Prompted by the recent publication in the Guardian of Alex Petridis's top forty Kinks songs here are various bits and pieces I've written about the Kinks' songs, Kollected here in one handy post. A few of the personal favourites discussed below did not make Petridis's list.
PEOPLE TAKE PICTURES OF EACH OTHER
Loss is Ray Davies' big subject; a song like People Take Pictures of Each Other could not have been written by anyone else and the essence of the song is captured in a few paragraphs in a book about The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller, who ends:
There is something neurotic about the wordless vocal tics that punctuate the song, and something desperate about the singsong round the piano as the track fades. The summer has passed by, childhood and freedom have vanished, love has been stolen away. You used to matter to someone, but now you don't. You might as well sing. It's all you've got - that, and your photographs.
PICTURES IN THE SAND
Pictures in the Sand is one of my favourite Kinks tracks, first heard on The Great Lost Kinks Album, a 1973 release of mostly 1968-69 tracks which Ray Davies hadn't approved, though the songs are all of a very high standard. A music hall - or more decorous end of the pier - atmosphere can be found in Pictures in the Sand in brightly coloured plastic spades, but for all the chirpiness - Ray and chums coming across like a Pierrot troupe - it seems to be a song about a hopeless love:
Every single day
I waste my time away
Drawing pictures in the sand
Writing messages to you
At the end the vocal seems to break down into a kind of discreet blubbering - or perhaps an imitation of the trumpet notes which tend to signal defeat in a cartoon or film comedy - but that is the only hint of the mask slipping.
The tempo of Pictures in the Sand may be sprightly (an old-fashioned word which seems to fit), but People Take Pictures ... is married throughout to an infernal, Tiggerish bounciness. Miller is spot-on, I think, about the desperation at the recording's end. It, too, is about a hopeless, or a lost, love, among other things:
You can't picture love that you took from me
When we were young and the world was free
Pictures of things as they used to be
Don't show me no more, please
[...]
People take pictures of each other
And a moment can last them forever
Of a time when they mattered to someone
Picture of me when I was just three
Sat with my ma by the old oak tree
How I love things as they used to be
Don't show me no more, please
There is even a Cossack dance-style interlude in the song which may suggest that the only way to cope is to avoid reflection by continuous whirling and bouncing: the hunger to relive the past is better resisted ("Don't show me no more, please").
AUTUMN ALMANAC
Autumn Almanac is another song which sounds at odds with itself. Is Ray making fun of the limited aspirations of the little man, with that hint of Formby gormlessness in the vocal?
I like my football on a Saturday
Roast beef on Sunday's alright
I go to Blackpool for my holiday
Sit in the open sunlight
Not, it seems, by the next section, which is sung straight, suggesting the pull of the past ("Come on home...") can't be escaped, only submitted to, perhaps for Davies as much as those he is singing about: if he is indeed mocking them, then perhaps he's mocking something in himself too.
There is a singalong fadeout here, too, less frantic than People Take Pictures ... but with a contrapuntal, insistent "Yes" and what sounds like the rhythmic battering of a hammer which may suggest that the jolly chorus are unwittingly celebrating their own stasis (as with People Take Pictures ..., a cheery singalong is a distraction, not a solution).
When I started thinking about Kinks songs for this entry I intended to say that the best of his work was acutely personal. Well, it is - and it isn't.
END OF THE SEASON
Thinking about the examples above, and End of the Season, you are never totally sure what's going on. End of the Season begins with what sounds like a heartfelt, agonised verse -
Winter time is coming
All the sky is grey
Summer birds aren't singing
Since you went away
- before slipping into what seems like a Hooray Henry's lament for times past. But the memory of that opening undercuts the subsequent mockery of this man, wrongfooted by the social revolution of the sixties -
I just can't mix in all the clubs I know
Now Labour's in, I have no place to go
But even if we are meant to laugh at this aristocratic type (and Ray's delivery of the above lines in particular would seem to suggest so), there is a kind of poetry in the way he describes his sense of desertion, whatever the upper class trappings:
Back in the scrum on a wet afternoon
Down in the mud, dreaming of flowers in June
Too long ago to recall the source - probably a seventies music paper - but I do have a vague recollection of Ray Davies expressing concern about Sunny Afternoon. That song, he said, was the first time he'd invented a character to inhabit - singing as him, not describing him from the outside - and my impression remains that however many years later the interview was taking place, he was still wondering whether he had taken a wrong turning, diluted his songwriting.
