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On which The Kinks get nostalgic and noisy all at once…
The Kinks "U.K. Jive" (1988)
Track Listing: Aggravation!/ How Do I Get Close?/ UK Jive/ Now And Then/ What Are We Doing?// Entertainment/ War IS Over/ Down All The Days (Till 1992)/ Loony Balloon/ Dear Margaret//Bright Lights/ Perfect Strangers (UK
"We've
got to get somewhere or hit something soon!"
If you've been reading these Kinks reviews in
chronological order then you may have noticed a pattern forming across the
1980s: deep pessimism about the world
and the band's place in it. What had started out in 1964 sounding like
such fun had by 1986 become a grind, a 'factory' that could never be escaped
and this time the narrators didn't even have a 'Sunny Afternoon' to keep them
hopeful when they lost their millions. Starting as early as 1965 the battle for
supremacy between the two halves of the Kinks kanon - the sadness, bitterness
and anger on the one side and the hope love and humanity on the other - had
raged across the next twenty years and the last time we heard the Kinks on
'Think Visual' it was the darkness that was definitely winning, seemingly on
for victory. Survival and head-shaking weariness is a theme of many Kinks
records - this is the band that gave us Where Have All The Good Times Gone?
in the peak years of the 60s after all - and yet UK Jive is something of
an oddity in the Kinks’ heavy canon because the characters here are for the
most part surviving with a smile on their face, putting up the worst that life
has to throw at them in the hope that soon, surely, honestly, definitely maybe
it will get better. Most songwriters on this list allow experience to triumph
over hope in their old age and turn in some decidedly crotchety middle-period
albums whatever the bright and sunny tunes they started out their career with.
Typically, Ray Davies pulls that same trick in reverse on albums like this one,
a record where hope really does win out over expectation and experience and
this album wins by a nose over its almost-equally fine successor Phobia
because of the hidden feeling of future joy that runs through UK Jive. The
Kinks were also firmly in danger of becoming the anonymous American rock band
with transatlantic accents that simply sounded like every other band out there
- at least judging by their recent singles. But The Kinks have always been a
band of surprises and so it proves again with 'UK Jive', the penultimate Kinks
album bucking the trend of everything that's going on around it to become the
band's most decidedly anglo-centric album since 'Muswell Hillbillies' in 1971
and their happiest in a lot longer.
The two are probably not un-connected. This is the
era when Thatcher's grip on turning Britain into the faceless money-making
monstrosity of the last record's 'Welcome To Sleazy Town' was beginning to loosen
(see 'Dear Margaret' in particular), when the cold war was thawing and the
Berlin Wall was being torn down and 'UK
Jive' was released in a relatively rare moment of peace and prosperity (in
between The Falklands the Gulf War). More specifically, this album celebrates
the UK’s growing place in a gradually uniting Europe and its move away from
being the self-contained uninfluenced island Ray berates on albums like Arthur, perhaps accounting for the rare optimism
and hope in many of Ray’s lyrics. England suddenly seems to have
a future on this album – and the Kinks, perhaps the most quintessentially
English band of all, seems to be dreaming of the future too. Englishness is a
strand of The Kinks we thought we'd never hear again after a decade spent
catering to the tastes of the band’s growing American market, with a welcome
lyrical return to decidedly ‘English’ phrases like ‘talisman’ and ‘never never’
to go alongside old friends like village greens and waterloo sunsets. Note the
fact that this album is 'UK Jive' though - it's a celebration of Britain as a
union rather than just treating England as if it were a separate county and
here the UK doesn't just dance, it jives a jig of happiness (just check out
that front cover where some very English suits belonging to the band dance 'out
of the wardrobe' - how small was Jim Rodford's by the way?!)
