Lola and Powerman vs Apeman and 'everybody else'

[manho]

"I'd like to do it as a more collaborative thing than we used to do"

translation: i have no new musical ideas and am hoping dave or the other two will come up with something.

[zilla]

What did the "other two" ever write? I'm guessing Ray meant that he wants Dave to help with the guitar parts more than anything else. I'm sure he's still able to write music, but will any of it be any good? Not likely. They should just tour, do mostly old stuff and satisfy some old fans. That what the fans would really want, not some boring or bad new album.

[cripes]

I'm trying to figure out why I'd pay a high price to go to some out of town shed to see this....I've never seen Pete Quaife in person. Maybe if they'd play Village Green Preservation Society in its entirety....I dunno---this is screaming 'miss' at me.

[owen]

according to dave, ray nicked all his ideas....

strangers is a bloody good song and is credited to dave, right?

[zilla]

Yeah, Strangers is a great Dave tune...he had few great ones here and there....But not that many.

I'm with you cripes...I probably wouldn't go see a Kinks reunion tour...Unless it was at a nice small place (I didn't go to the Obama celebration and could have easily, but I hate big crowds nowadays). I also wouldn't mind a greatest hits tour...that shit never gets old for me. Just toss out You Really Got Me and Lola and I'd be happy.

[toom]

Make room for yet another Kinks Komp, this one heralded as their first box-set. Are we to expect more box-sets?

www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/news/147646-the-kinks-to-release-first-ever-box-set

Tracklist:

Disc 1:

01 Brian Matthew Introduces the Kinks
02 You Really Got Me
03 I'm a Hog for You Baby
04 I Believed You
05 Long Tall Sally
06 I Don't Need You Anymore
07 Stop Your Sobbing
08 I Gotta Move
09 Don't Ever Let Me Go
10 All Day and All of the Night
11 Tired of Waiting for You
12 Come on Now (outtake with two false starts)
13 There Is a New World Opening for Me (Kassner publishing demo)
14 Everybody's Gonna Be Happy
15 Who'll Be the Next in Line
16 Time Will Tell
17 Set Me Free
18 I Need You
19 See My Friend
20 Wait Till the Summer Comes Along
21 I Go to Sleep
22 A Little Bit of Sunlight (Kassner publishing demo)
23 This I Know (demo)
24 A Well Respected Man
25 This Strange Effect (With Brian Matthew speaking over intro)
26 Milk Cow Blues
27 Ring the Bells
28 I'm on an Island
29 Till the End of the Day
30 Where Have All the Good Times Gone
31 All Night Stand (Demo)
32 And I Will Love You
33 Sittin' on My Sofa

Disc 2:

01 Dedicated Follower of Fashion (alternate stereo take)
02 She's Got Everything
03 Mr. Reporter (Ray vocal)
04 Sunny Afternoon
05 I'm Not Like Everybody Else
06 This Is Where I Belong
07 Rosie Won't You Please Come Home
08 Too Much on My Mind
09 Session Man
10 End of the Season
11 Dead End Street (first version)
12 Village Green
13 Two Sisters
14 David Watts
15 Mr. Pleasant
16 Waterloo Sunset (mono mix)
17 Death of a Clown
18 Lavender Hill
19 Good Luck Charm
20 Autumn Almanac
21 Susannah's Still Alive
22 Animal Farm
23 Rosemary Rose
24 Berkeley Mews
25 Lincoln County
26 Picture Book
27 Days
28 Misty Water

Disc 3:

01 Love Me Till the Sun Shines (Top Gear session with Brian Matthew intro and outro)
02 The Village Green Preservation Society
03 Big Sky
04 King Kong
05 Drivin'
06 Some Mother's Son
07 Victoria
08 Shangri-La
09 Arthur
10 Got to Be Free
11 Lola (mono single version)
12 Get Back in the Line
13 The Moneygoround
14 Strangers
15 Apeman
16 God's Children
17 The Way Love Used to Be
18 Moments
19 Muswell Hillbilly
20 Oklahoma USA
21 Twentieth Century Man
22 Here Come the People in Grey

Disc 4:

01 Skin and Bone
02 Alcohol Live
03 Celluloid Heroes
04 Sitting in My Hotel
05 Supersonic Rocket Ship
06 You Don't Know My Name
07 One of the Survivors
08 Sitting in the Midday Sun
09 Sweet Lady Genevieve
10 Daylight
11 Mirror of Love
12 Artificial Man
13 Preservation (U.S. single)
14 Slum Kids (live)
15 Holiday Romance
16 Face in the Crowd
17 No More Looking Back
18 Sleepwalker
19 The Poseur

Disc 5:

01 Sleepless Night
02 Father Christmas
03 Misfits
04 A Rock 'N Roll Fantasy
05 Little Bit of Emotion
06 Attitude
07 Hidden Quality
08 A Gallon of Gas
09 Catch Me Now I'm Falling
10 Nuclear Love (demo)
11 Duke (demo)
12 Maybe I Love You (demo)
13 Stolen Away Your Heart (demo)
14 Low Budget (live)
15 Better Things
16 Destroyer
17 Yo-Yo
18 Art Lover
19 Long Distance

