Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

And so we come to the first Kinks album that could reasonably be considered to be worse than its predecessor.

Which is not to say that Arthur is in any way a bad album — in fact its best songs are considerably better than the best material on Village Green Preservation Society — but rather that there are just the occasional signs here of an incipient flabbiness, a tendency to extend songs beyond their natural length with instrumental jams (the longest song the band had recorded in their entire career previously had been four minutes ten seconds long, but on this album there are four songs that are longer than that, with Australia being nearly seven minutes long).

However, this is still a truly great album, and it’s all the more astonishing then that it did so poorly with the listening public. Not only did the album fail to chart, but of the three singles released from it the first two didn’t chart at all and the third only reached number 33. For a band that only recently had had an unbroken run of eight top ten singles to do so poorly suggests that something, somewhere, was very, very wrong.

It could have been very different — Arthur was conceived as a series of songs for a Granada TV special, co-written by Ray Davies and the playwright Julian Mitchell, which would have looked at the history of Britain in the twentieth century through the life of a character, Arthur Morgan, based loosely on Arthur Anning, Davies’ brother-in-law.

Unfortunately for the Kinks, the TV show was cancelled fairly close to production, and the Who released their own concept album, also named after its central character, Tommy, while the Kinks were still finishing recording. This was partly because there was still a general lack of focus around the band at the time, with several projects in various states of completion — while recording and writing Arthur and writing the TV show, Ray Davies was also producing Turtle Soup [FOOTNOTE: An absolutely astonishing album by US pop group The Turtles, which manages to combine their witty LA pop sensibility with the gentle wistfulness of Village Green Preservation Society. Anyone who likes the Kinks' music must listen to it.] in the USA, while the band were also recording a Dave Davies ‘solo’ album (which would remain unreleased, although versions of it have appeared on archival releases) and the band were also getting used to new bass player John Dalton.

The recordings with the Turtles, however, had a longer-term impact — while in LA, Davies negotiated an end to the ban on the Kinks performing in the US that the US musicians’ union had brought in in 1965. As the band’s career in the UK ground to a halt, they were slowly able to build themselves a new career in the US.

The Album

Victoria
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The opening track, and third single from the album, this reached number thirty-three. Lyrically, it’s a return to the themes of Village Green Preservation Society, but less conflicted — it seems a fairly straightforward paen to the glories of Empire and to Queen Victoria, with only the line “for this land I shall die” hinting at the darker themes to come. The lyrics even specifically mention “croquet lawns, village greens”.

Musically, however, it’s as different from Village Green as the Kinks ever got — thudding, heavy, riff-driven rock, extremely bass-heavy and hitting one like a punch in the gut rather than being light, elegant and intellectual. Which is not to say there’s no subtlety here — the horn arrangement on the middle eight, in particular, is very well done — but this is the Kinks becoming a rock band, as opposed to a pop group.

The concept of ‘rock’ as opposed to ‘pop’ only really started to be seen as a distinction worth making in the late 60s, when most of the bands who wanted to be seen as ‘serious artists’ started concentrating on albums, making records more heavily influenced by the blues, and turning up their amplification. The Kinks were one of a number of wonderful bands who got left behind (albeit temporarily) by this change — perceived by the hippies as a pop group, while being seen as past it by the younger-skewing singles-buying audience, they could create wonderful records like this and be more or less ignored by both groups of listeners.

Victoria is, though, one of the Kinks’ more well-loved singles in retrospect, having been covered by bands as diverse as The Fall and The Kooks over the years.

This is also the first Kinks song to be more listenable in stereo than in mono. The mono mix of this (and of much of the album) is oppressive and bass-heavy. The stereo mix is lighter, more open, and has overall a better balance of instruments.

Yes Sir, No Sir
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This track is one of the most extraordinary things in the Kinks’ catalogue, a mini-suite in which Davies takes on a number of characters in order to express his anger at authority, using World War I as an excuse.

To the extent Davies’ songwriting has any coherent politics at all, it is against all forms of authority and conformity and for the individual, and here he lets that out in a way that he’s never previously been able to. He was almost certainly inspired here by the film Oh! What A Lovely War, which came out during the early stages of planning of the album, and which combined music-hall songs with a depiction of the horror of World War I.

While World War I had always been controversial, its role in the national myth of Britain had until fairly recently been that of ‘The Great War’, a war that the country could be proud of. However, as the 60s drew on, and as feeling against war in general was on the increase, the consensus changed to the one that now dominates discussion of the subject — the ‘lions led by donkeys’ who sacrificed themselves for no good reason. Even the Doctor Who story broadcast at the time Arthur was being recorded took this line, so common had that view become [FOOTNOTE And I am indebted to Gavin Burrows and Gavin Robinson, in the discussions for a blog post I wrote about that Doctor Who story, at http://mindlessones.com/2012/02/11/doctor-who-fifty-stories-for-fifty-years-1969/, for the slightly more nuanced view of that consensus I present here.].

