The Kinks’ Music: Something Else By The Kinks
Something Else is the Kinks’ first masterpiece. Recorded while Ray Davies was twenty-two, and Dave Davies only nineteen, it’s an astonishingly mature album by any standards. When one realises it’s only three years since this band were recording mediocre blues covers, the rate at which the band were growing as artists becomes absolutely flabbergasting.
This growth was not, however, without its problems. Pete Quaife had already quit the band and rejoined once, but was becoming increasingly annoyed by Ray Davies’ autocratic attitude and paranoia — Davies had taken to making the band rehearse for recordings, and work out arrangements, without hearing his lyrics or vocal melodies in case they would tell his ideas to other musicians who would steal them.
Ray Davies was himself feeling confined by the band and the hit-making formula — after dumping Shel Talmy, the producer of the first four albums, halfway through the recording of this album, and becoming producer himself, he was looking across the Atlantic to the example of Brian Wilson, who would write, produce and sing on the Beach Boys’ records but would then send the rest of the band on tour without him. There were plans for both Davies brothers to release solo albums — and indeed three tracks from this album were released on Dave Davies solo singles – Death Of A Clown backed with Love Me Till The Sun Shines, and Funny Face as the B-side to non-album single Susannah’s Still Alive. The plan seems to have been that the Kinks would have become Dave Davies’ backing band, while Ray Davies would make solo concept albums.
That plan never came to fruition, and despite the difficulties, Something Else became the first of a run of studio albums that is equal to any in popular music. It is as far above Face To Face as that album was above The Kink Kontroversy. This album, more than any other, hit a perfect balance between commercial success (with three hit singles) and artistic achievement. It was, however, the band’s worst-charting album up to that point, and would be the last album the band made ever to hit the UK charts at all.
The Album
David Watts
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The album starts with the most recognisable opening of any Kinks album, Ray Davies’ “nice and smooth” before the count-in to this song.“Nice and smooth” has taken on its own life in pop culture, becoming a catchphrase of King Mob in Grant Morrison’s comic series The Invisibles.
While it’s ostensibly about a schoolboy, David Watts was in fact a real person — a concert promoter in Rutland, who had once tried to buy Dave Davies from his brother for his own sexual uses. Once one knows that, lines like “And all the girls in the neighbourhood/Try to go out with David Watts/They try their best but can’t succeed” and “He is so gay and fancy-free” become not so much a gay subtext as outright gay text.
Musically, it’s a straightforward rocker, all on major chords and for the most part staying on the single chord of D. It’s a much more well-thought-out arrangement, and much tighter playing, than the earlier rockers, though, and is the first example of the two strands of the Kinks’ songwriting — the lighthearted social comments and portraits of odd individuals, and the hard rocking riff-based songs — coming together into a cohesive whole.
While this was never released as a single by the Kinks, the Jam had a hit with a soundalike cover version in 1978, which has led to this song appearing on many compilation albums and being one of the Kinks’ best-known album tracks.
Death Of A Clown
Writer: Dave and Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
While this song’s composition is credited to both Davies brothers, this astonishingly mature song is actually the first time that Dave Davies had equaled his brother’s songwriting ability, with Ray Davies’ only contributions being the ‘la la la’ bridge (sung by Rasa Davies) and the introduction (played on the plucked strings of a piano, and possibly inspired by the Beach Boys’ You Still Believe In Me, which started very similarly).
Musically, this is as Dylanesque as the Kinks ever got — simple chords, played on an acoustic guitar, with hoarse, almost sneering vocals — although Nicky Hopkins’ barrelhouse piano provides a feeling of continuity with the band’s other records from around this time. Lyrically, though, it’s a remarkable self-portrait from a young man who was increasingly unable to cope with the alcohol- and drug-fuelled life he was living.
It’s also a remarkable vocal tour de force, showcasing not only Dave Davies’ own voice (a very limited instrument, but expressive when used correctly as it is here) but also Ray Davies’ ability to take on other voices (in his wonderfully sarcastic backing vocals), and Rasa Davies, the Kinks’ in-studio secret weapon.
This was released as a solo single by Dave Davies, and reached number three in the charts, but Dave Davies soon found the pressure to write follow-up hits unbearable, and while he released several more solo singles over the next couple of years, he didn’t start a real solo career until 1980.
Two Sisters
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
One of the most beautiful songs Ray Davies ever wrote, this is a simple harpsichord-driven song about two sisters, one of whom is living a domesticated life with a husband and children, while the other is living a glamorous life of nightclubs and parties. Davies himself was having very conflicted feelings about his own life as a husband and father, in comparison to his brother’s more exciting lifestyle, but seems at least at this point to have accepted his life — the ending of the song, with Priscilla seeing her children and remembering the rewards of her own life, “so she danced round the house with her curlers on, no longer jealous of her sister”, is one of the most touching images Davies ever came up with.
No Return
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This rather lovely bossa nova track is in many ways the culmination of the fascination with descending chromatic scales seen in several songs on Face To Face. Whether it’s the D-C#-C guitar parts over C and B-flat chords at the beginning, the way the chord pattern over the line ‘passed me by’ is repeated a semitone lower for ‘said farewell’, or the way the middle eight’s chord sequence ends with F-E-E-flat-D, the whole backing track is built around a motif of descent by semitones, even as the melody soars upwards.
This lends a harmonic sophistication to the track that is rare in Davies’ work, but which suits the genre perfectly (Jobim, the master of bossa nova composition, often tried to fit all twelve notes in the chromatic scale into his songs). The lyrics, about the loss of one’s first real love, are so melancholy compared to the light sweetness of the melody and backing track that the song is lent a wistfulness that is rarely heard in pop music.
The track isn’t perfect — some of the acoustic guitar playing is a little hesitant — but this is the fourth minor masterpiece in a row on the album.
Harry Rag
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
After three rather dark, melancholy tracks in a row, we see here a return to the simpler, more bouncy feel of much of Face To Face, with a simple three-chord strumalong about the simple pleasure of smoking a cigarette. A variety of characters are portrayed, facing such eternal enemies as death and taxes with a smile, because they can smoke. Nowhere near as deep or powerful a track as the earlier songs on the album, this is nonetheless a fun singalong.
