to make a 6000-mile round trip to overdub the word “cherry” over “Coca” for the single release, in order to get it played. Both versions of the song are on the current release of the album.

Dave Davies has often claimed that he wrote the music for this song, uncredited. Whatever the correct credits, this is one of the best singles the Kinks ever released, and has now entered the popular culture to such an extent that this was the song chosen for Ray Davies to play when he performed at the Queen’s Jubilee concert in 2002.

Top Of The Pops
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A tedious heavy riffer with no real reason to exist, this is just a song about how having a hit single makes you popular, a sentiment that very few of the listeners will be able to appreciate.

The two main points of interest here are the line “I’ve been invited to a dinner with a prominent queen”, presumably included so that Lola would fit in with the rest of the album (other than that line there are no connections between the subject of Lola and the music-business stresses of the rest of the album), and the last line, in which Davies puts on an ‘hilarious’ mock-Jewish voice to play an agent.

One of the more positive changes over the last forty years in the UK is that outright mockery of ethnic minorities is no longer considered acceptable, but in the early 1970s — and even into the mid-80s — there was considered nothing wrong with even fairly small-l liberal comedians blacking up or making fun of Jewish people. In that context, Davies’ ‘comedy’ voice at the end of this song was perfectly acceptable — he’s doing a caricature of the stereotypical showbiz agent, not dissimilar to those done by people like Monty Python or The Goodies. Today, it mars the album, and comes across as very unpleasant.

The Moneygoround
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The best of the music-business songs on the album by a long way, this is a short (one minute forty-three) romp, in the style of Noel Coward or Flanders And Swann, through the details of the contracts that Davies was enmeshed in. While it’s obviously biased towards Davies (Robert Wace and Grenville Collins, both of whom are named in the lyric, have objected to the line “do they all deserve/money from a song that they’ve never heard?”, claiming that they knew and loved the music of the band when they were managing them), the description is one that anyone who knows about the music industry at that time will recognise as being largely accurate, with layers of publishers and managers all taking a cut before the artist gets a penny.

Musically, this is a pre-war show tune, from the almost-ragtime verses (with yet another Davies descending bassline) to the melodramatic bridge (Davies sounding wonderfully hammy on “I thought they were my friends”, his tongue firmly in cheek even as the point of the song is serious) and the bouncy chorus, with its lyrical quote from The Music Goes Round And Round. The Moneygoround also has a slight musical resemblance to that song, a hit for the Tommy Dorsey band in 1936 that was a pop standard when Davies was growing up. The resemblance to The Music Goes Round And Round can be heard most closely in Russ Conway’s piano version, though I don’t recommend anyone listen to that track.

This, however, is a delight. Funny, clever, and entertaining, and complaining about a real problem without being angsty.

This Time Tomorrow
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Side two opens with this, one of the most affecting tracks on the album, even though like many of the better tracks on this album it admits of less analysis than some of the more complex music on the band’s mid-sixties records.

Staying almost entirely in the key of G (apart from an occasional B major chord, usually just as a passing chord), this is a curiously melancholy upbeat song about a long plane journey home, to “fields full of houses”. The most interesting feature in the track, and the one that lifts it into the top tier of the band’s early-70s work, is the way the banjo part (played by Dave Davies, with a very unusual attack — he’s playing it like a guitar player, rather than a banjo player), with its fast-picked arpeggios, is doubled by Gosling’s piano. The odd, skipping, rippling effect created by having two such different instruments play such a fast arpeggiated part on an otherwise mid-tempo song is one that must have been hellish to achieve in the studio, but which paid off, making this track endlessly listenable.

A Long Way From Home
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

And after the plane touches down, you find “you’re still a long way from home”. This piano ballad seems to be addressed to both Dave Davies and to Ray himself. For Ray Davies throughout his career, losing touch with one’s roots seems to be the single worst thing possible, even as he clearly grows to have less and less in common with the poor North London people he grew up with.

Here he sings about how “your wealth will never make you stronger”, because “you don’t know me” from the perspective of someone who knew a rich star when he was a “runny-nosed and scruffy kid”. Whether this is Ray singing to Dave, or Ray taking on the persona of someone from Muswell Hill talking to Ray, it’s fair to say that the critique in the song summed up how both men felt at the time.

The song is very pretty, but curiously forgettable — I have listened to this album hundreds of times, and on the day I wrote this piece I listened to the album five times in a row before I started writing, but I still thought “Which one was that, then?” when I came to write about it. It works in the context of the album, and it clearly meant a lot to the band, but it’s not a highlight.