Yes Sir, No Sir conveys that sense all too well. It starts with a simple military bass and snare-drum pattern, and a simple four-chord guitar part, over which Davies sings as an infantryman asking for ‘permission to speak’ and ‘permission to breathe’.

We then get the addition of a horn section, and a return of the old favourite technique of holding a chord while the bassline plays a descending scale, as an officer tells the soldier “you’re outside and there ain’t no admission to our play”, and in a parody of the popular World War I song, to “pack up your ambition in your old kit bag/And you’ll be happy with a packet of fags”.

We then get to the chilling heart of the song, when Davies takes on the persona of an aristocrat, concerned more with maintaining authority than anything else. The last few lines of this section — “Give the scum a gun and make the buggers fight/Just be sure to have deserters shot on sight/If he dies we’ll send a medal to his wife”, followed by a braying laugh — are among the best things Davies has ever done.

We then return to the trooper for one last verse before…

Some Mother’s Son
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Easily the best album track the band ever did, this exquisite little ballad uses many of the techniques from Village Green Preservation Society, both musical (harpsichord arpeggios, played by Ray Davies, who did provide all the keyboard parts on this album, and descending scales) and lyrical (the motif of the photograph again) to totally different effect — the nostalgia here is a mother’s memory of her son, shot in the war.

While this song gets much of its power from its generality — the details of the soldier are deliberately kept vague, he’s an Unknown Soldier figure rather than a person with a sketched out life history — the real key line here is the seemingly unbearably callous, but simultaneously heartbreaking, line about the mother framing his picture on the wall, “but all dead soldiers look the same”. Like so many of Davies’ best lines, this has many, many possible interpretations — the way the military makes people conform, the way photographs are framed to look the same way for everyone, but the most touching reading of the line, I think, is the implication that the soldiers killed in the war were not yet fully formed.

Boys of eighteen and nineteen for the most part, they hadn’t yet had time to develop as distinct individuals, before that opportunity was denied them — which is why it’s possible to sing about them so generally.

A heartbreaking song on its own, when listened to in context after Yes Sir, No Sir this becomes one of the most effective anti-war songs ever written.

Drivin’
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This was the lead-off single from the album, and the first Kinks single not to get into the Top 40 since 1964. In retrospect, it was an insane choice, as it’s one of the very weakest songs on the album. It’s not bad, just rather substance-free.

Even on here, though, there’s still some bite — while it sounds like a purely escapist piece of fluff, the lyrics show why escapism was needed, in the between-wars time in which this is set, “seems like all the world is fighting/they’re even talking of a war”, and when the characters go for a drive and picnic they’ll be followed by debt collectors and rent collectors.

Brainwashed
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Another of the weaker songs on the album, this is one of those songs where Davies’ vaguely libertarian politics take a fairly nasty turn, and his individualism becomes a contempt for anyone who lives a normal life, with lines like “Look like a real human being but you don’t have a mind of your own”.

In particular, Davies here blames the “bureaucrats” who give the character to whom he’s singing “social security/tax saving benefits” for brainwashing people — a typical libertarian critique of the state, and one which has some validity, but a critique that it’s much, much easier to make when, like Davies, you’ve grown up with those safety nets and also managed to become very wealthy.

Which wouldn’t be so bad in itself — there is nothing that says that pop music should be politically ‘progressive’ (whatever that word actually means) and a critique of social democracy from a right-libertarian perspective, at a time when the revolutionary rhetoric of much of the New Left was starting to fall apart, would be a fair idea for a song, even if I’d disagree with that critique, but here Davies is talking to someone who is a victim of this supposed brainwashing, but seeing that victimhood as a moral failing in the victim.

This kind of arrogant right-libertarian victim-blaming is something we also see a lot of in the works of Frank Zappa, whose attitudes are closer to those of Davies than most critics acknowledge, but except at his early 80s nadir Zappa never wrote anything as musically dull as this.

Australia
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A much better song finishes the first side of the album. In the late 50s and early 60s there was a mass wave of emigration from the UK to Australia, which at the time was advertising widely for (white) Commonwealth immigrants, as opposed to its extremely restrictive immigration laws today, and the Davies brothers’ sister Rose, and her husband Arthur, had moved over there.