Tin Soldier Man
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is another throwback to Face To Face, and a less successful one. It seems very much to have been written to a formula — simple verse with very few chords, bridge with yet another descending chromatic scale under a stationary chord, lyric mocking conformist city gents… it’s the kind of thing you’d come up with were you to try to write a Kinks-sounding song.
It’s not without interest — when Rasa Davies’ backing vocals come in with the key change to the relative minor on “wicky wack wack oo” the whole track sounds more alive — and it’s clearly been worked on. In particular, there are two different sections taking the place of the normal middle eight — the “every day you see his army” and “wicky wack wack oo” sections — showing Davies’ love of playing with the boundaries of normal song structure, something that would come out more on Autumn Almanac. It’s also one of the few tracks on the album to feature instrumentalists other than the four Kinks and Nicky Hopkins — having a small horn section — so may possibly have been considered as a single at one point.
Situation Vacant
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another of the weaker tracks, this little slice-of-life story is essentially a mother-in-law joke writ large — Johnny quits his stable job in order to try to find a better job like his mother-in-law wants, but his mother-in-law gets what she really wants when Johnny’s wife leaves him because he’s got no job at all.
Once again this is musically a fairly straightforward rocker, with yet another chromatic descending bass part (under “for peace and quiet’s sake”), suggesting it was tossed off relatively quickly, but it has more imagination than the preceding track, especially in the way Rasa Davies’ wordless vocals over the fade merge with the lead guitar part.
Love Me Till The Sun Shines
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
Released as a Dave Davies solo track as the B-side to Death Of A Clown, this was a far less inspired song than its A-side. Other than some very mobile bass playing from Pete Quaife this is the kind of play-in-a-day song most people write once they’ve learned their first few guitar chords. It’s enjoyable enough of its type though, and it shows the quality of this album that even on the third comparatively weak song in a row it’s still sounding like the strongest album the band had made til this point.
Lazy Old Sun
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Yet another song built around a chromatic descent, this time the whole chord sequence goes down in semitones – F-E7-E-flat6-D-D-flat7-C7. After me pointing out the overuse of this technique in little spots in some songs on the album, one might expect that I would attack this as lazy. In fact this track, the closest the Kinks ever came to psychedelia (and one suspects a response to the Beatles’ Rain), is absolutely wonderful, with its low, moaning backwards guitar [FOOTNOTE At least, that's my best guess as to what has been done to the guitar sound on the early part of the track.] and throbbing drum part (played exclusively on toms and bass drum, with added hand percussion). Rasa Davies’ voice sounds almost like a theremin here, and the whole thing is one of the best group performances on the album, though Ray Davies never thought it came off.
It also has some of Davies’ best lyrics, as he sings to the sun “when I was young, my world was three foot seven inch tall/When you were young there was no world at all”.
Afternoon Tea
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A bittersweet, enjoyable singalong track about the end of an affair, this features some nice country guitar from Dave Davies and a pleasant, simple chorus based around chords descending in whole steps. A lightweight song, but a necessary palette cleanser between two of the densest tracks on the album.
Funny Face
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
Other than possibly the final track, this is easily the highlight of the album, and the most emotionally raw thing Dave Davies ever wrote.
I don’t normally talk in my music books about the personal lives of the musicians, but it’s almost impossible to understand Dave Davies without understanding the central trauma of his life — when he was fifteen, he got a girl named Sue pregnant, and planned to marry her. His mother, however, thought that this would destroy his life, and so lied to him and told him that Sue had told her she didn’t love him any more, and that Dave was never to see her or their child. He only finally met his daughter in the mid-1990s.
And so we get this song, where the protagonist is being kept from seeing a woman he loves even though “everything you want was bought with lies”, who may be taken from him permanently (she’s being kept from him by doctors, and “they say you won’t last any longer”) and so he has to think of her “walking around in my memory”. However, he catches a brief glimpse of her “peering through frosted windows” and can reassure himself that “Funny face is all right”.
Davies sings the choruses in a falsetto utterly unlike his normal punkish howl, one that’s all the more affecting for being clearly out of his range, and these choruses, with their organ and Rasa Davies’ almost choral backing vocals, have a hymnal quality that is utterly beautiful.
This was released as the B-side to Dave Davies’ solo single Susannah’s Still Alive.
End Of The Season
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Noel Coward had become an influence on Ray Davies’ songwriting during the writing of Face To Face, and this is possibly Davies’ finest pastiche of Coward, down to a perfect imitation of him vocally. Musically, the song places a rather odd basic chord sequence (starting with G then moving to G#, back to G and then to E) against a bassline that moves from the tonic of whatever key the chord implies, to the superdominant, to the leading tone then back to the superdominant, a repeating ‘arch’ figure similar to some of those used in the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.
The song perfectly follows pre-rock song structure, down to the use of an introduction using separate-but-related musical material from the rest of the song (in pre-rock music this would be called the ‘verse’, but that word has a different meaning now). The fun of the song comes from the way Davies juxtaposes this old style against more modern problems like nobody being at the club since a Labour government got in, getting no kicks on Saville Row, and there being no ‘chicks’ around, most of which are concerns one associates more with the Rolling Stones than with Coward.
Of course, now, the gap between 1967 and the present is much larger than the gap between 1967 and the pre-war era Davies is pastiching, and the song takes on a slightly different air, now that Swinging London is as far in the past as the British Empire.
Waterloo Sunset
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
There are two types of song I dread when writing about music. The first type is the dull song about which there is nothing much to say — a twelve-bar blues with lyrics like “I love you/yes I do/Ooh it’s true” — writing anything at all about such songs is a chore.
But then there are songs like Waterloo Sunset (are there any songs like Waterloo Sunset?), a song so obviously, blatantly perfect, and whose perfection is down to a simplicity and economy of expression, that to analyse it is pointless.
One can point out facts, of course — that Davies originally titled this song Liverpool Sunset, that the lead guitar has 50s-style tape echo applied, or that Davies wanted to call the lovers Bernard and Dorothy at first, because Terry and Julie sounded too glamorous — but those facts add nothing to one’s appreciation of the track.