Disc 6:

01 Heart of Gold
02 Come Dancing (demo remix)
03 State of Confusion
04 Do It Again
05 Living on a Thin Line
06 Summer's Gone
07 How Are You?
08 The Road (live)
09 The Million-Pound-Semi-Detached
10 Down All the Days (To 1992)
11 The Informer
12 Phobia
13 Only a Dream
14 Drift Away
15 Scattered
16 Do You Remember Walter? (live)
17 To the Bone (demo)

I don't know exactly what rarities are on there that I don't have, a few things I don't know (Misty Water?). It's got to be pretty cheap for me to buy it if I already have most of it. And no Did Ya?! That would be perfect for a box like this.

Also, Ray is playing close to here in a couple of weeks, Asbury Park, I saw him once this year, so probably a pass.

[cripes]

this one heralded as their first box-set. Are we to expect more box-sets?

Heh heh....good one.

I don't know exactly what rarities are on there....

Looks like dick to me....worse than The Who box a few years back.

[cripes]

By the way, 'Village Green Preservation Society' is 40 now.

Leave it to The Kinks to release maybe their best record on the same day as the white album.

[manho]

The Kinks: Picture Book

Alexis Petridis
The Guardian, Friday 12 December 2008

Befitting a band with theatrical ambitions, the story of the Kinks is a play in two acts. The first takes place during the 60s, in which they may or may not have invented heavy metal, set a dizzying standard for British lyrics, defined forever a notion of Englishness in rock, and released arguably the decade's greatest run of singles. In the second act, they struggled through the 70s, before briefly becoming stadium rock stars in America - somehow overcoming the fact that leader Ray Davies was no better qualified to be a stadium rock star than become defence minister of Malawi - then soldiered on until 1996. Perhaps understandably, audiences tend to leave at the interval. There's something laudable about the way the six-CD Picture Book attempts to retell their story, giving an equal footing to the 70s, 80s and early 90s. Still, it's hard to stifle an apprehensive gulp when their last great album, 1971's Muswell Hillbillies, hoves into view and you realise there are still three CDs to go.

Nor is CD1 without its low points. What made You Really Got Me and All Day and All of the Night work so remarkable was the disparity between the urgent macho grunt of the guitars and the dry, disaffected camp of the vocal - perhaps they weren't so much the first heavy metal records as the first glam rock tracks - but on more straightforward R&B or covers of Long Tall Sally their approach just sounded anaemic. 1965's feeble Everybody's Gonna Be Happy suggested the Kinks were running out of steam after barely a year, but the truth was that Davies' talents lay elsewhere. In fact, they lay so far outside the realms of early 60s pop that he would have to shift the boundaries himself to accommodate them. The remarkable See My Friends introduced both the drone of Indian music and the topic of homosexuality into pop's lexicon; A Well Respected Man established it as a vehicle for social satire.

It is for the latter that Davies became legendary. Like every great satirist, he maintained a degree of affection for his victims. Compare the exquisitely drawn Sunny Afternoon and Mister Pleasant - on which Davies manages to simultaneously elicit scorn and sympathy for a dissipated, violent aristocrat and a ghastly, avaricious businessman respectively - with the one-dimensional nastiness of the Stones' Play With Fire or the Beatles' Piggies, and you see how far ahead of the pack he was. His world view always contained a pronounced reactionary streak, but initially at least, it seemed knowing and charming: there's a certain cussed brilliance about writing a song called Where Have All the Good Times Gone? at the height of the 60s. A married father, looking down on Swinging London from suburban Muswell Hill, Davies was better placed to provide a clear-eyed, truthful picture of the era than those caught up in its hysteria: the exquisite party-pooping of Dead End Street has more in common with the work directors such as Ken Loach were coming up with for BBC1's Wednesday Play strand in the mid-60s than anything in contemporary British pop.

But if you make an album as fantastic as 1967's Something Else (home to the matchless Waterloo Sunset, Death of a Clown and David Watts) only to watch it limp to No 35, then watch its equally fantastic follow-up The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society fail to make the British charts at all - a fate that would befall every subsequent Kinks album except compilations- then perhaps it's inevitable that your small "c" conservatism will take on an increasingly bitter, misanthropic, solipsistic cast.

That's the big problem with the last three CDs of Picture Book, rather than the overwrought concepts, or the music - and that is taking into account that the Kinks spent much of the 70s labouring under the insane misapprehension that they should play country. Needless to say, the most British band in history made for deeply unconvincing Nashville pasticheurs, in much the same way that Alan Bennett might struggle trying to pass himself off as a rodeo rider. Davies' genius flickers occasionally - on the warm, sepia-tinted Celluloid Heroes and Come Dancing or the jaw-dropping Art Lover, which daringly applies the old simultaneous-scorn-and-sympathy trick to, wait for it, a paedophile - but it's swamped by pinched mean-spiritedness. Down All the Days (to 1992) features him fulminating against the EU, sounding for all the world like Richard Littlejohn armed with a guitar. You couldn't make it up.

