UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 11

‘The golden age of The Kinks

begins more or less here.’

Face To Face (1966)
by The Kinks

It isn’t easy picking an underrated album by The Kinks because, apart from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society  (1968), which has, over the years, gradually acquired classic status and been accorded the deluxe reissue treatment, all of their albums might be described as underrated. I struggled, for instance, to choose between Face To Face, Something Else By The Kinks (1967), Arthur (1969) and Muswell Hillbillies (1971). The reason Face To Face won out for me was because it is a key transitional album for the band and, song for song, one of their strongest sets after Village Green.

I think Kinks albums are underrated due to the perception, even amongst many serious music fans, that they were a singles act. Certainly, that seemed to be the opinion of the UK record-buying public by the mid-1960s because, although Face To Face reached # 12 and stayed on the chart for nearly three months, its overall sales were disappointing. The follow-up, Something Else fared even worse, spending just a fortnight on the chart and peaking at only # 35. It would, remarkably, be the last time, barring compilations, that a Kinks album appeared on the British chart. Given their reputation as one of the all-time great bands, it’s strange to reflect that only 5 of their  24 studio albums ever charted in their homeland. But then, even during their glory years, certain great Kinks singles like ‘Mr. Pleasant’, ‘Shangri-La’ and ‘Celluloid Heroes’ also failed to chart at all.     



Ray, Mick, Dave & Pete c. 1966

The Kinks were the first of that fabulous triumvirate of working-class ‘Mod’ bands*1 from London to make it big (the others being The Who and The Small Faces). Led by Ray Davies, one of the very best songwriters of his generation, The Kinks started off by pretty much inventing Heavy Rock with singles like ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ and ‘’Til The End Of The Day’. With songs like ‘Tired Of Waiting’ and ‘Set Me Free’, they were also early exponents of the Power Ballad. Meanwhile, with the shimmering strangeness of ‘See My Friends’, they, along with The Beatles and The Yardbirds, pioneered the period’s fascination with the East and, in     particular, the hypnotic drones of Indian music.

Ray Davies though, had not finished breaking new ground and, ahead of Face To Face, had begun creating the sharp slices of social commentary for which he is most revered. ‘A Well Respected Man’ and ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’ point the way forward to a very different kinda Kinks and the style of song that came to define them.

The earlier Kinks material had been all about beat and rhythm and sheer power, with lyrics simple to the point of monosyllabism. By 1966, however, melody had taken over and the vocabulary of their songs had rapidly expanded. There was also a growing desire amongst the more imaginative pop musicians to produce LPs as artistic statements rather than the casual hotchpotch of songs that was then more or less the norm. Bob Dylan and The Beatles were spearheading this movement and, with Rubber Soul, released at the end of 1965, and Revolver, which came out just ahead of Face To Face, The Beatles were also demonstrating how the recording studio could be a more colourfully creative environment.

Although the Kinks album stands up well today, it can also be seen very much as a record of its time – it certainly comes dressed in the styles of the day. The front cover painting has a stream of butterflies fluttering into the foreground from the top of some groovy hipster’s head, whilst the back has one of those publicist’s sleeve notes that were in vogue at the time and which attempts to be arty and witty without succeeding on either count. With its warm, analogue, four-track mono sound, the record was the fourth and last of their albums to be produced by Shel Talmy before Ray Davies himself took over in the studio. It was also the first album to feature entirely original material by Ray.

1966 was a difficult year for The Kinks. As well as having to cope with their perennial management problems, Ray suffered what was described as a ‘nervous breakdown’ which led to him being replaced by Mick Grace*2 for a tour of Belgium, and bassist Pete Quaife broke a leg and temporarily left the band, to be replaced by John Dalton*3 You can hear the strain in Ray’s voice –  always a dry, fragile instrument – which sounds quite rough around the edges on some of Face To Face.

The fruity tones of Grenville Collins, one of the band’s managers, opens the album, answering a telephone on ‘Party Line’, a bouncy guitar tune about invasion of privacy. It features one of Dave Davies’ occasional lead vocals and provides a lively, if inconsequential start before ‘Rosie, Won’t You Please Come Home?’ strums in with its lament for a girl who has flown the family nest (Rosie Davies, one of the six elder sisters of Ray and Dave had emigrated to Australia several years before). It’s a more complex song, underpinned, as are so many Kinks songs from the ‘60s, by their distinctive rhythm section, and effectively economical flourishes of guitar. It also features the first of several appearances by Nicky Hopkins on harpsichord.