And pointing out musical techniques is unnecessary. On some songs, pointing to the change between a minor seventh and an augmented minor seventh and how Davies does something similar on Set Me Free might give someone a new appreciation for the song. In this case, everyone already appreciates it.
The best I can do, really, is say that if you haven’t listened to this song in a little while, you should listen to it again. Listen to the mono version, not the abysmal stereo mix (thankfully both are on the deluxe CD version), and forget all the facts, like that this masterpiece only got to number two in the singles chart behind Brian Poole And The Tremeloes doing a bad cover of a Four Seasons song. Just listen and you’ll agree.
Waterloo Sunset‘s fine.
Bonus Tracks
Act Nice And Gentle
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to Waterloo Sunset is the other type of song I dread writing about (though I wasn’t thinking of it when I wrote that passage) — it’s a twelve-bar blues with lyrics like “Come on baby, hold my hand/Come on baby, understand”. It has some nice country guitar, but is basically forgettable.
Mr Pleasant
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to Autumn Almanac, but released as a single in many other countries, this is one of the band’s very strongest B-sides and appears on many ‘best of’ compilations. While it’s not up to the standards of their A-sides, and seems to have Davies trying to keep to a ‘satirical’ formula he’d already outgrown, it still has a lot more life in it than many of the other songs of this type, thanks largely to the vaguely ‘trad’ trombone part and to Nicky Hopkins’ barrelhouse piano.
Susannah’s Still Alive
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
Dave Davies’ second solo single (though again featuring all the other Kinks) is actually not as good as its B-side, but is still an extraordinarily good song. Once again apparently inspired by the girl he lost when he was fifteen, whose name was Sue, this tells the story of an alcoholic woman who is waiting for a lost love (a soldier, presumably dead) to return, and “wears nothing in her bed at night/She sleeps with the covers down, hoping somebody gets in”.
While musically it’s simple — driven by a riff that’s a variant on a standard boogie bassline, with vaguely Dylanesque harmonica from Ray Davies, and only four chords — it’s a far better song than one would expect from someone as young (and, frankly, thuggish) as Dave Davies was at the time. That it only got to number twenty in the charts is probably due to the slightly garbled lyric (the opening line is “Oh, Susannah’s bedraggled, but she still wears the locket round her neck”, in case you wondered) and bad double-tracking.
Autumn Almanac
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This may be the best single the Kinks ever released, and it’s certainly the most complex, despite its singalong sound.
Lyrically, the song is a portrait of a hunchbacked gardener Ray Davies employed at the time, who had scared him as a child and for whom he felt a great deal of empathy (Davies had damaged his back as a child, and has had to take pain medication for most of his life, and he worried for most of his teenage years and early adulthood that this damage would lead to him becoming hunchbacked). The description of someone living their entire life in one area, watching the football, having Sunday lunch and going to Blackpool for their holidays might sound mildly contemptuous, until one realises that Davies himself has lived almost his entire life within a mile or so of his childhood home and went to see every Arsenal home game around this time. (And Pete Quaife was quoted around this time as saying “LSD seemed to close minds into little boxes…The Kinks all agree that Sunday dinner is the greatest realisation of heaven”).
And here we get to the heart of Ray Davies’ writing in this period, which is that he is someone who has always felt attached to his family and local area, and felt a responsibility to them, even as he was having experiences that took him away from anything that could be offered by a pub in Muswell Hill. He disliked himself for getting above his station even as he resented the normality he wanted but couldn’t have.
Musically, this is quite astonishingly structured. It’s based around the simplest, most obvious chord pattern in music, a cycle of I-IV-V-I (or I-vi-V-I, its close relative), but by moving through different keys (usually by playing with major/minor relations) and time signatures it becomes quite bewildering. To break it down:
We start with an intro, cycling through IV-V-I in E repeatedly, for three bars of 4/4 followed by one bar of 6/4.
We then have the first verse, which starts with an Am, rather than the A major chord we would expect. This is the start of a vi-V-I sequence in G, after which the verse plays around with I, IV and V chords in G, and then the whole thing repeats. This is a total of two six-bar sections in 4/4.
Then there’s the section starting “Friday evening…”. This starts with Em (in the key of G) but then switches to E major, going back to the key we started the song in. This section goes i-I-IV9-V7-I-IV9-V7-I, a similar pattern to the intro, and consists of one bar of 4/4, one bar of 3/4 and four bars of 4/4.
We then, on the line “Tea, and toasted…” switch to a strange between-keys zone for six bars, before going into the second verse.
The second verse is structured the same way as the first, but has an extra 6/4 bar of D at the end before going into the next section.
The “I like my football” section is the simplest, just being on the I, IV and V chords of G, the same key as the previous section, and lasting a standard eight bars.
We then have the “this is my street” section, which starts with a key change from G to Gm, but over its eighteen bars (all in 4/4, but with the bass sometimes implying that they should be split into twos and sixes) wanders in a no-man’s land between G, Gm and E, never quite settling on any of them.
Verse three, the last verse, is the same as the first two verses, except that instead of ending “it’s my autumn almanac” it repeats “yes, yes, yes, yes” twice (over IV-V-I-V changes) before a coda which cycles through IV, V7 and I in 6/4 time.
This is a structure that doesn’t really admit of any analysis. Rather it’s the kind of structure that can only be created by someone who has internalised every lesson of pop song construction so thoroughly that he can ignore any of the rules that get in the way of what he wants to do and know it will work. That it sounds so casual, so effortless, is the true miracle of this song. Contemporaries were making music that was perhaps more complex, but where the Beatles, say, saved a song like Happiness Is A Warm Gun for an album track, this was released as a single and got to number three. A truly dazzling, breathtakingly good single.
Good Luck Charm
Writer: Spider John Koerner
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
A nice little oddity, this — a cover version of a ragtime-blues song originally released under the name Good Luck Child by Spider John Koerner, a Minnesota-based blues revivalist who was friends with (and an influence on) Bob Dylan. For this recording, done for a Dave Davies solo BBC session, Davies and Nicky Hopkins recast it as a Cockney knees-up.