The Kinks had good reason to feel optimistic for
more personal reasons. Ray's gloom across 1986 may be accounted for by a
mystery illness that left him poorly for much of 1987 and 1988. After several
mis-diagnosis the problem turned out to be a blood clot and a build up of fluid
on Ray's lungs that saw him confined to hospital in Dublin for treatment
(Ireland will play a major role on final Kinks album 'Phobia'). Uncharacteristically
Ray had struggled to write for much of the time when he was poorly - but more
characteristically was buzzing with ideas while in hospital and eager to start
them all at once on release. One of them is this album, a second a planned
autobiography (abandoned 100 pages in and re-started in more adventurous form
as 'X-Ray' for release in 1996) and the third a project that will overshadow
the making of much of this album: a musical named '80 Days'. Based, naturally
enough, on 'Around The World In 80 Days' the project shares much of the same
humour, pathos and hope of this album, which starts with stuffy narrow-minded
upper class Englishmen making a silly bet and ends with the narrator's world
journey having opened his minds to the glories of other worlds, a discovery
that's far more valuable to him than winning any wager. Ray will end up writing
18 songs for the musical which runs between late August and October 9th 1988
and suffers a typically Kinks-like fate unloved
and neglected fate, closing after a few weeks with little publicity despite
getting some encouraging reviews from theatre critics who usually hate pop
artists messing around with their genre on sight. This musical is a project
that more than deserves a revival in these days of ‘musicals featuring songs
made famous by the artists’ frivolities and might have a better chance of
success now than it did the first time round (dare I say it, it's a lot more
interesting than 'Sunny Afternoon', the disappointing musical based on The
Kinks' life that skips all the interesting story in favour of singalongs and
where none of The Kinks look like the 'real' band - why is this project so
popular with fans when they didn't bother seeing Ray's original Broadway
handiwork beats me! It's still a lot better than the awful 'Mama Mia' that
kick-started this craze though, so I'll let it pass...) With the musical
closing early and The Kinks waiting for an album, inevitably the one informed
the other - both in terms of practicalities ('Loony Balloon' was an unfinished
song from the sessions and uses an out-of-control hot air balloon as it's big
metaphor) and in the sense of theme ('UK Jive' and 'War Is Over' date from
after the musical but sound at one with it, thanks to their tales of middle
Englanders widening their horizons at last and the peace that could equally
apply to the inter-war setting as much as the late 1980s).
As for the rest of the band, they too were hopeful,
up to a point (well, at the beginning at least). The mid-1980s tours had been
hard work but the rest across 1987 and much of 1988 had done the band good and
they were eager to get back together again after their longest period away from
each other. Moreover, the Kinks knew that UK Jive would be their last
record under their old contract with MCA and had already been approached by
Columbia for a deal that sounded very promising and supportive at the time -
they weren't to know just yet that this deal too will go sour. In a way this
fifteenth anniversary album sounds like a tying of loose ends, The Kinks
returning to their past themes in order to wave goodbye to this turbulent part
of their lives and enter the 1990s much more hopefully. Interestingly 'UK Jive'
is much more of a joint project than 'Think Visual' et sequence has been -
though even this came at a cost. Dave for instance gets a record three songs on
the album - his most since 'Something Else' way back in 1967 - and his
brother's material has lots of space for his nicely aggressive cobweb-blowing
guitar.
However the lyrics to much of 'UK Jive' proved to be
wishful thinking and the old tensions quickly resurfaced inside the Konk
studios. Despite the 18 month gap relationships between the brothers were at
their frostiest at the time – Dave says in his book Kink that his songs
were edited, messed around with and ultimately left off the LP without his
knowledge, an event that led to the first known physical fight between the brothers
since their teenage days (and Dave's emotional quitting of the band he'd helped
found, till being slowly persuaded to return). If true (which seems likely), then it seems a
sorry state of affairs for this record in particular – musically the two Davies
brothers had never been closer than on this album (Dave too deals with politics
and people coming together) and the
younger Kink’s songs are more than worthy of inclusion; indeed this album’s
final track Perfect Strangers, is a candidate for the best song here. Eventually
a compromise was made on the condition that two of Dave's songs were relegated
just to the CD, back in an era when vinyl continued to be (just about) the main
format for rock and roll. That meant that the original album ended on the
uncomfortable spoof of 'Dear Margaret' - a great song and a welcome chance to
hear the political side of The Kinks, but an uneasily bitter and depressed
finale to an album that until this point had been largely hopeful and looking
forward to the future. This ends up with the unusual result of giving Dave his
own 'mini EP' attached to the end of the main record, with Ray perhaps
distancing himself from his brother's work.