Davies here outlines a dream of a mythical utopian Australia much like the California of the Beach Boys (who he references on the line “we’ll surf like they do in the USA”, with some very competent Wilsonesque falsetto in the backing), an open, free society very different from the closed, decaying Britain still in thrall to the memory of Queen Victoria, and would have made for a great single.

However, they then choose to spoil the track somewhat (though it’s still, on balance, an enjoyable record) by adding onto the three-minute actual song a near four-minute instrumental jam which has little to recommend it (other than the humorous touch of playing the wobble-board, an instrument invented by Australian TV personality and singer Rolf Harris, which would conjure up images of Australia instantly to anyone in the UK, even though it was invented and popularised over here).

I sometimes sound rather harsher on these freeform instrumental outros than I perhaps should — they are very much an aspect of the time when they were recorded, when the discipline of the three minute pop song was being deprecated in favour of the ability to stretch out and extend songs — but the looser and less disciplined the Kinks’ music got, in general, the less successful it seems in retrospect. A band who were recently singing the praises of timeless traditions were now attempting to follow the herd, and it’s precisely those points where they do that that the music is at its least successful.

Shangri-La
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This, on the other hand, earns every second of its five minutes and twenty seven seconds. This portrait of a retired (or close to retirement) middle-class suburbanite living in a small house [FOOTNOTE: Note for Americans -- many houses in the UK are known by names, rather than numbers, and Shangri-La would be a typical example of such a name (the cliched example would be Dunroamin). Merely stating that a house is named this would, for a British person, mean they would be willing to give near-certain odds that the owners are over 55, have a doorbell that plays a snatch of a sentimental tune, a sticker in their window saying “no cold callers”, some form of garden gnome, quite possibly holding a sign saying “gran lives here”, and own a small dog, probably a terrier of some kind. The point being that this is a detail which implies a great deal to Davies' intended audience. The song would be very different were the house named “Spunker's Squalor” like the house Mick Avory and Dave Davies had shared a couple of years previously.] is a far more sympathetic look at the life of the kind of person Davies criticised in Brainwashed.

Starting with two verses based on picking around an Am chord on an acoustic guitar, which would nowadays conjure up Stairway To Heaven for most people, but came out first by several years, and with a gentle brass backing coming in in the second verse, we have a description of the protagonist’s (presumably Arthur’s) contentment in his own little kingdom, with undreamed-of luxuries like a car and indoor toilets. It’s gentle, and understanding, and quite lovely.

We then have a few bars in D, with a I-Imaj7-I7 change (a very common way of implying stasis and movement simultaneously in music, used in for example the first line of the Beatles’ Something), before the song goes into another of Davies’ descending scalar bassline sections, but here a harpsichord has come in, and this suits the baroque feeling very well. All of this gives a feeling of movement while staying in almost exactly the same place, which fits the lyric perfectly.

This section’s lyric manages the wonderful trick of simultaneously evoking a feeling of security and of being trapped — the protagonist has “reached the top and just can’t get any higher”, “you’re in your place and you know who you are”, and most damningly “you need not worry, you need not care/You can’t go anywhere”. The protagonist here is in the same situation as the singer in Autumn Almanac, living exactly the life he’s chosen, in exactly the place he wants to be, but trapped by that very perfection — he knows that any change he makes to his life would make it worse, so he can’t change it.

We then have a description of the protagonist’s earlier, working life with “a mortgage hanging over his head, but he’s too scared to complain, ’cause he’s conditioned that way” — the protagonist gets rid of these financial insecurities, he pays off his debts, but he still lives in a state of insecurity.

In the next, rockier, section — almost all built on one chord, again with a descending bass to disguise the fundamentally stationary nature, he’s “Too scared to think about how insecure you are” precisely because of the security he’s in now — having lived a poorer life he knows how fragile it is. Meanwhile, “all the houses on the street all look the same”, and the protagonist is suffering an almost schizoid detachment — when the neighbours visit “they say their lines, they drink their tea and then they go”, like actors in a play or film rather than real people.

After this, the reprise of the earlier “sit back in your old rocking chair” section, with its brass band backing, sounds absolutely triumphal, the Dm of the rocky section resolving into D major, and the middle-aged man sat in his chair is a figure who has overcome real difficulty to get this eggshell-fragile comfort, and can justly be proud of it.

Shangri-La is one of the best things the Kinks ever recorded, and in the way it uses its epic length to take the listener on an emotional journey it deserves comparison with A Day In The Life by the Beatles, Surf’s Up by the Beach Boys and (the closest resemblance musically) You Set The Scene by Love. For all that parts of this album are bloated compared to the band’s earlier work, this track shows what they could do with the longer song lengths that were now being allowed.