Little Woman (backing track)
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: None
An absolutely gorgeous instrumental, with mellotron on flute setting (think Strawberry Fields), chorded piano and a very prominent, melodic bass line. This sounds at times like the Zombies’ Odessey And Oracle, at times like the Beach Boys, and at times it points forward to ideas that Davies would use on the Kinks’ next studio album, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. This really should have been taken further.
Sand On My Shoes
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is an early attempt at Tin Soldier Man, with the same melody line and a very similar arrangement, with a lyric about being poor but happy, sitting at the beach. The subject (leaving city life behind to escape and live a more relaxed life) is one that Davies would return to, but the lyric here is half-baked at best, and the faked ending doesn’t do the song any favours. It’s easy to see why he rewrote it.
The Kinks’ Music – Face To Face
Face To Face is very much a transitional album for the Kinks. It was the first album to consist entirely of songs written by Ray Davies (though Dave Davies has claimed in the past to have written the opener, Party Line) and the band’s line-up was in transition. Pete Quaife had left the band between the recording of the Sunny Afternoon single and its release, though by the time the album was released he had rejoined. John Dalton, his temporary replacement for some of the sessions on the album, would replace Quaife after his second, permanent, exit in 1969.
It was also the first album where Davies fully explored the side of his songwriting that had been played with on Kwyet Kinks, and is infinitely better than its predecessors. This is the first Kinks album with no embarrassingly bad tracks — the worst track on here would have been among the best on any of the earlier albums. And the sound is different, too — there are more harpsichords than distorted guitars.
The problem is that this is so far ahead of the earlier albums as to effectively be by a different band, and so it doesn’t really invite comparisons with those, but with the albums immediately after it — and those albums are as far ahead of Face To Face as Face To Face is ahead of The Kink Kontroversy. The general standard of the album is very high — it’s the first Kinks album that makes a completely enjoyable listening experience from beginning to end — but not exceptionally so. There are very few truly outstanding songs here, even as there are no bad ones. In this way, Face To Face is probably close to the Beatles’ album of the previous year, Help!, a similarly transitional album and one where, like this, the band’s leader (Lennon in the case of the Beatles, Ray Davies in the case of the Kinks) was going through a severe mental breakdown from the opposing pressures of domesticity and pop stardom.
The Album
Party Line
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
The album starts off with the song that, of all those on the album, sounds most like the Kinks of old. After the opening telephone ring (a remnant of an early concept for the album that would have the songs linked by sound effects [FOOTNOTE According to The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller, part of the 33 1/3 series of books) and “Hello, who is it?” (spoken by Grenville Collins, one of the three managers the band had at the time), the song goes into a fairly straightforward, bouncy, three-chord country rock song, much in the vein of the Beatles' Carl Perkins pastiches, with a lusty Dave Davies vocal.
Lyrically, the song is a simple complaint about having to use a party line (a type of telephone service where several people would have to use the same line, and could, if they wished, listen to each other's calls), though with a little nod towards the gender-ambiguity that the band had been playing with (“Is she big, is she small, is she a she at all, who's on the other end?”).
Musically, it's slightly more interesting. While the verse is straightforward -- essentially a twelve-bar in G, but without the normal change to the IV on the fifth bar -- and the first half of the middle section is just a shuffle between the I and V in D, the middle section then wanders between the keys of D and G for another nine bars in a rather disjointed way, coming in at seventeen bars total.
This is easily the best opener of any Kinks album so far.
Rosie Won't You Please Come Home
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A simple but effective song, featuring only five closely related chords and with a simple verse/chorus structure, this song works because of the emotional honesty behind it. The song is written about the Davies brothers' elder sister Rose, who had emigrated with her husband Arthur (of whom more in a couple of albums' time) to Australia two years earlier, and is a simple plea for her to come back at least for a visit if not to stay for good.
Musically, the main points of interest are the pseudo-baroque harpsichord part by Nicky Hopkins, and the way the vocal is doubled during the minor key chorus sections by what sounds like at least two guitars, the bass and possibly a piano faintly in the mix.
The whole is somewhat reminiscent of the Zombies, who had been having some success with similar keyboard-based minor-key songs, and points the way forward to the baroque pop sound of albums like Da Capo by Love.
Dandy
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The first of the 'social comment' songs on the album is a jaunty, bouncy part-attack part-celebration of a womaniser who is probably based on Dave Davies, and is catchy enough that it was a massive hit single in Europe, as well as a hit in the US and Canada in a soundalike cover by Herman's Hermits. While Ray Davies sings the song with relish (especially the line “two girls are two many, three's a crowd and four you're dead!”) it's a rather minor piece.
It is the first of several songs on this album and around this time, though, to feature sections with a descending scalar bassline under a held chord, something that becomes a minor compositional tic of Davies'. This probably either suggested, or was suggested by, the line “while the cat's away the mice are gonna play”, as the bass melody under that section is reminiscent of Three Blind Mice. This subtle integration of music and lyrics is something that most listeners will never notice but which greatly adds to the sense of cohesion of the song, and is a sign of Davies' increasing maturity as a songwriter even on a relatively slight song like this.
Too Much On My Mind
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
As a song, this is a return to the repetitive, simple style of Tired Of Waiting or See My Friend, but this rather lovely song about suffering from anxiety is saved from sounding like a throwback by the arrangement, with Nicky Hopkins' skittering harpsichord perfectly evoking the feeling of unwanted thoughts running through the brain, while Rasa Davies adds beautiful high harmonies to her husband's lead. A definite highlight of the album, even if there's less to analyse than some of the other songs.
Session Man
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
An extraordinarily intricate piece of baroque harpsichord, very much in the style of Bach, links the previous track with this one (in fact I wouldn't be surprised at all to discover it was based on some minor work of Bach's, though it doesn't ring any bells and follows a similar progression to that of the rest of the song), before the band pay a backhanded tribute to its player, Nicky Hopkins. Lines like “No overtime, no favours done, he's a session man” and “he's not paid to think, just play” sound quite harsh, but given how much Hopkins' keyboard contributes to this track, and how universally liked he was by the band, one has to assume they are mostly tongue in cheek.
Rainy Day In June
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Easily the strangest track on the album, this is quite unlike anything else Davies - or anyone else for that matter - was doing at the time. Starting with a peal of thunder (another of the leftovers from the linking sound effects idea), and keeping an A pedal in the bass throughout almost the entire song, this has a ponderous, depressing feel as the low A turns half the major cycle of fifths the song is built on into a sequence of minor chords.