These brotherly issues apart, The Kinks really do sound like a band
again on this album and that makes it a doubly criminal shame that this most
settled of Kinks line-ups folded so quickly, due to record company shenanigans
and falling sales. Keyboardist Ian Gibons then became the latest casualty of
trying to keep the peace between the brothers and quit the band after the
sessions were done (he isn't credited on the sleeve as a form of 'revenge' -
though interestingly the keyboards play fare less of a role than they had on
'Think Visual' suggesting that tensions may have been running before the album
was even started). Gibbons is the last member of one of the longest running
turnovers in rock - from here-on in the rest of the band will limp through to
the final shows in 1995.
Perhaps as a result of all this 'UK Jive' seems
oddly aggressive for such an uplifting LP. For some reason the few fans who
know it take to calling 'UK Jive' a 'pretty' LP. Presumably that's for the
Beatley twang of 'War Is Over' and ballads 'How Do I Get Close?' and 'Loony
Balloon'. However to my ears I would have said the opposite - that this is the
rockingest, feistiest Kinks album in some time. The album starts with
'Aggravation', a song that starts loud and gets louder with every passing
verse, whilst the 'Give The People' leftover 'Entertainment is full of that
period's snarled hard-edged taunts and 'Bright Lights' and 'Dear Margaret' sock
a powerful rock punch. Even the quieter songs on the album (like the near
calypso 'What Are We Doing?') come with a sonic crunch the last couple of Kinks
albums could have done with more of. What
with the likes of poignant songs such as Waterloo Sunset, Dedicated
Follower, Dead End Street et al, its hard to forget that The Kinks started
their career as angry zeitgeist early heavy-metallers, complete with
ungrammatical choruses, slashed amplifiers and a guitarist who makes Led
Zeppelin sound like the Spice Girls. It’s fitting, then, that as The Kinks
headed into the end of their long career (29 years as a recording act between
1964 and 1993 barring minor bust-ups!) they should return to the sound that
started things off for them. UK Jive sounds super-aggressive when you’ve
grown up on the Kinks’ music-hall and rock opera records, with more up-tempo
songs than usual.
The result is a quiet
triumph, a rewarding record that's a sort of nice find for fans loyal enough to
hang on to the bitter end. 'UK Jive' sounds much like the other Kinks records
of the 1980s but taken to the maximum: 'Aggravation' rocks harder than anything
the band had done in years, whilst songs like 'Loony Balloon' see a return to
that timeless magic of years gone past that could have been recorded in any era
(with less trappings than most). Of course you still have to make allowances:
neither 'Now and Then' nor 'Bright Lights' are up to the rest of the album,
while the 80s production (despite being an improvement on 'Think Visual')
doesn't give the right amount to this set of songs to breathe. The cover is
tacky and should have been better. Good as it is 'Entertainment' doesn't belong
on this LP - and having Dave's songs stuck together at the end makes for rather
an unbalanced listening experience too. However there's a lot more to love
about this record than loathe and for a post-Pye album 'UK Jive' is remarkably
consistent album and barely puts a foot wrong - in sharp contrast to the
rollercoaster ride that is 'Think Visual'. It's also arguably the best place to
hear the old Kinks favourite theme of disliking the present while looking
forward to the future - and as such is
the (near) perfect place to (nearly) end the kanon. To think though that this
record could have been even greater judging by two popular fan favourites first
started at these sessions: Scattered,
later
released on Phobia, is known to
have been written in this era and started at the sessions but left
unreleased for four years – an early version with alternate lyrics from the
late 1980s is known to exist but has yet to be released (while less 'English'
than the rest of the album, it would have fitted the album's
smile-through-tears-concept nicely). Also there was the more jovial and dark
yet decidedly English The Million-Pound Semi-Detached, a track recorded
early on in these album sessions but left unreleased till becoming part of Ray
Davies’ Waterloo Sunset collection of Kinks offcuts and rarities
included as a ‘bonus CD’ with the Kinks’ Singles Collection compilation
CD (circa 1998). Some of the better '80 Days' songs (such as 'Ladies Of The
Night' and the writers-angst song 'Let It Be Written') could have adapted for
this record too - in fact all of Ray's unreleased demos for the hard-to-find
musical (there never was a soundtrack album) would make fine additions to a
'deluxe' CD release one day (*sigh* one day...) 'New World', as released on the
'Did Ya?' EP of 1991 dates from this period as well, although let's not go
there in terms of suitability...
