January-February 2009 LAST OF THE STEAM-POWERED BRAINS
From Muswell Hill to Madison Square Gardens. Sumptuous, goodies-laden box set charts the rise, rise, rise and fall of THE KINKS. By ANDY MORTEN.
THE KINKS Picture Book Universal 6-CD box set
Ahh, the age-old dilemma. HowDO you fill six CDs of Kinks music without alienating curious novices, annoying diehard fans or neglecting even the murkiest stages of one of the most
idiosyncratic thirty-year careers in popular music? Answer: you don’t.
Firstly, allow me to surrender the
notion that The Kinks were just as important – if not more important – than The Beatles, Stones or Who. Furthermore (where’s me high horse?), I challenge anyone to find 28 songs recorded in frantic succession during the white-hot period between early ’66 and ’68 that first challenged, and then changed, the course of pop music like the contents of disc two of Picture Book did. You want wry social
observations, swinging London soundtracks, outsider garage rock nuggets, nervous breakdowns as yearning ballads, out-of-time Noel Cowardesque vignettes, deathlessly evocative snapshots, sepia- tinted odes to nostalgia, rough-hewn guitar workouts and quietly hilarious satirical put-downs? Try ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’, ‘Too Much On My Mind’, ‘End Of The Season’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Village Green Preservation Society’, ‘Big Sky’ and ‘Victoria’ for starters – every last one of ‘em a master class in song writing and storytelling still guaranteed to have 90% of The Kinks’ myriad illegitimate musical offspring quaking at the realisation that they’ll never come close to matching even the slightest of these timeless works of art. Not in their dreams. Let’s just say I kinda like The
Kinks and leave it there, OK? Picture Book opens with ‘You
Really Got Me’ which is a good idea as the clutch of early demos and single sides that follow wouldn’t make for the most engaging introduction. It ends with ‘To The Bone’, a fairly underwhelming mid-90s album track that confirms Ray Davies’ own, typically melodramatic suggestion that The Kinks were pretty much over when original bassist Peter Quaife split in ’68. So far, so so.
However, somewhere around the
middle of disc one, something happens… and it continues to happen with mounting intensity until somewhere around the middle of disc four. Let’s face it; nobody’s going to spend 30-odd quid on a box set to hear a couple of tracks apiece from Schoolboys In Disgrace or Low Budget are they? The sausage in this particular Scotch egg is to be found in the music made by the brothers Davies and their friends Mick Avory, Peter Quaife, John Dalton and John Gosling during the glory years at Pye and the immediate fallout, before US stadiums and grim self- pastiche became the order of the day. Down to the nitty-gritty. 138 tracks
spanning 33 years over six chock-full CDs. Eighteen previously unreleased tracks – mostly demos like the widely covered ‘I Go To Sleep’ and ‘This Strange Effect’ – dropped into a democratically elected consortium of classic singles, album tracks and B-sides, presented in recording date order so ‘She’s Got Everything’ – a killer slab of garage rock originally slipped onto the back of ‘Days’ in ’68 but cut way back in early ’66 – appears between ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’ and ‘Mr Reporter’ – undoubtedly Ray’s most hateful lyric (“I’ll kill you Mr Reporter, rather
than let you distort my simple sound”. Yikes! Not exactly ‘We Can Work It Out’ is it?). This twist on conventional chronology puts a number of tunes into refreshingly new context.
Where the box fails is in its
insistence to document the lulls almost as exhaustively as it does the peaks. By allotting the whole of discs five and six to the late ’70s onwards (and, to be fair, including two or three less than earth-shattering early demos and studio rejects) we lose the sparkling ’68 single ‘Wonderboy’, Face To Face’s signature tune ‘Dandy’ and Dave’s sublime ’69 B-side ‘Mindless Child Of Motherhood’. I would have gone for Lola vs Powerman And The Money-go-round’s ‘This Time Tomorrow’ over the same album’s ‘Strangers’ too but that’s splitting hairs and I can do that anytime with my fellow Kinks fanciers in the comfort of the pub so I’ll stop. With the original band poised to
play together for the first time in 40 years, the timing of this box is shrewd to say the least but ultimately it’s as close as you’re gonna get to a definitive overview of The Kinks’ music short of actually buying their first dozen or so albums. But then you’ve already done that, right?
The Kinks’ brief dalliance with flower power was far from convincing 57
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