The lyrics, though, are what makes this really different. This is a dark, impressionist series of glimpses of a fantasy world under some kind of attack - “The demon stretched its crinkled hand and snatched a butterfly/The elves and gnomes were hunched in fear too terrified to cry”. It's utterly different from everything else on the album, and from everything else in 1966. One suspects it's a picture of Davies' mental state at the time.
A House In The Country
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Sung by Ray Davies in a hoarse voice that sounds almost more like his brother Dave than his normal singing voice, this is one of three songs on this album which appear to be about the same character (who may be at times a cruel caricature of how Davies saw himself at his worst), who is defined entirely by his possession of a large house.
Each of those songs are sung, though, from a different view point, and in this almost proto-punk attack, staying on three chords for almost the entire song, we have the character as seen from the viewpoint of an envious outsider who's “gonna knock him off of his throne”.
Holiday In Waikiki
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
An amusing trifle, this simple ditty starts out with vaguely 'Hawaiian' sounding music (Sandy Nelson-esque drums, ocean sound effects) but soon becomes a typical Kinks track of the period, only the 'Eastern' bent notes on the lead guitar suggesting anything exotic.
Which makes sense, because the song itself is a satire about how the truly different has been packaged, neatened and commercialised, so a holiday in Waikiki now consists of PVC grass skirts, overpriced ukuleles, shacks selling Coke and hula girls from New York. Reducing the Hawaiian elements to a couple of signifiers but otherwise just ploughing ahead with a straightforward Kinks song makes perfect sense in this context.
This song is unfortunately rather spoiled by a bad mix -- one of the few on this album that sounds like the bad mixes producer Shel Talmy had inflicted on the earlier albums -- with the vocal almost inaudible.
Most Exclusive Residence For Sale
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The second of our looks at the owner of an expensive home is the weakest of the three. This time our stately homeowner has been bankrupted, turned to drink and been forced to sell the property, and we see him from a neutral perspective, neither attacking nor sympathising. While there's not much to say about this song beyond that, and it's one of the weaker songs on the album, it's still head and shoulders above almost anything on the first three albums, showing just how much Davies' songwriting had advanced.
Fancy
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A return to the pseudo-Indian sound of See My Friend, this has a hypnotic, dronelike effect thanks to the repetitive guitar part and sliding bass, and one of the best of Davies' simple, repetitive melodies.
The lyrics are quite extraordinary, seeming to be simultaneously about longing for connection to other people (“if you believe in what I believe in then we will be the same always”) and pride in keeping distance from those same people (“they only see what's in their own fancy”). This is wrapped up in the narrator's mind with sexuality, of an ambiguous nature (“no-one can penetrate me” being the crucial line, but also “my love is like a ruby that no-one can see, only my fancy”).
It's not a song that submits well to analysis, but it's one of the most gorgeous, strange songs Davies ever wrote, fading a way on a haunting note that sounds like nothing so much as a didgeridoo.
Little Miss Queen Of Darkness
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another fairly minor track, but one that nonetheless shows the skill with which Davies was now able to blend fairly nuanced character studies with music of a wide variety of genres. In this case we have a rather poignant portrait of a woman with something missing in her life after the man she loved left and turning to hedonism, set to a pastiche of 1920s pop music.
The most interesting feature of the track is actually a mistake -- in the instrumental break, the instruments fall in and out of sync with each other. Mick Avory has said [FOOTNOTE In an interview at http://kastoffkinks.co.uk/Mick%20Avory%20interview%20part%202.htm ] that this was because he recorded the drum part in the break as an overdub, and Shel Talmy wouldn’t let him do a second take, saying it was good enough. The sound of the band drifting out of sync, only to come back together before the next verse, is actually much more impressive than it would have been had Avory played the part as he intended.
You’re Lookin’ Fine
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
A rather dull, plodding track, the only one on the album that could easily have fit on the first three, this song is based on a bass riff half-way between Money and Peter Gunn, but not as catchy as either, and the only musical point of interest is a change to a VIIb where normally one would expect a V. The lyrics, meanwhile, are just about seeing a woman and telling her she’s looking fine.
Sunny Afternoon
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
And tying all the themes of the album together, both musically and lyrically, we have this, one of the band’s biggest and best hits. Starting with a descending bass scale in D minor under two chords, recalling the more interesting use of bass in tracks like Rainy Day In June and (especially) Dandy, the track is in the style that rock music critics usually refer to as ‘music hall’, despite having absolutely no resemblance to actual music hall music, a sort of laid-back, loose-swinging feel based on strummed acoustic guitar and barrelhouse piano.
The lyrics once again refer to a rich man slowly becoming dissolute, though this time they’re sung from his point of view (and Davies is writing at least partly about himself and his newly-rich rock star peers), as he bemoans the taxman taking his yacht away (at the time the top marginal rate of income tax was 95%. This was not very popular with rock stars, who had generally been very poor until recently and didn’t like their money going now that they had some).
The song is wonderfully good-humoured and catchy, and Davies is self-aware enough that it is targeted more at Davies himself than at anyone else — the protagonist here is complaining, but knows he has no real problems. It deservedly got to number one, and is still one of the band’s most loved songs.
I’ll Remember
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Unfortunately, rather than end with Sunny Afternoon, which perfectly sums all the album’s themes, Face To Face ends with this track, which belies its name by being an utterly unmemorable piece of standard early-60s pop, a throwback to 1964 with a simple I-IV-V jangly verse. It’s not a bad track, but other than You’re Looking Fine it is the weakest, and it’s a bathetic closer.
Bonus Tracks
Dead End Street
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Musically very similar to Sunny Afternoon in style, this dark minor-key piece, with its prominent trombone part, could almost be the dark flip of the Beatles’ Penny Lane, but came out several months earlier than that track. A grim, haunting piece of social comment, it sadly still rings true today — lines like “I’m deep in debt now, it’s much too late/We both want to work so hard but we can’t get the chance” have only increased in relevance over the years.