Yet for all that hard work, for all that optimism,
for all that togetherness, for all that hope, UK Jive still flopped on first
release. It wasn't all that much of a surprise I suppose - to put this album in
context, back in the 80s the Kinks’ sales dropped badly and the band ended up
on MCA in Britain and the smaller London label in the US which couldn’t – or
wouldn’t –give the band a lot of help in terms of publicity - but it's a
surprise given that 'UK Jive' became the poorest selling Kinks studio LP until
'Phobia; trounced it, despite being far more commercial than the last two. Sad
to say that UK Jive all but disappeared from the shelves before most
fans knew it was out and to my knowledge has yet to re-appear on CD after its
brief release in the late 80s. Yet you wouldn’t know that by listening to the
record, which is full of that same hope that like their home country the Kinks
might one day re-claim their old status again, with their next ‘breakthrough’
release just round the corner. Fed up and disappointed by the album’s fate, UK
Jive was almost the last roll of the dice for the Davies’ brothers, who put
so much effort into this album that they could only bring themselves to try
again just one more time after this. Ray and Dave did go on to make one final
patchy but generally good album though (Phobia, 1993 – check out Still Searching, Surviving and Close
To The Wire, classics all) and both Davies albums continue to make strong
solo albums to this day; albeit Dave is still recovering from a stroke that has
taken him out of commission a bit in recent years. But this album makes a
fitting near-final bow all the same; a last run through all the themes,
inspirations and power-riffs that made The Kinks the great little band they
always were, played mainly in the style that brought them fame and fortune 25
years earlier in 1964. It may have been cruelly ignored at the time but for
those in the know UK Jive is a fitting (near)-end to a wonderful career.
The
Songs:
The album begins teasingly with gentle acoustic
strumming, a haunting Ray Davies vocal and the lightest 30 seconds on the whole
album. That doesn’t last long however – [328] Aggravation! is one of the band’s heaviest
full-adrenalin rockers since Till The End Of The Day. Ray uses one of
his favourite themes for this song – the mundanity of life and the lengths
people go to in escaping it – but instead of singing a longing ballad as
normal, Ray’s latest character is determined to fight back. A panic attack set
to music, it follows a character physically stuck in a traffic jam and
gradually realising that he is stuck in other ways too: in a dead end job, in a
dead end relationship and in a life that seems to have got out of control. Many
latter-day Kinks songs like using the metaphor of the car: once a sleek
‘desired’ object, by the late 1980s cars have become metal death traps, ugly
production assembly jobs that look much the same, representative of our
repetitive frustrated modern lives. Listen out for this song’s close cousin Somebody
Stole My Car on Phobia where Ray isn’t cross about the hassle or the
loss of property so much as he is about the idea that his car, his own personal
home on wheels, will now become just like all the other cars out there in the
hands of his robber, shorn of the trappings Ray has been keeping to make his
car unique to him. In short Aggravation! sounds just like its
title: a tightly controlled burst of anger, with a fierce riff and some
pounding drums that twists and turns through several different melodies but
can’t quite shake off the threats of a life of boredom and conformity that
hovers throughout the song. Anyone who has been brought up on Waterloo
Sunset will probably be running their copy of this album over with their
car about now – but for those of us who had been waiting for years in vain of
hearing a true Kinks rocker Aggravation! is a promising start for the
record.
After this, the most dramatic start to a Kinks album
in years, placing the album’s lovelorn ballad single [329] How Do I Get Close?
would seem an obvious way to cool the album down. But pretty as the song and
Ray’s gentle vocal are, this sweet little ballad is turned into another rock
and roll monster courtesy of more pounding drums, one of Dave’s most out of
control guitar accompaniments and a hollered middle eight from brother Ray.