I can't remember the journalist's response, though I suspect the correct one would be that in fact he'd liberated himself to explore contradictory viewpoints in the same song. Those occasions when Davies is less successful, or less interesting as a writer, seem to be when contempt for his subjects isn't tempered by the hint of some other attitude - as with Plastic Man, say, or Mr Pleasant.
VILLAGE GREEN
And his donning of various personae in the same song - Village Green, for example - certainly makes for a richer experience for the listener: There is a yokelish aspect to the initial vocal in Village Green then Davies appears to morph into a more knowing narrator, mocking the American tourists attracted to the place's quaintness. But when he then sings:
I miss the village green,
And all the simple people.
I miss the village green,
The church, the clock, the steeple.
I miss the morning dew, fresh air and Sunday school.
you instantly get that on some level he's experiencing a real hankering for lost innocence, even if all the things mentioned above are mere symbols - especially as the yokel figure has earlier talked about leaving in search of fame.
BIG BLACK SMOKE
Big Black Smoke is the tale of a girl who runs away from a village green-type existence - not in search of fame but to escape boredom:
Her little country home,
Her little country folk,
Made her blood run cold.
At times Davies' vocal tone veers towards a kind of Victorian judgemental relish, as when he describes the sinful attractions of the big city:
Well, she slept in caffs and coffee bars
and bowling alleys
before slipping back into a more sympathetic register for the specifics of her decline:
And every penny she had
Was spent on purple hearts and cigarettes.
But even though this and other details (such as the mother who "pines her heart away") suggest a basic sympathy for the girl's plight, the framing device of a bellringing town crier ("Oyez ... oyez") serves to put the tale at a distance, giving it the air of a cautionary Victorian ballad of a "ruined" maid.
On the other hand, maybe Davies's point is that nothing has changed, even if a modern day culprit might not be a village squire but simply a more exciting boyfriend option who, in a possible reference to pimping, "took her money for the rent and tried to drag her down."
DEAD END STREET
The vocal delivery in Dead End Street, by contrast, is what you'd have to call robust - especially the shouted chorus - but it's the arrangement which provides the extra layer of meaning in this case.
Apart from the black humour of the reference to the couple's "Sunday joint of bread and honey" this seems a fairly straightforward account of living on the breadline, albeit with nice homely touches ("and me feet are nearly frozen") reinforced by the ominous brass at the beginning - a possible suggestion of Northern-style ssociations with scrimping and saving?
That gives way, however, to what at first seems an incongruously celebratory, jazzy tone, courtesy of trombonist Chris Barber. Why such an uplifting fadeout when things seem to be reaching crisis point ("rent collector knocking"), and no possibility of escape or redemption has been offered by the lyric?
No chance to emigrate,
I'm deep in debt and now it's much too late.
Barber was an enthusiastic exponent of New Orleans jazz and that city's tradition of an upbeat number to follow the solemnity and sadness of a funeral. So, rather than serving to make a bleak tale more palatable, the arrangement reinforces the lyric's assertion that there will be no way out this side of the grave:
(Dead end!)
People are dying on dead end street.
(Dead end!)
Gonna die on dead end street.
WATERLOO SUNSET
I must have been eight years old when I first heard Waterloo Sunset, in the year of its release, and - like just about everyone else in the world - realised it was something special.
Perhaps for a child the fact that it wasn't, strictly speaking, a love song had something to do with it, even though lovers figure in it. Certainly Davies' late friend and mentor Ned Sherrin said that was what made it unique in the pop charts of the time.
For someone growing up in Scotland, however, the song's setting was enough to suggest something magical, even if the Engerland in my head may not have swung like a pendulum do. My childish notions of the country and its capital came largely from Ealing films on the telly, all decency and community spirit, tempered by odd glimpses in police series of a modern day city seemingly awash with criminals, spies and pyromaniacs like George Cole in Gideon's Way.
Whatever the reason, the song stayed in my imagination. A few years later, when a family holiday finally necessitated an overnight stay in London, I eagerly craned out of my room's tiny window to take in the stretch of water in the reddening dusk: it was Waterloo Sunset.
We were in Camberwell at the time.
You can find a great deal about the song on the net, and I'm not going to try to provide a digest of others' comments here. Instead, I'm going to pick up on a few points which have stuck with me over many years of thinking and reading about the song.
To start with the identity of the lovers: my only contribution to the Terence Stamp/Julie Christie question is that I'm prepared to swear that on one early occasion when the Kinks were performing the song on TV (possibly Top of the Pops, possibly not), I distinctly heard Ray sing the words: "Terence meets Julia."