Accentuating the feeling of helplessness and being stuck in a dead end, in the chorus the bass (played by Dave Davies on a standard bass and John Dalton on a Danelectro, a technique probably picked up from the records of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, both of whom did this on many occasions to have an especially thick bassline) keeps playing a four-note descending riff, but it starts on the third note, so it goes from F# down to F, jumps back up to A, then G, then repeats over and over, while the notes in the top of the chord stay essentially the same (the progression is D7/F#-F-Am-Am/G, so there’s an A and a C in the chord throughout the chorus). The feeling we get is of being stuck in one place, going round and round trying to find a way out but always ending up back at the start — a feeling only amplified by the fact that the entire last half of the song is made up of repetition of this musical material, with few words other than “dead end street”.
While Shel Talmy is the credited producer, Ray Davies actually produced this himself — unhappy with Talmy’s production of the single he took the band back into the studio and rerecorded it with a radically different arrangement. Reportedly when Talmy heard it he couldn’t tell the difference.
Remarkably for a song with such a grim message, this went to number five — and would probably have been even more successful had the BBC not refused to show the promo film for it. A pioneering example of music video, this was a wonderful mixture of Eisensteinian bleakness and broad pantomime comedy, apparently supervised by Ray Davies himself, which centred around a troupe of undertakers taking a corpse away from a terraced house. Some of the sketches Monty Python did about undertakers three years later bear more than a slight resemblance to this video.
By this point, the Kinks were at their peak — everything they released for the next four years or so would be wonderful.
Big Black Smoke
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to Dead End Street, it shows how far the band had progressed that this was B-side material, as at any point before 1967 it would have been at least considered as a single. As it is, it’s a very good minor track, based around a bouncy country rhythm, with yet another descending chromatic bass-line with a stationary chord on top (this time the Em – Em/D# – Em/D – Em/C# – C7 that opens the verse and the Em – Em/D# – Em/D – Em/C# that ends it), and another bleak social commentary lyric, this time about the plight of homeless runaways. The subject of homelessness was clearly in the air at the time — I’d initially thought this was inspired by Cathy Come Home, but while researching this I found that Cathy Come Home was broadcast only two days before this song’s release.
The song begins and ends with another of the examples of musique concrete style effects that Davies had been experimenting with — church bells at the beginning, joined by the sound of town criers at the end.
This Is Where I Belong
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to Mr. Pleasant, this sounds like an attempt to write in the style of Bob Dylan ca. Like A Rolling Stone – it’s a very harmonically simple song, built around guitar arpeggios and a Hammond part that sounds almost exactly like the arrangements Dylan was using, and Davies practically does a Dylan impression on the middle eight.
Lyrically, it’s just a simple, touching love song. Nothing hugely special, but easily good enough to have been many other bands’ A-side at the time.
She’s Got Everything
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
An unsuccessful attempt at a dance song, this is by no means bad as such, but it’s a throwback to their earlier work. The fact that even the band were unimpressed can be seen by its release history — while it was recorded during the Face To Face sessions, it was left off that album and the subsequent two, before being released as the B-side to Days two and a half years after it was recorded. Still better than most of the band’s 1964-65 work, it’s uninspired and uninspiring.
The Kinks’ Music – The Kink Kontroversy
The Kink Kontroversy, the Kinks’ third album, was their last in their early ‘beat group’ mode. While it’s a definite improvement on the previous two albums, it’s also a step back in terms of Ray Davies’ songwriting from the non-album tracks that had recently appeared as singles and EPs. It seems, bizarrely, that Davies was seeing his singles as the place for experiment, while the albums were to be kept as close as possible to a formula. This would change with the next album, Face To Face, but here we still have a raw rock group rather than the Kinks as they would become, although the darker, more melancholy tinge to the lyrics is quite pronounced.
The Album
Milk Cow Blues
Writer: Sleepy John Estes
Lead Vocalist: Ray & Dave Davies
The album opener is the only cover on the album, a version of an old blues standard. Happily, it’s credited to the correct writer, Sleepy John Estes (most recordings credit Kokomo Arnold, whose recording of the song was more successful than Estes’ original), though truth be told there’s not much to have written in this collection of floating lyrics. [FOOTNOTE: A 'floating lyric' in the blues is a line that is used in many different songs, for example “don't the moon look lonesome shining through the trees/don't your heart feel lonesome when your baby packs up and leaves” or in the case of this song “don't that sun look good goin' down?/that old moon looks lonesome when my baby's not around”.] This is actually one of the most successful of the Kinks’ blues covers, largely because they completely abandon any pretence of playing the blues and instead turn it into a proto-psych rave-up, something like a three-minute version of Love’s Revelation, with a very prominent piano part from Nicky Hopkins.
Ring The Bells
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This song has one of Davies’ loveliest melodic ideas, based around a beautiful acoustic guitar riff tic-tocking between D and Asus4 chords. It’s such a nice melodic idea, in fact, that the Rolling Stones used it as the chorus to Ruby Tuesday a year later. The later song is better than this one, and more developed – this is still from a period where Davies believes that a two-chord riff and some repeated lyrics are enough by themselves to carry a song – but the similarity is so strong it’s astonishing that there appears not to have been a lawsuit.
Gotta Get The First Plane Home
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A very simplistic song, this track works better than the song due to its well-thought-out arrangement. Session drummer Clem Cattini [FOOTNOTE: Mick Avory had had a falling out with the rest of the band, especially Dave Davies, and barely plays on the album] uses the kick drum and toms to accentuate the riff, which itself is doubled on guitar and bass, while playing straight fours on a cymbal, while Nicky Hopkins plays boogie trills in the very highest range of the piano. Ray Davies also adds some good, if incongruous, blues harmonica. An example of how unpromising material can still be turned into an adequate record, given the right attention to detail in the arrangement.
When I See That Girl Of Mine
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A track that seems to have been written in the style of the Everly Brothers, this would have fit perfectly into the pop landscape two years earlier. Were it not for the prominence of the bass, this could pass for something Mitch Miller would write for Gerry And The Pacemakers or Freddie And The Dreamers, with its four-chord banal chirpy verse. It all falls apart slightly in the middle eight, with some rough double tracking and an ineffective key change, but it’s still a catchy enough piece of nothing. Bobby Rydell covered this in the US, which pretty much says it all.