Very Kinks lyrically, with its tale of a person trying to get close to his
partner but never quite managing to ‘break through’ the walls of silence
between them, it features some touching musical observations set to a
delightful sighing chorus melody and a spiky heavy metal guitar riff. This album’s
pass at the Kinks’ long hoped-for hit single (it flopped miserably, like its
half-a-dozen or so predecessors since Come Dancing became a small hit in
1983), its one of the band’s more commercial efforts despite the wailing
guitar-work. Think You Really Got Me meets Lola, Waterloo
Sunset and some terribly noisy
modern band with a name you can’t pronounce all mixed together in one song (if
you can!) Unfortunately, even though Ray has dropped his fake-American accent
by this album, the Jamaican patois he sings in on this song’s middle eight is
twice as annoying as any vocal crime he committed in the rest of the 1980s,
especially given as this is the most traditionally ‘English’ of songs on this
most ‘English’ of albums by the most ‘English’ of bands, concerning warm desire
hidden behind a reserved frosty shell.
[330] UK Jive itself is just as
noisy, but its performed with such laissez faire abandon that it sounds quite
gentle compared to the songs before it. A fun song with a mocking exaggerated
cockney accent from Ray, the song is despoite how it sounds and how critics
have read it, actually less about Britain than about the 60s and the swinging
London scene in general, at the beginning at least. Most of the song is a subtle dig at insular UK
politics and its extreme veering between conservatism and liberality in the 70s
and 80s, although while the Ray Davies of old might have exploded his top at
the ‘island policies’ running out of synch with the rest of the world, here he
is content to make a joke about how a hard-working man ‘blew all his wages by
half-past nine’ because he forget about the tax inflation across the rest of
Europe that year. However, the song sounds very 60s-ish, especially the
way it ends with a burst of The Who’s My Generation (a cheeky riposte
from Ray who always reckoned The Who nicked The Kinks’ early sound – listen to I
Can’t Explain and You Really Got Me back-to-back and its clear he
had a point!) Britpop five
years early, this song’s very English groove will be mined endlessly by bands
like Blur and Pulp in a few years’ time, sounding just as retro but somehow
refreshingly contemporary to boot. Fun isn’t really a word you associate
with the Kinks and their records from the troubled 80s, but with UK Jive’s swaggering
rhythm, its gabbled 100-lines-a-minute vocal and its joyful woo-hoo backing,
its hard not to laugh at the song’s tongue-in-cheek exuberance, even if the
message is just as harsh and angry as it ever was. I say chaps, jolly good
show, what?
In keeping with the
‘career retrospective’ feel of this album, [331] Now and Then
sees a return to the wordy and thoughtful Kinks that kept philosophy alive
during most of the 1970s, being nothing less than a three-minute discussion of
mankind’s evolution and progression to date. We haven’t really changed all that
since we came out of the oceans, says Ray, putting into practice business and
political structures that exist to this day on a grander scale, philosophies
obediently followed but still not completely clear to us even now. Seeing the
past as a ‘garden of Eden’, Ray believes that all of our societal trappings in
the modern industrial age are a sign of stupidity not wisdom and throughout the
song he yearns for a much more innocent age when we actually seemed to
understand life much more than we do now. Even with the song’s obvious
melancholy, however, Ray ends the song on an unusually optimistic note, seeing
a future time when ‘enemies are friends’ and paradise is once again within our
reach. A nice idea for a song, unfortunately the rather boring tune can’t hope
to match the majestic lyrics and the whole thing is marred anyway by an
irritatingly poor 1980s production - ear candy floss that’s pretty, but in fake
and distracting way – on a song that would have been more suited to just the
voice of Ray and a piano or a guitar. Still, its nice to see the Kinks trying
for something new and a subject so impressively big here and this most
forgotten of songs is surely a contender for being revived in Ray’s solo live
career and being given a second chance to shine.