A playful reference to one half, at least, of cinema's golden couple (they starred in Far From The Madding Crowd that year) or an equally playful booting of the song's original pair a rung or two up the social ladder?
I think I prefer the latter explanation. And even if the revision was a momentary whim to amuse his bandmates it still suggests the inclusivity of the song: no matter how much of an allowance your daddy gives you, the healing balm of that view is yours for the gazing. (And I didn't even need to be there.)
In the act of listening, of course, the song makes perfect sense. Scanning the lyrics cold on the page, however - without the benefit of additional information about family members who may have inspired it - you can't help wondering about the character of the speaker and his relation to this couple. For a kickoff, he seems to have been watching them regularly enough to note that
Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station
Every Friday night
But there's no clear indication he actually knows them. He appears to be a recluse, claiming in his defence:
I don't need no friends
[...]
I am so lazy, don't want to wander
I stay at home at night
But two details suggest that he has somehow absorbed the couple, is them as well as himself: an artist, in other words, identifying with his subject. He is an omniscient narrator, swooping down on them as though via a crane shot, picking out the young lovers from the "Millions of people swarming like flies." And he even knows that they, like him, "don't need no friends" - that the city itself, the beauty of the scene, is enough to sustain the watcher and the watched.
Waterloo Sunset has already been compared by others to Wordsworth's famous sonnet about Westminster Bridge. But a small detail from his book-length poem The Prelude may illuminate the song further. Subtitled "Growth of a Poet's Mind", the poem might be crudely summarised as "boy meets Lakes - boy loses Lakes - boy gets spirit of Lakes back again." (Other synopses are available.)
One section deals with his sense of alienation in London until he too is able to zoom into the swarm to pick out tiny details of humanity:
.... a Man,
Whom I saw sitting in an open Square
Close to an iron paling that fenced in
The spacious Grass-plot; on the corner stone
Of the low wall in which the pales were fix'd
Sate this One Man, and with a sickly babe
Upon his knee, whom he had thither brought
For sunshine, and to breathe the fresher air.
Of those who pass'd, and me who look'd at him,
He took no note; but in his brawny Arms
(The Artificer was to the elbow bare,
And from his work this moment had been stolen)
He held the Child, and, bending over it,
As if he were afraid both of the sun
And of the air which he had come to seek,
He eyed it with unutterable love.
Suggs (how's that for a cultural leap?) was talking in a TV series about the impact of first hearing Lola . He said something to the effect that although he didn't get the details, he knew enough to understood it was describing an adult world, and set in a place - Soho - associated with adult pursuits.
He went on to say, however, that he had found the song reassuring: the message he took was that whatever the obscure challenges to come later in life, they could somehow be coped with, that ultimately he'd be alright, just as the speaker seemed to be.
The subject matter isn't quite the same, but Waterloo Sunset had, I think, a similar effect on my younger self. The speaker may be a reclusive adult - is it merely being "lazy" which keeps him indoors? - or he may be an artist. But it could equally easily be a child's eyes which are timidly peeping out at life from that window, at the big city with its "millions of people", and those as yet unknowable adult challenges.
That, at any rate, was how I think I took it - and the London I knew then only from TV seemed more remote and dangerous, closer to my notion of "The City", than nearby, familiar Glasgow.
Taken like this, Terry and Julie could be seen as imaginary figures, brought into being by the child-artist in an effort to make sense of that frightening mass of people and bring them down to a manageable scale: two people who at least know each other.
Their names are friendly, reassuring, perhaps absorbed from film or TV (which might bring Terence Stamp and Julie Christie back into the equation); they presumably have found proper grown-up jobs in the big city as they meet at the end of a working week; maybe, too, the fact they have discovered each other in all this crowd offers hope for that peeper-out at the window that he might someday be redeemed from his isolation.
As would be consistent with a child's-eye view, however, the speaker doesn't enter into details of their lives beyond the suggestion that they have in some unspecified way completed each other ("they don't need no friends") and feel "safe and sound" - a phrase perhaps more associated with children than adults - once they have crossed the river.
And instantly I see in my head the image used to sell Start-Rite shoes in the sixties and well beyond: two small children hand in hand, a boy and a girl, walking along a road which stretches to infinity with the dark unknown safely fenced off. But as mentioned earlier, over and above the need for contact with others what seems to sustain all three in the song is the place itself. Indeed, for the narrator, London itself seems like a friend who can be addressed with familiarity:
Dirty old river, must you keep rolling ...
which would make sense of his later "I don't need no friends."