I Am Free
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
The first sign that Dave Davies was going to become a serious songwriting rival to his brother, this is one of the highlights of the album. The lyrics are sixth-form nonsense, written by someone who likes using big words without caring very much if he actually understands what they mean, but musically this seems to be an attempt at sounding like Dylan, with its folk-rocking six/four strum. The thirteen-bar verses sound untutored, but utterly natural, and go well with the lyric about wanting to escape from civilisation and be free.
Till The End Of The Day
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A top ten hit in the UK, this barely scraped into the top fifty in the US, marking the start of the time when the Kinks’ fortunes in the US took a turn for the worse, after they were banned from performing over there thanks to their violent reputation.
It’s also a turning point in another way, being the last of the band’s generic pop singles. After this, all the rest of the band’s hits would be music that only they could have done.
This is a good thing, as this is musically by far the least interesting of the band’s run of sixties hit singles, the only real point of note being the way that while its tonal centre is in F (or possibly Dm), it starts in D major and wanders back there occasionally by having A chords rather than the expected Am.
It’s a catchy enough pop tune, but they’d done better before, and would do much better afterwards.
The World Keeps Going Round
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another of the many simple, repetitive songs Davies wrote in this early period, this one appears to have been inspired by the Beatles’ Ticket To Ride, sharing with it its broken drum part, clangorous guitar and general world-weariness. It also strongly resembles the Beatles’ later Rain, which has very similar lyrical sentiments.
That said, this is again a clearly minor work, from a writer who still thinks repetition is the key to success.
I’m On An Island
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is one of the few tracks on the album which points the way forward to the band’s later work. An ersatz-calypso track driven by acoustic rhythm guitar and piano, this immediately sounds worlds more professional than anything we’ve heard so far, and the song itself is one of the earliest examples of Davies mocking his own depression, something that would come up again and again over the next few years.
Something that could have been self-indulgent moping (our protagonist is ‘on an island’ because he’s alone since his girlfriend left him, and he wouldn’t mind being alone if he could just be alone with her) becomes instead a tongue-in-cheek piece of self-mockery, and Davies’ vocal here, which could easily have fallen onto the wrong side of the comedy racism borderline, just about manages to remain delightful rather than annoying.
The middle eight, interestingly, bears a strong melodic and syllabic resemblance to that of So How Come (No-One Loves Me)?, an Everly Brothers track that similarly straddles the borderline between comedy and angst.
Where Have All The Good Times Gone
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This, on the other hand, is an absolute masterpiece, and may well be the first post-modern pop song. Davies here impersonates Bob Dylan ca. Like A Rolling Stone to deliver a song that is, in part, a denunciation of the way the simple pop music of a year or two ago was being replaced by more complex, mature, downbeat music, like Like A Rolling Stone, the Rolling Stones’ version of Time Is On My Side, and the Beatles tracks Help! and Yesterday, all of which are parodied during the course of the song.
Except that the song itself is an example of the very form it’s parodying, because it’s a lyrically mature, complex song about depression and nostalgia, of precisely the type that was only just becoming possible for pop bands to record.
And this tension is at the heart of the song – it’s a song about depression, and the tricks it plays on you. The protagonist is depressed not because of anything in particular, but precisely because he’s depressed (“wondering where I’ve gone wrong/Will this depression last too long?”). While he starts by singing about how much better things used to be, soon he realises that “Yesterday was such an easy game for you to play, but let’s face it things are so much easier today” and that he needs bringing down to earth.
Not only that, but the idealised past, the ‘good times’, when described seem anything but – they’re obviously self-deceiving recollections (“they always told the truth”), but even so they still manage to sound awful (“didn’t have no money”, “Daddy didn’t have no toys and Mommy didn’t meet no boys”).
This tension – this longing for a past which is acknowledged as being mythical and never having really existed, while also trying to push forward in progressive directions that wouldn’t have been possible in the past, and self-reflexively commenting on both these tendencies – would become the most important and unique aspect of Ray Davies’ songwriting within a couple of years, dominating the band’s best three albums, Something Else, Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur. We see it here for the first time, in a song that was only considered at the time to be good enough to be a B-side.
It’s Too Late
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This, on the other hand, is a very basic country song of a type that could have been written by Hank Williams, but played to a slowed-down Chuck Berry rhythm, but without Berry’s swing – it sounds for all the world like a prototype for Status Quo.
Had this been played looser, in a more honky-tonk style, this could have been a very decent little track, but as it is it’s a bit flat-footed.
What’s In Store For Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
While this song is credited to Ray Davies, it sounds to me far more like Dave Davies’ work, both melodically and in its subject matter (the lyric is about wanting to see the future, with lines like “I wish I had a crystal ball”, which would fit rather well with the younger Davies’ well-known fascination with astrology and the occult).
Either way, this is a minor track, over almost before it’s begun. The one interesting feature here is the rhythm guitar part stabbing on the off-beat, a trick presumably borrowed from the Beatles’ She’s A Woman, and one that gives the track almost a ska feel.
You Can’t Win
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray and Dave Davies
And the album finishes with a chugalong R&B riff, one of the band’s best attempts at playing Mod style soul music. While this is still unimpressive stuff in itself, the difference in technical competence between this and the work on the band’s first album is astounding. From here on out, they were going to be able to turn that competence towards far more interesting material.
Bonus Tracks
Dedicated Follower Of Fashion
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The first Kinks single to follow up on the social satire style of Well Respected Man, this could almost be part two of that song, but this time attacking, rather than the upper classes, the London fashionable set (although there was a great overlap between the two groups at the time).
While the song was apparently written as a straight attack, written after an argument (a fashionista had criticised Davies for wearing a comfortable but unfashionable jumper), Davies clearly saw an element of himself in the character. He’s later stated that the lines “they seek him here, they seek him there” (taken, of course, from The Scarlet Pimpernel) were aimed at much at himself and his desire not to be recognised, as well as his lack of a clear sense of identity, as at the character in the song. [FOOTNOTE: This would also make the slight homophobic/transphobic tinge of some of the lyrics seem slightly less offputting - Ray Davies has always been publicly ambiguous about his sexuality, while his brother is openly bisexual. If these lines are aimed at Davies himself, that would take the sting out of the song somewhat.]