                                                                                                  

Dandy Dave

‘Dandy’*4, like the single, ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’ and ‘Two Sisters’ (issued the following year on Something Else) is another song which may well be about that famous peacock and man about town, Dave Davies. Ray, who by now was married with a child, envied his younger brother’s gallivanting around Swinging London. Although the narrator chides the ‘low-down dandy’, warning him that he’s ‘moving much too fast’ and ‘can’t escape the past’, it’s an affectionate portrait which concludes that he’s ‘alright’ and will ‘always be free’ and ‘needs no sympathy’.

The pressures of stardom and the responsibility weighing on the band’s most creative member is the subject of ‘Too Much On My Mind’, one of Ray’s loveliest ballads. Considering his recent history at the time, it’s a remarkably candid song featuring a tinkling acoustic guitar and harpsichord, punctuated by a repeated bass slide.

That harpsichord is to the fore on the next track, ‘Session Man’, with Hopkins playing a baroque run before Ray delivers a withering put-down of the protagonist who’s ‘not paid to think, just play’ and who ‘always finishes on time / No overtime or favours done’. It’s a cracking tune, but one wonders what Hopkins – virtually a de facto member of The Kinks in the studio - made of it – especially as he’s strongly rumoured to be the inspiration.

The mood darkens with ‘Rainy Day In June’, a great track in which an apocalyptic storm is described poetically amidst minor chords, spectral backing vocals, handclaps and dramatic sound-effects of the thunderous summer downpour which unleashes ‘a demon’ snatching butterflies ‘in its crinkled hand’. Presumably this was one of the tracks Ray had in mind when he complained that he didn’t like the psychedelic album cover and would have preferred something ‘black and strong, like the sound of the LP, instead of all those fancy colours’.

‘A House In The Country’*5, which closed the first side of the LP, reverts to the less interesting style of opener, ‘Party Line’. A wordy, but one-idea beat song with a bam-bam chorus, it’s about the failure of a status-symbol property to satisfy its rich, shallow owner who, in reality ‘ain’t gotta home, oh no’. Ray’s singing sounds tired on this and it may have been better fielded out to his younger brother.

‘Holiday In Waikiki’ is much better. A wry tale of disillusionment, it features a narrator who wins a holiday in a newspaper competition, only to find the exotic resort ‘commercialized’, expensive and ersatz. Even the hula-hula girl wears a plastic grass skirt and comes from New York of Greco-Italian parentage. Without ever sounding nearly as accomplished as their session men, The Kinks yet again demonstrate their knack for getting all of the right sounds in the right place on this buoyant pop song, with Mick Avory’s drums captaining the ship.

The swashing surf effects which bookend ‘Holiday’ lead into ‘Most Exclusive Residence for Sale’, a song which not only recalls the scenario of ‘A House In The Country’, but acts as a precursor for ‘Sunny Afternoon’ later on. This time a man who ‘made good…hit the hard times and had to sell out’. A somewhat more sympathetic character than that in ‘House’, we’re told that:-

                               ‘Because he had a heart and not a head

                               He spent it all on girls and fancy jewellery

                               Then he found himself in front of a judge and jury.’

Ray is on his best laconic crooning form here and the booming guitar riff and mocking ‘bah-bah-bah-bah’ backing vocals create an entertainingly tragicomic picture of a hero who ‘soaked away all of his troubles and let them drown’.

The tone and tempo are then suddenly arrested by ‘Fancy’ – for me, one of the highlights of the album and, indeed, of the Kinks’ classic period. A close relative of ‘See My Friends’, it begins with a glistening twelve-string guitar, then picks up a repeated sliding bass note and Ray’s droning vocal (one of his best on the record). Halfway through, urgent down-strokes bring in a pattering tabla*6 as Dave’s six-string emerges, eventually hitting high notes at the end as the bass note, enormously compressed and sustained, melts into the fade. It’s not so much Indian as other-worldly…

The words to ‘Fancy’, sparse and awkward on paper, work wonderfully well in the mysterious sonic haze of the record. Ray’s own attempts to explain the song have been vague but the phrase’, ‘No-one can penetrate me’ seems to have psychological rather than sexual significance. No such abstruseness clouds ‘Little Miss Queen Of Darkness’, a neat mid-tempo song about a discotheque dolly-bird who disguises a broken heart by losing herself in dancing. It is enhanced by subtle guitars and a totally unexpected, echo-laden, but musically interesting drum solo (and I don’t know of too many of those…).

‘You’re Lookin’ Fine’ is a fairly straightforward blues work-out which doesn’t go much further lyrically than its title suggests. It’s a bracing couple of minutes though, and at least gives Dave a chance to shine with his only real solo of the album. It’s followed by one of The Kinks’ best loved and most heard songs, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, one of the band’s three UK # 1 singles - and on the chart throughout England’s World Cup winning summer.     