This ties in with Wordsworth again, and now I really can't avoid that more famous poem. In The Prelude, the citybound Wordsworth may take comfort from glimpses of human contact but feels he has lost himself as a result of being away from the mountains, hills and lakes of his Cumbrian childhoood. Whatever the isolated examples of people caring for each other, London itself is not a beautiful place; he may even be suggesting in the above extract that it's the ugliness of the place which makes those instances of contact more moving (the moment of tenderness Wordsworth noted in The Prelude was "set off by foil").
In the sonnet written on Westminster Bridge, however, he finally gets the city. Writing in the early morning, before the day's bustle has begun, the emptiness allows him to see the beauty which was always there - and such is his rapture at the realisation, the vision goes straight in at number one, beating the Lake District down to two:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
[...]
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Just to be clear, Wordsworth is not saying he prefers the city empty: "mighty heart" seems to refer both to the mass of people and their physical surroundings. London seems a single entity, a vast body which is nevertheless comprised of countless individuals.
As is well known, Davies had a tracheotomy which contributed to the writing of the song. Slowly recovering from the operation, his vision seems not dissimilar:
I couldn't speak for days and the nurses would wheel me out onto the balcony to watch the Thames. I was amazed by how I could see such life in the river. It felt like blood pumping through the veins of the city.
[...]
it was just a very poetic moment for me. So [when I wrote 'Waterloo Sunset'] I thought about that time.
In Davies' song, however, beauty is present at the end of a working day when the city is still thronged, and available to all - the Terrys and Julies, the Terences and Julias ...
And the child/man/artist gazing, like Wordsworth, on what he has half-created, half-perceived.
Ray Davies has said he doesn't like analysing songs ("It's instinct") and that's as it should be for any artist. But the origins of such an enduring song seem particularly tantalising. How much did his passive, weakened state while recovering from the tracheotomy contribute? It could certainly help explain the childlike aspect of the observer figure. He has said that he nearly died after the operation: could it be that the essence of the song's power is simply that it reaffirms for all of us the wonder of being alive?
But of course lots of people have gone through near-death experiences without penning immortal ditties. All that is certain is that its composition seems to have come easily: he has said that there wasn't any part of its creation which wasn't a pleasure to him. Magical enough on its own, of course, is the piece's sea change from Merseybeat lament to a more personal location - and a different sort of song altogether.
As with Where Have All the Good Times Gone? it is also a perfect marriage of words and music. Quite apart from their intrinsic beauty, the harmonies (including Ray's then wife Raisa) bestow the aural equivalent of a glow over the description of the scene, working in this case with, rather than against, the lyric to - I was going to say romanticise, but maybe simply to draw attention to a vista which more jaded citizens have stopped noticing. Could the intention be to suggest, musically, the setting sun's rays, an antidote to the brightness of the taxi lights (and the harshly strummed guitar at the start) which may have made the speaker retreat to his eyrie in the first place?
It's difficult not to think of Waterloo Sunset in terms of other media. As mentioned earlier, there's something cinematic about it. But perhaps it's better compared to a painting. There may be a narrative of sorts (watched from the window, the lovers meet and cross over the river) but the song seems to invite quiet contemplation of the sort associated with standing in front of a canvas (or being wheeled out to gaze upon the Thames).
And as with a good painting, the selection and ordering of elements of elements from life leads to something new and separate which is as much about the maker as his model.
Even if what is produced ultimately has a separate life. Ray Davies once said, rather sadly, at the end of a TV documentary, "I'll never be as good as Waterloo Sunset." I took the remark to refer not to his songwriting powers but the innocence, the - well, I'm tempted to say holiness in the song. In fact, the term may be unavoidable.
There is a poem by Humbert Wolfe in his book Cursory Rhymes, part of which I dimly remember. The young Charles Lamb, pupil of the distinctively uniformed Chrst's Hospital school, then in Newgate, is visited by an angel who sets out the whole of London before him. Quite how this was achieved I can no longer remember; I have retained only the final couplet, in which the angel
Set London working like a toy
And gave it to the Bluecoat boy.
It's a phrase which also sums up what Waterloo Sunset gave me personally, making a remote and forbidding place seem knowable by placing an urban Adam and Eve in its centre - a thought, incidentally, which may also explain my fondness for the film Three Hats for Lisa - and it also seemed to suggest, in the person of the speaker, that you didn't have to join the rat race, that it was enough simply to be, to observe and record. I'd even like to go further that this song may have provided my first inkling of the transforming power of art, but I really can't remember.