In fact the song played a part in Davies’ increasing mental ill-health – he claimed later that people would sing the “oh yes he is” chorus at him in the street, and that in his fragile mental state he believed they were saying they knew who he was better than he did himself.
That said, none of this would have been apparent to listeners at the time, who would have taken the song for what it seems – a witty, playful attack on conformity. The language in the song is beautiful – Davies coined the word ‘Carnabetian’ as an adjectival form of Carnaby (after Carnaby St, the most famous fashion-shopping street in London at the time) and there are some lovely lines like “in matters of the cloth he is as fickle as can be”. Davies’ vocal is also extraordinary, running through a wide variety of different accents and voices effortlessly.
The song does have a bit of a nasty edge to it, as many of the whole 60s ‘attacking conformity’ genre did, but at least here Davies is attacking the hip and trendy rather than middle-aged normal people.
One thing that is always said about this song which is a complete nonsense, though, is that it’s a ‘music-hall’ song. This shows that most people who write about pop music haven’t got ears. Davies’ vocal and the call-and-response chorus do owe a little to music-hall traditions, but musically this is a country-folk song.
I’ll go further and go out on a limb and say it was patterned specifically after Johnny Cash’s cover of Lead Belly’s Rock Island Line. Both songs start with a strummed acoustic guitar, playing the same pattern (slightly stressing the off-beats), then bring in a prominent bassline mostly playing around with firsts and fifths, a similar simple drum pattern, and rockabilly picked guitar (Dave Davies seems to be doing a fairly accurate impression of Luther Perkins, Cash’s guitarist). The parallels aren’t exact – Rock Island Line starts slow and then builds up to a faster pace, while this track stays at one tempo throughout – but this song as recorded owes at least as much to country blues as it does to the music hall.
Sittin’ On My Sofa
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to Dedicated Follower Of Fashion was this riff-driven freakbeat 12-bar blues, sounding much like every other London band of the time who had heard a few Stax records. It would have been great to dance to in a Mod nightclub, and it is far more accomplished musically than anything the band had done for their first two albums, but it’s still ultimately forgettable (and, at 3:07, rather too long for the few ideas it has).
I’m Not Like Everybody Else
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
This track, apparently originally intended for The Animals, was released as the B-side to Sunny Afternoon, but has become one of the band’s most-loved tracks, mostly for its punkish attitude (it includes another little dig at the competition – “I won’t say that I Feel Fine like everybody else”). In truth, though, it’s nowhere near the song its reputation suggests. It’s a very callow piece of work, and it exalts individuality in the most generic way possible, so that it was perfectly possible for IBM, the apex of corporate responsibility, to use it in a TV commercial.
Likewise, I remember seeing Ray Davies perform this live at Glastonbury, in front of an audience of about twenty thousand people, all singing happily along, in unison. Davies even introduced the song by saying “None of us are like anyone else, are we?” and pointing a mic at the crowd to get them to bellow “NO!” as one. The crowd appeared not to see anything amusing in this, though one hopes that Davies at least was aware of what he was doing.
It’s a catchy enough song, but at three minutes twenty-eight it outstays its welcome somewhat.
Mr. Reporter
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is a minor piece, a Dylan pastiche right down to the ridiculously lengthened nasal vowels. It’s one of the earliest of that annoying subspecies of song, the whine about what a difficult life it is being a rock star. In this case, Davies is attacking, at inordinate length, reporters who misquote him. Some of it is frankly bizarre – “Why, Mr Reporter, do you like some things more than most?” – and there’s an anger to the song that unfortunately means it is lacking in craft. This is a purely relative judgement of course – compared even to the songs the band had been recording three months earlier for the album proper, this is a minor masterpiece – but compared to what Davies was capable of, it clearly falls flat.
The band would return to this song again, for a version with Dave Davies on vocals for a projected solo album, but while that version is an improvement on this, both tracks remained unreleased for good reason.
Time Will Tell
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A thinly-recorded outtake that sounds more like a demo than a finished recording, this track is more interesting than much of what made it to the actual album. A fuzz guitar raveup, it points the way to another possible direction for the Kinks’ music, a road never travelled. Because this song keeps much of the feel of the first three albums, but with more competent musicianship, and with lyrics that seem to deal very frankly with Davies’ increasing depression and feeling that he was an actor playing a role – the chorus starts “time will tell if I’ll survive/I’d rather be dead than just pretend I’m alive”.
This sounds a couple of years ahead of its time, and could easily have been a garage-psych classic for a band like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.
And I Will Love You
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A rather pretty little track that was never taken any further, this is another of Davies’ songs of this period that is based around the repetition of a couple of phrases over and over, and is one of his last songs in that style. It does, however, show the increasing musical sophistication of the band, being based around a bossa nova beat and with a hammond organ pad that one assumes they weren’t taking entirely seriously, but which is still a more adventurous sound than much of what they’d used on record earlier.
Davies here uses the same strange vocal style he uses on I’m On An Island – a style that sounds like a caricature of an ethnic accent, except that no accent in the world sounds anything like it. It’s an odd style, and one he’ll return to at several points in the future, but it works.
All Night Stand
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A very hissy acoustic demo, this song seems to have been written as a favour for Shel Talmy – it shares a title with a book Talmy’s new publishing company was releasing, and was recorded by a band called The Thoughts on a label Talmy owned.
While catchy, it seems completely tossed-off, and its origin is probably visible in the last lines – “Can’t get these people off my back/ten percent for this and that”. Davies was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the number of people, Talmy included, who had business interests in the Kinks but who appeared to have little sympathy for his creative aspirations.
The Kinks’ Music 1 – Kinks
The Kinks’ first album, titled simply Kinks, is a mish-mash of different styles, only some of them effective. While Ray and Dave Davies had been playing together for many years, and had been working with bass player Pete Quaife for some time, the final line-up of the band, with drummer Mick Avory, had only settled down after the release of the band’s debut single, a lacklustre cover of Long Tall Sally, in February 1964. Avory was so new to the band that he doesn’t even appear on much of the album, being replaced by session player Bobbie Graham.
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…
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