[332] What Are We Doing?
is even more original, the closest Ray has ever come to putting on record his
concert trick of singing calypso favourite The Banana Boat Song chorus at every
possible opportunity and in the middle of the most inappropriate songs. In
retrospect its surprising that it took until 1989 for the Kinks to record their
first true originals song in this style, given that even You Really Got Me ended
up sounding like the Banana Boat Song for a time in the mid 70s. Lyrically,
this song is another of Ray’s cries against the madness of the world and the
doomed bravery of the people in it. It’s half-protest song and half
tongue-in-cheek comedy, with some rhetorical questions sung by Ray at his most
vocally powerful (his ever-changing accent really does suit the lilt of
calypso, although Dave’s rocky riffs stop the song becoming too
tongue-in-cheek, a problem many calypso songs have). The lyrics make it clear
that Ray’s narrator cannot understand why mankind is unthinkingly marching
towards his fate without even a second glance – joining a ‘merry queue’ who are
standing around for no reason while acid rain falls and industrial waste
trickles into the atmosphere (and this is in 1989?!? – why has nobody in power
been paying attention to songs like this; even now there are a large minority
of politicians who don’t believe in global warming at all!) Despite the jolly
backing, Ray hasn’t been this lyrically worked up since the days of Give The
People What They Want (see review no 81) and this track is so typically
beautifully Kinks it becomes an album highlight.
Side two is back to the career retrospective, but
this time with a genuine recording from the early 1980s. This song’s answer to
the question ‘how to Give The People What They Want’ – [333] Entertainment – was
even set to be the title track of that 1981 LP at one point (see review 81)
before Ray got cold feet (fair enough given the sheer uncompromising lyrics and
performance here – but the title track he replaced it with is surely twice as
provocative as this song ever was?) Most commentators, when they bother to
mention this album at all, dismiss this track as UK Jive’s weakest link,
a stodgy out-of-place song sarcastically goading the audience further and
further into bad taste just as the band often did in the early 80s. To these
ears, however, this song sounds like the conscience of the album, the
finger-wagging track that all great Kinks albums have, reminding us that
suffering and unnecessary hardship shouldn’t be dismissed as fodder for the 10
o’clock news bulletins that no one seems to pay any attention to anymore
anyway. It’s bare-bones rock and roll and over-strained vocal from Ray also
help juggle the different styles that make up most of the second side of UK
Jive and the song at least sports a catchy chorus and some spiffing Dave
Davies guitar-work, even if Ray’s written much better lyrics than this in the
past.
[334] War Is Over
is another rare hopeful Ray Davies song which seems to be the reply to What
Are We Doing?’s question, telling us that changes are being made and even
though some aspects of modern life are worse than the days of old, a few things
at least are getting better. A terribly commercial song, complete with sound
effects and a singalong chorus, it could be about either the tenuous peace that
has existed in the world at large since WW2 or a more personal look at a
couple’s life over a similarly long period (or, as is probably the case, both).
A typically yearning Kinks chorus (edging up key by key, line by line and with
the harmony vocals added singer by singer) is the highlight of a surprisingly
catchy song that might have been a better bet as the album’s single than How
Do I Get Close? However, underneath all that jollity, the unexpected last
line jars: ‘the unknown soldier can’t be saved’, returning to a land he barely
recognises from the one he left when his country went to war and abandoned by
the politicians who sent him there. With conflicts brewing in the middle East,
leading to the Gulf War in just a couple of years’ time, it seems that Ray is
pleased about some of the differences between the 1960s and late 80s – and yet
is puzzled by the similarities which he believes should belong to a more
backward and primitive climate.
Ray is not quite finished yet though – he returns
for an encore with the lovely walking-pace ballad [336] Loony Balloon
(somehow transformed into a rocker for the similar track Drift Away on
the band’s last album Phobia). Despite his prowess on electric guitar,
Dave Davies is always much more at home on sensitive ballads with real emotion
he can click into and he does his brother proud on this song, with a
particularly spine-chilling guitar introduction. A strong candidate for the
album’s best track, this song uses the delightful metaphor of the Earth as a
balloon floating uncontrollably in space, despite the attempts of its leaders
to steer it, wrongly believing they are important enough to have an impact on
its natural aimless flight. The refrain ‘drift away’ sounds at once comforting
and despairing and onomatopoeically this track really does sound like it’s
drifting gradually further and further out of reach of the listener, shifting
keys as the mood takes it as it drifts solemnly past your speakers. Then again,
you can also view this track as an attack on voter apathy in the context of the
other political post-Thatcher songs on the record, with the leader jumping
overboard ‘with a lunatic look on his face’ and the refrain reminding us of all
the other people left defenceless on board unsure of what to do, acknowledging
that ‘its so easy to just drift away’. This song is the most obvious album
selection from Ray’s musical Around The World In 80 Days where possibly
it would have accompanied Jules Verne’s characters on their first flight into
the air (though ultimately it seems to have been left unused during final
performances). In truth, though, this classic song is less about plot than
about atmosphere, with some typically witty yet also warning lyrics and a
beautiful Ray Davies vocal pitched somewhere between off-handed fatalism and
genuine despair.
