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Kinks - Picture Book
| Rollingstones |
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Even before the Kinks made their first hit, the 1964 fuzz rocket "You Really Got Me," singer-composer Ray Davies was writing about euphoria in the past tense — check out "I Believed You," a brash 1963 demo included on this six-CD set and recorded when the Kinks were still a North London dance band called the Boll-Weevils. But Davies quickly refined that raw longing into a fiercely personal pop of loss — the mourning grind of '64's "Tired of Waiting for You," the explosive '65 wailer "Where Have All the Good Times Gone" — built on the Kinks' bratty R&B spunk and dusted with the antique sparkle of British music hall. Half of Picture Book's long view (this is the first Kinks anthology to go up to their mid-Nineties finish) is devoted to the band's sustained brilliance into the early Seventies, emphasizing Ray's near-daily pursuit of excellence and a fading Albion across now-fabled singles and corralled rarities. Some of the legendary tension between Ray and his younger brother, Dave, the Kinks' lead guitarist, was rooted in the latter's love of loud, and his equal, if not upper, hand is evident in the wisely selective passage through the Kinks' Seventies and Eighties arena-rock resurrection. But Ray never stopped looking over his shoulder. Picture Book ends with another demo, "To the Bone," from 1995, in which Ray spots a favorite old LP in a record shop, triggering memories of a failed love affair. "Every single groove," he sings, "cuts me to the bone." It is a familiar sensation here....full text |
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| Uncut |
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In 1994, I interviewed Ray Davies. He turned up at Wandsworth Park in a Nissan Micra, smoking a cigar. Then he flitted from bench to bench, talking about the tragicomic tale of The Kinks, his brother Dave (they communicated by fax, unable to meet without conflict), and a career spent writing “songs for waitresses and divorced people”. Davies didn’t seem offended that I asked no questions about The Kinks after 1977. His own autobiography, X-Ray, stopped even earlier, in 1975. Because it has more expansive parameters, few will sit blissfully through the entire contents of Picture Book, a 6-CD box set of 137 Kinks tracks spanning the years 1963–1994. Over those three decades, the brothers from Muswell Hill (and original bandmates Pete Quaife and Mick Avory) turned beat-pop on its head, introduced soap opera and vaudeville into rock’n’roll, and played out their last 15 years as arena-rockers in America. (Although, as I write, rumours are circulating that they have re-formed.)...full text |
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| Contactmusic |
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Long before either Noel or Liam Gallagher were a twinkle in their mother's eye, the first case of sibling rivalry had already taken British pop by storm. Ray and Dave Davies emerged from a succession of R'n'B covers bands - as was the norm at the time - before embarking on their own songwriting partnership as one half of The Kinks. Recruiting Mick Avory and Pete Quaife along the way, mainly as their rhythm section but just as importantly to keep the peace between the ever-warring brothers, it wasn't long before they were enjoying similar levels of success to fellow darlings of swinging sixties Britain, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Indeed 1964's third single 'You Really Got Me' was one of the first singles by a UK act to make its presence felt in the Stateside dominated American Billboard chart. Five decades have passed since then, and over that time The Kinks popularity has seen more ups and downs than a rollercoaster, hitting its unparalleled peak in the mid-1960s before dropping again, then showing the odd signs of resurgence in the early parts of each of the ensuing decades that followed, if not always down to the band themselves, as the 1990s fascination with Ray Davies and co. was undoubtedly inspired by Britpop, in particular Blur, a band whose success owes a large debt to The Kinks both lyrically and conceptually....full text |
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