Too much on Ray's mind?

Opening with one of those great Kinks introductory descending bass lines (cf. ‘Dead End Street’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’)*7 it’s a classic sunshine song and has appeared on numerous ‘Summer Hits’ type compilations but, paradoxically, its lyric is as much doom and gloom as it is lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer*8. England is not so much ‘swinging’ as suffering an economic downturn and the narrator of the song is being squeezed by a ‘big fat momma’ government and ‘the taxman has taken all [his] dough’. The over-riding message that listeners take away though, is that of cocking a snook at adversity. Before the narrator sails away into tax exile (or lurches into bankruptcy), it’s his cool insouciance that we identify with:-

                           ‘My girlfriend’s run off with my car

                           And gone back to her ma and pa,

                           Telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty

                           Now I’m sitting here

                           Sipping at my ice-cold beer

                           Lazing on a sunny afternoon.’    

The album ends anti-climactically with ‘I’ll Remember’, a wistful lost-love power ballad recorded nearly six months before the Face to Face sessions. One wonders why other superior songs from the period such as b-sides like ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’ and ‘Big Black Smoke’; and ‘End Of The Season’ (which ended up on Something Else) weren’t preferred in the final programme*9.

The first of these, defiantly roared out by Dave, would have fitted into the album’s identity-crisis theme well – as would the second, with its tale of a country girl who runs away to London only to succumb to what Dylan Thomas called ‘capital punishment’. The third, another poor little rich boy’s Cowardesque lament for the girlfriend who’s flown abroad for the winter, leaving him behind, wailing ‘Now Labour’s in, I have no place to go’, would also have complimented the record’s satirizing of the British class system. 

Face To Face is an album whose writer and characters, be they first or third person, gaze critically beneath the constructs of self and society. From now on, the songs of Ray Davies would focus on family, friends, the industry he worked in, and the world at large. Songs of ‘social commentary’, yes - but all presented through the peculiar prism of his own personality. The golden age of The Kinks begins more or less here.

 

N. B.

In 2011, I wrote a poem about Ray Davies called Old Ray after watching a BBC Imagine documentary about him. If you'd like to read the poem, it can be found in the POETRY CORNER top tab on the home page of this blog - click on the tab, scroll down to the list of poems and click on Old Ray.

*1 – To pigeon-hole such great bands as ‘Mod’, is of course, to diminish their achievements; The Kinks, The Who and The Small Faces were all so much more than that – but, until about 1967, they were all known as ‘Mod’ groups.

*2 - Mick Grace, plucked from a London band called The Cockneys, shared lead vocals with Dave Davies on the Belgian tour, before sinking back into obscurity, much like one Jimmy Nichol, who famously – and forgettably – replaced a sick Ringo on several Beatles gigs during a 1964 world tour.   

*3 – ‘Little Miss Queen Of Darkness’ was the only Face To Face track on which John Dalton, formerly of Mod outfit The Creation, played bass, although he is also on ‘Dead End Street’. He permanently replaced Quaife between 1969-76.

*4 - ‘Dandy’ was a ‘turn-table hit’ in the UK by anachronistic radio star, Clinton Ford, but the cover by Herman’s Hermits, at the peak of their success in the US and Canada, had a bona-fide hit Stateside. As you’d expect, it’s a rather anodyne version made even worse by the addition of a twee string arrangement.     

*5 – Ray Davies moved to a country house himself around this time, but quickly became homesick and returned to London. The song was a minor hit for The Pretty Things.     

*6 – I’m guessing about there being a tabla on ‘Fancy’ – it might be someone hitting cardboard boxes, for all I know.

*7 – A word here about the highly distinctive use of backing vocals on Kinks records such as ‘Sunny Afternoon’. Usually some combination of Dave, Pete Quaife, Rasa (Ray’s first wife) and Ray himself, the effects created are more than merely harmonious and add mood, wit and eloquence to the songs.

*8 – ‘Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days Of Summer’ was the title track of a 1963 album by Nat King Cole.

*9 – Ray Davies originally had the idea that all of the tracks on Face To Face would be blended together by sound-effects such as the ringing phone on ‘Party Line’, the storm on ‘Rainy Day In June’ and the waves on ‘Holiday In Waikiki’. Had they been included on the album, there would also have been the pealing church bells on ‘Big Black Smoke’ and the birdsong on ‘End Of The Season’. Sadly, nothing came of the idea but, had it come off, it would have predated The Beatles’ famously segued Sgt. Pepper (1967) by some seven months…

 

 C. IGR 2013