Rats
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

Musically, Dave Davies’ second song on the album is an early heavy metal track that could have been recorded by Deep Purple or Black Sabbath with little change. It’s not a genre I particularly like, but it seems a competent enough example of the style, if out of place on this album.

Lyrically, however, this is one of the strongest and strangest things on the record, a hallucinatory scream of despair at the music business people he sees as “rats jumping on and off my back” whose “hate spreads just like infection”. It’s clearly the work of a troubled man, and is possibly the most unfiltered, honest thing on the whole album. It was the B-side to Apeman.

Apeman
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The second single from the album, and the band’s last top ten hit in the UK, was this calypso song, which returns to Davies’ regular themes of wanting to get back to nature and a simpler life, rather than live in a civilised world with “the over-population and inflation and starvation and the crazy politicians”.

Much like Top Of The Pops, this song has been accused of having what gets described euphemistically as “outdated racial attitudes”. And in a sense it does — this song is from a time when it was considered reasonable to sing in a comedy fake-Carribean voice, which would probably be considered unacceptable today by most people but was, like the “Jewish” voice in Top Of The Pops, considered perfectly normal at the time. The voice is ‘outdated’, but no worse in that respect than many other products of its times (which is not necessarily to defend those other products).

The problem comes when the ‘outdated’ comedy voice is combined with lyrics that contain the line “I’m a King Kong man, I’m a voodoo man, I’m an apeman”. The combination of a stereotypically ‘black’ vocal sound with references to apes and voodoo is at best an unfortunate one, and one that has caused several people to see the song as racist.

However, while I’m not going to argue that there is nothing problematic about the song, I don’t believe this song was intended in a racist manner, and I can’t imagine that it occurred to Davies for a millisecond that the conjunction of the ape imagery and the voice could be taken to have any racist implications.

Certainly, the faux-Carribean feel of the song seems to have been taken by real calypsonians as being a mostly-sincere tribute, rather than an insult — a cover version of this was recorded less than a year later by the Esso Trinidad Steel Band as the opening track of their self-titled album [FOOTNOTE This was reissued in 2011 on Bananastan Records, the label of Van Dyke Parks, the album's producer, and is essential listening.].

Certainly, in retrospect, it would have been better had Davies not put on that particular ‘funny’ voice when singing that particular set of lyrics, but I do think intentions count for a lot, and this isn’t the song of someone with bad intentions.

Leaving that to one side, is the song any good?

Well, yes, it is. Other than the piano part at the start (played to sound like a steel band), this is musically almost a straight reworking of Lola, with similar instrumentation (including the prominent dobro that’s all over the album), feel and chord sequence. It seems a clear attempt to recapture lightning, having much the same resemblance to Lola that All Day (And All Of The Night) had to You Really Got Me. Apeman was so much Lola part two that Davies even had to make another transatlantic plane trip to drop in another single word to get the song played on the radio, this time when the BBC weren’t sure whether the air pollution was “fogging” or “fucking” up Davies’ eyes.

Apeman, however, floats where Lola lumbers. Where Lola is by far the more instantly impressive track, Apeman sticks with the listener, and is an absolutely perfect pop record, and the last truly great Kinks single.

Powerman
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A dull, plodding rocker, comparing the “Powerman” who’s “got my money and my publishing rights” with Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Hitler and Mussolini. Possibly comparing Edward Kassner (whose parents died in Auschwitz) with Adolf Hitler was not the best way to get people’s sympathy. Failing that, Davies could have tried writing a more interesting song to put the comparison in.

Got To Be Free
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

And we finish the album with a song that ties together its themes, both lyrically (the themes of wanting to escape from the people making Davies a “slave” and live free like “a flea or a proud butterfly”– he even reuses the line about “the bugs and the spiders and flies” from Apeman) and musically. In particular it returns to the bluegrass section from the start of The Contenders and turns it into a full song.

The verses, which stick closely to the feel of that section of The Contenders, work well, with surprisingly authentic-sounding bluegrass banjo and dobro playing. The choruses work a little less well, sounding like an attempt to sound like the Rolling Stones in their more country-blues moments.

The song, like the album it’s closing, is something of a curate’s egg, veering from dull to surprisingly effective. The best moments of the album are as good as anything the band had done, but even those are problematic in a way earlier work hadn’t been, while the worst moments were inferior to anything the band had done since Face To Face.

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