The rest of the album is handed over to Dave, who
gets one track on the LP version of the album and three on the CD. Although the
noise levels have increased another tenfold, these songs show that the younger
brother is every bit as much of a craftsmen as Ray. [337] Dear Margaret is a
stirring protest song aimed squarely at Thatcherist Britain and those who ran
it, for once playing the pessimist to his brother’s optimist. Dave makes the
many 1980s reforms of Britain sound like a personal attack (he goes into
several anti-Thatcher rants in his autobiography Kink, although probably
no fewer than she deserved). Dave uses as his narrator a hardworking man who
became rich through his own hardworking efforts earlier in the century only to
see his fortune drop again after the whims of unfeeling politicians in the 80s.
There’s no doubting Dave’s real anger in his vocal, especially the wailed ‘Dear
Margaret I trusted you’ over the song’s curious fade, but he still finds the
space to giggle through lines such as ‘I like your wiggle when you walk’ which
is directed at Mrs Thatcher herself, an offhand comment which somehow manages
to sound like the most vitriolic line of the song, dismissing Margaret’s
politics as meaningless compared to her voter appeal as a ‘woman’ first and
politician second (alas at the time of writing it looks as if Hilary Clinton might
now get the chance to prove how intelligent and clear-thinking female
politicians can be when they’re given a shot at power - how times change between
eight years of review writing - although to be fair Thatcher looked just as
promising until she actually got into power and proved us all wrong).
The fact that Dave didn’t get his two fine songs
onto the original vinyl version of UK Jive (editor: they're coming up
next in this volume, though, so don't go away!) speaks volumes about the state
of The Kinks at the end of the 1980s.
Times were often tough for the band, even
more than most bands who lasted 30 years together (every time the Kinks seemed
to be on the verge of success something – anything – seemed to come along and
spoil it all, no matter how unexpected—never did a band cancel more concerts
due to illness, pre-bookings or band disarray than the Kinks throughout their
long career together). You could make several claims about what great music was
lost when the Kinks received their draconian American ban in 1964 after some
curious shenanigans involving Dave Davies, a bottle of alcohol and an air
stewardess, when Peter Quaife was badly hurt in a car crash in 1966 or when
record company shenanigans seemed to kill off the commercial roll started with
the success of Lola in 1970. However, it’s perhaps most heart-breaking
that the Davies brothers seemed to throw it all away just as it was becoming
good for them again, artistically if not commercially, and at just the point
where their ‘visions’ for the band most complemented each other’s. A surging
optimistic memorial, summing up everything their many fans ever loved about the
many different eras of Kinkdom, UK Jive is a poignant way in which to
(nearly) end their long story and in which to (almost) end our list.
Plus on the CD....
[338] 'Bright Lights' - a 'bonus' track on the CD release of 'UK Jive' -
is a noisy and rather unfocussed Dave Davies rocker, not unlike those from his
trio of solo LPs earlier in the decade. A rare tale of marital unhappiness
(Dave and wife Lisbet - Pete Quaife's cousin - were breaking up and will get divorced
in 1990) the lyrics sigh over how something that once promised much and dazzled
with starry hope can now be filled with such darkness and dread ('Time's
running out just as fast as it can' is the sighing opening line). Dave's
narrator is eager to escape married life and go back to being single - but it
'half scares him' too. with a nice nod of the hat to Kinks Klassik 'No More
Looking Back' in the way everything seems to be reminding him of his ex. On
most other 1980s Kinks albums this average song might have fared better, but
it's just not as memorable or passionate as Dave's other two songs either side
of it.