It may be, though, that the persona of the child which my younger sensibility imposed on the speaker isn't so far off the mark, that what I was responding to was the purity and optimism of the childlike eye of the man who then used the skills he had acquired to bring that vision to life.
Or something. Maybe the best way to explain how I feel about it is that if Waterloo Sunset were a painting it would not be Pre-Raphaelite (my first thought): the stories told on those canvases often have some kind of moral connotation.
No, Waterloo Sunset is not out to teach you anything, or not in any kind of conscious way. If there was any equivalent in paint, I'd say it was Stanley Spencer, a man who saw the divine in the everyday sights around him, whose vision of paradise was interwoven with his home in Cookham.
What has not been mentioned yet is the directness of Ray's vocal on the recording. No semi-Americanised voice like the early days, no Georgie Fame impersonation, no shifting in and out of personae ... just that distinctive, slightly nasal, lilt which serves his composition perfectly. I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that Ray was rather shy about letting the group hear his vocal (possibly it was the song itself); it may not be a confessional song, a la Where Have All the Good Times Gone? but it does feels intimate, unprotected: it is, I'd suggest, the child in Ray - and in all of us.
But whatever the possible details of its composition and recording, ultimately, like all great art - and this is surely one of the greatest popular songs of the twentieth century - Waterloo Sunset defies analysis. It has to be heard. And whether or not its composer feels he can "never be as good as Waterloo Sunset," we can only be grateful that he wrote it.
The above pieces were originally part of a series entitled Gnome Thoughts, speculating about possible influences on David Bowie's songwriting. I've cut out most of the Bowie references for this repost so the focus is squarely on Ray Davies but this final extract, written a while after that piece on Waterloo Sunset, is worth keeping as it was:
I was talking to a colleague about Waterloo Sunset and its possible influence on Bowie's songwriting. After a bit of mulling he cited Heroes - which instantly seemed obvious. It too couldn't really be described as a narrative, but it does have that image of a couple kissing which seems central to the song.
He suggested that the image may point to a possible difference between the writers' approaches: in Heroes Bowie appropriated an actual embrace (Tony Visconti and his partner) and put it in an entirely different context whereas Waterloo Sunset (whatever it may actually be) feels more like direct experience: however much he may empathise with the couple, Davies makes no secret of his separateness from them. The conclusion (assuming I'm representing the conversation accurately) seemed to be that Davies is less likely to play fast and loose with source material. Not quite sure how useful the distinction is as a general rule but I record it here anyway.
If you're becoming slightly confused (and I think I am), perhaps Bowie's comment about Be My Wife, as quoted in Hugo Wickens' book about Low (see earlier post here) may make things clearer:
"It was genuinely anguished, I think," Bowie once said of the song, before adding: "It could have been anybody, though."
It's hard to imagine Ray Davies expressing a similar ambivalence about any of his songs.
Prompted by my thinking more about Big Black Smoke in the last few days, we also talked about the remarkable economy of means in Ray Davies' lyrics. The song is a kind of mirror image of Waterloo Sunset - the city threatens to swallow up and corrupt the girl - but it feels like a complete, and very effective, narrative rather than a single image. Not because the story is told in in exhaustive detail but because the details seem particularly well selected and compressed.
She took all her pretty coloured clothes,
And ran away from home
And the boy next door,
For a boy named Joe.
And he took her money for the rent
And tried to drag her down in the big black smoke,
In the big black smoke.
Those last three lines, for example, are all that we need for the essence of her relationship with the more exciting boyfriend. That first line is also rich with suggestion: the clothes that weren't appreciated or suitable in the stifling country setting? Could it hint at the possibility of prostitution to come, the being dragged down? That would add another layer of meaning to
Till she walked the streets of the big black smoke
Our conversation then took a quirkier turn: what David Bowie songs might Ray Davies convincingly sing? I suspect the correct answer is "None; I can't imagine him wanting to;" but my colleague mentioned Panic in Detroit from the Aladdin Sane album. Not because it's a London song but because of that Davies-like use of small but telling detail to suggest a bigger picture:
He looked a lot like Che Guevara,
drove a diesel van
Kept his gun in quiet seclusion,
such a humble man
His final provocative suggestion was that with such songs as the above, and with America rather than England as his subject, it could be argued that Bowie was attempting in his songwriting what Ray Davies had been doing with such style closer to home.
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