The only problem with this is that it was released as a single, when it’s an utterly unsuitable choice. It’s an absolute masterpiece, but it sank without trace, becoming the band’s second single in a row not even to make the top forty.

Mr. Churchill Said
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This is one of the lesser songs on the album, but a necessary breather after the intensity of Shangri-La. A fairly simple song, this just lists pretty much every cliche about the “Blitz spirit” that was (and still is) the principal way the Second World War is viewed in British culture. In the context of the album, a slight satiric edge might be perceived here — everything is portrayed in terms of speeches from Churchill, or Mountbatten, or editorials from Beaverbrook, all of them the kind of authority figure that the rest of the album spends so much time attacking — but I think the song is fundamentally sincere.

She’s Bought A Hat Like Princess Marina
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

One of the most effective songs on the album, this is a look at a particular type of respectable poverty, where people will go hungry in order to keep up the appearance of respectable middle-class living. Both the characters in the song have bought hats that resemble those of the ultra-rich upper-classes — Princess Marina was the Queen’s aunt and a member of the royal families of two countries, while Anthony Eden (later the Earl of Avon) was Prime Minister in the 1950s.

The song is presumably set in the mid-1930s, when Britain was still suffering the effects of the Depression, but when Eden was a dashing young politician who was so popular for his looks and fashion sense that Homburg hats were renamed in his honour and he was known as one of “the glamour boys”, while Marina had only recently married into the British Royal Family.

We get two verses played relatively straight, over a harpsichord backing, with the pathos of the situation mostly left implicit, before everything breaks down in the middle eight, and the previously tight-laced singer starts bellowing “buddy can you spare me a dime?”, referencing the popular Depression-era protest song, before the last verse is done almost in the style of the Bonzo Dog Band, uptempo in a mock-Dixieland style with out-of-tune horns and banjo.

Young And Innocent Days
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A rather lovely waltz-time baroque pastiche, once again based around a descending scalar bassline, from the perspective of someone looking back at better times both for the singer and for his lover. One of Davies’ best melodies, the lyric is merely serviceable, leading to a song which manages to be unmemorable when one is not listening to it, but enrapturing when it’s playing. The instrumental middle eight is particularly beautiful.

Nothing To Say
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A filler track in the context of the album, though one suspects it would have been a powerful moment in the TV show, here one of Arthur’s children, grown with kids of his own, tells the old man that he won’t be spending any more time with him and it’s best they go their separate ways (presumably the son is the one who will emigrate to Australia), because while he’s fond of the memories of his childhood, the two of them have nothing in common any more.

It’s a good and interesting subject for a song, but the musical material doesn’t really live up to the topic, just being a straightforward three-chord rocker. It’s certainly not a bad track, but nor is it up to the standards of the best material on the album.

Arthur
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray and Dave Davies

And we finish with a country-rock song that points the way to the sound the band would go for on Muswell Hillbillies, that tells the whole story of Arthur’s life, allowing us to put the rest of the songs into their proper context. And happily, for an album that at times has shown a callous indifference to Arthur and his middle-class conformist type, here the band sing “Arthur, could be that the world was wrong…Arthur, could be you were right all along” before ending on a unison chorus of “Oh we love you and want to help you/Somebody loves you don’t you know it?”

By ending on this note, and with a song that ties together the previously disparate songs into some sort of coherent narrative, the band manage to make the album better than the sum of its parts. While it has songs which contain misjudgements, either musically or lyrically, the album as a whole, and in its closing statement, is fundamentally on the side of decency and empathy. There might be an element of contempt in their attitude to Arthur at times (as no doubt there always is when those in their twenties consider those two generations older) but this is still the same band who gave us Village Green Preservation Society, a band that can see something noble in the tiny triumphs and failures that make up a normal life. It’s not glamorous — not the story of an extraordinary character, there are no pinball wizards or acid queens here — but it’s an honest attempt at depicting ordinary life with sympathy and good humour, and as such Arthur is almost certainly the best concept album ever recorded.

Bonus Tracks

Plastic Man
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The last track that Pete Quaife, the original bass player for the band, ever played on before his acrimonious departure first from the Kinks and shortly thereafter from the music business altogether, was this, the single that almost destroyed the band’s career.