They split at the height of Britpop: on the evidence of the closing To the Bone, while young bands were knocking themselves out trying to sound like the Kinks, the Kinks were knocking themselves out trying to sound like Dire Straits. It's hardly a triumphant finale, but if nothing else, they ended their days the way they began them: cussed and reactionary to the last.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

[toom]

This Alexis Petridis, a bit of a cunt, eh? Didn't realize the Kinks went country in the 70's. The one "country" record they made, maybe their best record ever, is even labled their "last great record" by him earlier in the article.

[cripes]

I'm of the opinion that 'Lola Vs....' was the last true Kinks LP. Nothing against 'Muswell' or the first 'Preservation' record, but all those horns and girls....eh...

I've been looking over recent Ray setlists....he did 'Starstruck' the other night. Here's 'Shangri-La' from Providence

[digit]

strangers is a great bit of writing...macca would love one like that...

[Cat Stevens]

"The Who this month", october 1969:

On Halloween, the tour resumes at the Kinetic Playground in Chicago. The opening act is The Kinks. The next day, Pete writes the following to a friend: "Ray [Davies] told me something that I wasn't aware of which explains a lot. He said the Kinks were banned from touring the States over some Union hassle or Tex hassle in 64. Wow, man, it's set them back but after seeing them and hearing them and hearing their album [Arthur] I just know they are going to get it together. they seem much more together and perhaps the prospect of discovering a new and sincere audience over here will affect them the way it affected us. At the show I mentioned the Kinks a couple of times and got such warm reactions I ended up dedicating our opera to them and theirs and got a standing ovation for doing it. I'm sure a lot of our fans are their fans."

[cripes]

Ray Davies To Tour Kinks Khoral
09/29/2009
By Blurt Staff

As you've no doubt heard, some time agao Kinks frontman Ray Davies adapted songs from his extensive back catalog for choir, re-recording key tunes with brand new choral arrangements. The collaboration with the the 65-strong Crouch End Festival Chorus at the 2007 BBC Electric Proms in London has now yielded The Kinks Choral Collection, due November 10th on Decca. A nationwide tour is scheduled to coincide with the release. (U.S. dates below.)

Produced by Davies himself and with arrangements by David Temple, Steve Markwick and Davies, this union casts a fresh light upon Kinks klasssics via new versions of "You Really Got Me", "All Day And All Of The Night", "Waterloo Sunset" and many more.
Davies said of his Crouch End vocal colleagues; "With a song like 'Waterloo Sunset', I feel as if the people I wrote it for are singing it". He added that they display "an ingenious palette of choral techniques" - for example, "See My Friends' recast as an a cappella gospel hymn to illuminate life-after-death lyrics.

There's also a six-song suite from the 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. Although not as well known as some of the bigger hits, this collection is now widely regarded as The Kinks' masterpiece, with songs like "Do You Remember Walter?" which is a poignant memoir of a vanished childhood world.

Already got the Kinks katalogue? Decca predicts the album "offers so much to explore and admire from fans who own it all, or to complete newcomers... a great introduction to Davies' idiosyncratic, delightful world."

Well, all right then. Let's hear it for delightful worlds!

Tour Dates:

Thursday, 11/12 San Fran, CA Warfield Theatre with The Vox Society Choir
Saturday, 11/14 Los Angeles, CA Orpheum Theatre with The Vox Society Choir
Tuesday, 11/17 Boston, MA The Berklee Theatre
Thursday, 11/19 New York, NY Town Hall with The Dessoff Chamber Choir
Friday, 11/20 New York, NY Town Hall with The Dessoff Chamber Choir
Saturday, 11/21 Philadelphia, PA Tower Theatre
Monday, 11/23 Albany, NY The Egg
Tuesday, 11/24 Montclair , NJ The Wellmont Theatre

Damn...I almost want to see this, but something about this smells like caca. He's gonna do a load of my fave tunes, but that whole 'choral' thing leaves me unmoved.

[manho]

"but that whole 'choral' thing leaves me unmoved"

better than listening to new songs.

[cripes]

Pete Quaife hit the Big Sky.

The Kinks were the last early sixties band that had all its original member still alive.

[david]

Tony Butala, Jim Pike and Bob Engemann are all still alive, aren't they?

[david]

These guys are all still around too:

[cripes]

Hey, that guy on the left looks like Peter Asher.

I guess Chad and Jeremy are both still alive too, but they're more a duo than a band.

[cripes]

OK--it's been pointed out to me that all the original members of The Hollies are still alive.

I did a bit of thinking and checked and found out that The Shadows and The Searchers are all still alive.