The Kinks You Really Got Me

Ray Davies/LPO/Crouch End Festival Chorus - review

A man blessed in many ways, but never with a sunny disposition, it sometimes seems as if Ray Davies spent the entire 60s complaining. The most recurring of his grumbles involved the Kinks 's record company. Not only did Pye Records work him to a nervous breakdown, they refused to spend the kind of money on the Kinks' albums that EMI showered on the Beatles. You might argue that Davies managed pretty well regardless – it's hard to see how more money would have made Waterloo Sunset a better record, perfection being notoriously tough to improve on – but tonight's performance of their 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society seems to be less about nostalgia than restitution. The album has been lavishly reworked for orchestra (the London Philharmonic, no less) and choir (the Crouch End Festival Chorus); precisely the kind of thing Pye wouldn't spring for 40 years ago.

The result genuinely sounds different. Linked by short interstitial instrumental passages, it feels more like a suite of songs: it starts to resemble a more prosaic English equivalent of Brian Wilson's Smile, another flawed masterpiece obsessed with history and nostalgia, with mythologising a non-existent past. Furthermore, the new arrangements appear to clarify Davies's intent. If you're the kind of listener unsure just how affectionate his brand of satire was, troubled that he might have been that most unedifying of things, a rock star sneering at ordinary people, then the heft of the orchestra and voices make the characters depicted in Johnny Thunder or Do You Remember Walter? seem heroic, rather than pitiable.

A shifting of emphasis continues in the second half of the show, which sees the same lavish treatment meted out to the Kinks's greatest hits. You find yourself wondering whether turning Sunny Afternoon into a jolly audience singalong cancels out the darkness at its heart, or if getting everyone to blithely join in with its intimations of domestic violence simply makes it more subversive. If the massed voices and instruments somehow contrive to make You Really Got Me less urgent and powerful than original, they make Days' emotional shifts from celebration to sadness all the more poignant, a state of affairs bolstered further by Davies – clearly a little under the weather – struggling to hit the notes. Ill or not, he's clearly delighted by the evening. The final time he sings the line in Waterloo Sunset about the characters being in paradise, he smiles gently and says "and so am I", a man who's finally got what he wanted all along.

The Kinks, You Really Got Me Willie Simpson

Welcome to part 57 of my never ending youtube countdown.  Today, I present another one of England’s best, this time, The Kinks!  I start off this blog with an understatement, the Kinks are an interesting group.  Led by lead singer/songwriter and all around musical genius, Ray Davies, the Kinks are the all time kings of garage rock in my opinion.  The rest of the band, which originally featured Mick Avory on drums (who nearly killed lead guitarist Dave Davies (Ray’s 17 year old brother) by knocking him unconscious with his drum set in an on stage brawl), and Pete Quaife on bass.  Also, Ray and Dave were constant bickering brothers who fought constantly for decades.  Yea…the Kinks had a slew of problems which led to a crazy ban from US touring at the height of the British Invasion and their commerical breakthrough success with “You Really Got Me.”  This ban cost the Kinks a potential army of fans, tons of money, and a greater spotlight that the likes of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and the Who all happily lapped up.  For the rest of their existence, though still managing to churn out hits because of Ray’s sheer brilliance, and still influencing the very bands listed above enormously, the Kinks never got their proper recognition and were forced to carry on throughout the years in a Spinal Tap like state, embarrassingly embracing heavy metal schlock and stage craft by the 1980s in an attempt to stay relevant.  It’s one of the biggest crimes in rock and roll history because the Kinks were that good.  Ray Davies basically invented garage rock with “You Really Got Me,” a song which the Who admitted to copying for their breakout single, “Can’t Explain.”  Ray’s songwriting was also heavily influential on the likes of John Lennon, who considered “Wonderboy” one of his favorite songs ever, and used it years later as the inspiration for “Beautiful Boy.”  Not only that, he turned into one of rock and rolls greatest lyricists and melody makers, basically as good the Beatles, sometimes even better considering he had to put the whole band on his back and never had a partner to share the load with.  The most inspiring thing about Ray is the legacy of gorgeous, honest, and uncompromising music he left behind (well at least through the first half of the 70s,)  and “You Really Got Me,” is his undeniable greatest splash hit.  So here it is, rev it up, and toast one to Ray folks, one of the greatest ever.

You really got me

The Kinks: All Day and All of the Night, Day by Day Concerts, Recordings and Broadcasts, 1961 - 1996

Inside the hits

You really got me, an illustrated world discography of the Kinks, 1964-1993

Mods, rockers, and the music of the British invasion