It’s sad that this was Quaife’s swansong, as he deserved better than this. This is Davies attempting, and failing, to write a Kinks song — specifically a song from their commercial high-point a couple of years earlier. Musically, it’s fine — a competent enough pastiche of their sound ca. Dedicated Follower Of Fashion — if unmemorable, but lyrically it’s horrible. An attempt at the earlier satirical style Davies had used in songs like Well-Respected Man, it is aimed not at any real person, but at the kind of fantasy of what a conformist middle-class person might be like that an arrogant eighteen-year-old might come up with. It shows no sympathy for the character, and dehumanises him so completely that the song detaches from all reference to reality and becomes about nothing at all.

The attempt at getting more commercial backfired. Up to this point, every single they’d released since 1964 had got to at least number 12. This was banned from the radio for using the word ‘bum’, and so only scraped to number 33. The next two singles (Driving and Shangri-La) didn’t chart at all. The Kinks would have the very occasional hit single from this point on, but their golden touch for singles success departed with Quaife.

This Man He Weeps Tonight
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

The B-side for Shangri-La, and one of several tracks recorded around the time of Arthur for Dave Davies’ unreleased solo album A Hole In The Sock Of, this Byrds-like jangly folk-rock record would probably have been a better choice for the A-side. Despite not being as good a song as its A-side, this is undoubtedly the more commercial song — it’s a straightforward verse/chorus song with a catchy riff and good harmonies, while still having an up-to-date heavy rock sound.

Lyrically, it’s a simple song about the break-up of a relationship and regret for plans made that will never now be put into action. The most interesting line is “I thought our thing would last, ’cause it said so in my horoscope”, which is the first indication in any of his songs of Dave Davies’ interest in astrology, which would soon broaden to include occultism and the ‘magick’ of the Golden Dawn, and be the most important influence on him for most of his life.

Mindless Child Of Motherhood
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

Another Dave Davies solo track, this time the B-side to Driving, this is almost painful to listen to because of the sheer weight of emotion behind it. A howl of pain about the end of his teenage relationship and the child he had never seen, this has none of the ambiguity or metaphor of the earlier songs he had written, instead containing lines like “I know that it’s unfair to bear a bastard son, but why do you hide, babe, when we could have shared a love?”

The song’s construction is extraordinary, barely staying in the same time signature for two bars straight, and having a chorus that alternates bars of sixes and sevens, while following perfectly the emotional logic of the confused, disoriented lyric. This would definitely not have made a good single, but is the best thing Dave Davies had written to this point.

Creeping Jean
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

The B-side to Dave Davies’ solo single Hold My Hand, this has almost exactly the same melody as Ray’s earlier Rainy Day In June. Lyrically, it’s a rather nasty, misogynist rant against a girlfriend leaving him, but musically it’s a powerful band performance. Just a shame they’d already recorded the tune with better lyrics.

Lincoln County
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

A 1968 solo Dave Davies single (and thus featuring Pete Quaife on bass), this is very unusual for Dave Davies, as it sounds musically for all the world like a Ray Davies song, descending bass-line, harpsichord and all. While it’s a little harder in tone than most of the Village Green Preservation Society material, it’s no more so than Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains and with its theme of returning home it would have fit the earlier album nicely.

Lyrically, it’s less strong — it’s a ‘coming home from jail’ song built up out of cliches from country songs, and doesn’t seem to have been written with any real conviction — but musically it’s one of Dave Davies’ best songs from this time. Unfortunately it didn’t chart.

Hold My Hand
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

Another non-charting single by Dave Davies, again featuring Quaife on bass rather than Dalton, this one is an obvious attempt at sounding like Bob Dylan, right down to impersonating Dylan’s voice (it actually comes spookily close to the sound Dylan was getting on the Nashville Skyline album, which was being recorded when this was released). Even more than that, though, it sounds like the ramshackle boozy soul-folk that Rod Stewart (a former schoolmate of the Davies brothers and Quaife) would come out with towards the end of the year.

It’s an odd choice for a single, having odd time signatures in the chorus, which breaks down as far as I can tell into two bars of seven, two of four, one of six and one of four, though it could be written in a variety of other ways — the pulses are all over the place. The chorus also, with its seven-beat bars and “three blind mice” melody bears a very slight resemblance to a countrified version of All You Need Is Love.

Not Davies’ best work, it was a brave song to go with as a single, and deserved to do better than it did.

Mr Shoemaker’s Daughter
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

A perfectly pleasant, but derivative track that seems to have been built up out of bits of Ray Davies’ songs Mr Reporter and Mr Pleasant, along with a brief statement of the riff from the Searchers’ Needles And Pins by a horn section, the lyrics to this are the kind of fluff that would have been a minor hit for Herman’s Hermits four or five years earlier. This was intended for Dave Davies’ solo album, but remained unreleased until a 1980s Japanese-only compilation of Dave Davies solo tracks.