[339] 'Perfect Strangers', the final track on the CD version of 'UK
Jive', is an unsung Dave Davies classic. The catchy chorus dabbles with contemporary
music but handles it in a much better way than many Kinks recordings, with the
babble of a synthesiser continually brushed aside by the more traditional
sixties verses and a keening middle eight. The lyrics return to a favourite
Dave theme - the idea that mankind is part of a wider group that understand
each other at a different level. Writing about the sudden connection we
sometimes feel to strangers we've never met before, Dave widens the metaphor
out to humanity in the wider sense, telling us that deep down none of us are
strangers to each other - thus updating his 1970 song 'Strangers' by telling us
it's just not true; that man is never truly lonely. A great performance with
multiple Daves all singing the classic tune while Dave solos to perfection
(like the other two Dave songs on the album Ray probably isn't on it all), you
have to wonder why this classic track wasn't allowed on the album (elder
brother jealousy?) 'Perfect Strangers' certainly sounds as if it belongs on 'UK
Jive' more than the guitarist's other songs for the album: the middle eight's
slow scary fall with the lyric 'I know there will come a day...' is
particularly right for an album about hitting rock bottom and finding no way to
go but up. A cracking band performance - the last with Ian Gibbons in the
line-up - makes for a memorable finale to 'UK Jive' - certainly more so than
'Dear Margaret' was on the original.
A NOW COMPLETE LIST OF KINKS ARTICLES TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:
‘The Kinks’ (1964) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/the-kinks-1964.html
‘Kinda Kinks’ (1964) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-kinks-kinda-kinks-1965.html
‘Kinda Kinks’ (1964) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-kinks-kinda-kinks-1965.html
'The Kink Kontroversy' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/the-kinks-kink-kontroversy-1965.html
'Face To Face' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-8-kinks-face-to-face-1966.html
‘Something Else’ (1967) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-kinks-something-else-1967-album.html
'Face To Face' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-8-kinks-face-to-face-1966.html
‘Something Else’ (1967) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-kinks-something-else-1967-album.html
'The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation
Society' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-kinks-are-village-green.html
'Arthur' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-30-kinks-arthur-1969.html
'Lola vs Powerman and the Money-Go-Round' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/news-views-and-music-issue-74-kinks.html
'Arthur' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-30-kinks-arthur-1969.html
'Lola vs Powerman and the Money-Go-Round' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/news-views-and-music-issue-74-kinks.html
'Muswell Hillbillies' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-kinks-muswell-hillbillies-1971.html
‘Everybody’s In Showbiz’ (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-kinks-everybodys-in-showbiz-1972.htm
‘Everybody’s In Showbiz’ (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-kinks-everybodys-in-showbiz-1972.htm
'Preservation Acts One and Two' (1973/74)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/news-views-and-music-issue-60-kinks.html
'A Soap Opera' (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-111-kinks.html
'Schoolboys In Disgrace' (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-kinks-schoolboys-in-disgrace-1975.html
'Sleepwalker' (1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/news-views-and-music-issue-132-kinks.html
'Sleepwalker' (1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/news-views-and-music-issue-132-kinks.html
‘Misfits’ (1978) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-kinks-misfits-1978.html
'Low Budget' (1979) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/the-kinks-low-budget-1979.html
'Give The People What They Want' (1981) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-81-kinks-give-people-what-they.html
'Give The People What They Want' (1981) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-81-kinks-give-people-what-they.html
'State Of Confusion' (1983) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-kinks-state-of-confusion-1983.html
'Word Of Mouth' (1985) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/news-views-and-music-issue-96-kinks.html
'Think Visual' (1986) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-37-kinks.html
'UK Jive' (1989) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-93-kinks-uk-jive-1989.html
'Word Of Mouth' (1985) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/news-views-and-music-issue-96-kinks.html
'Think Visual' (1986) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-37-kinks.html
'UK Jive' (1989) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-93-kinks-uk-jive-1989.html
'Phobia' (1993) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-kinks-phobia-1993.html
Pete Quaife: Obituary and Tribute http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010_06_27_archive.html
Pete Quaife: Obituary and Tribute http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010_06_27_archive.html
The Best Unreleased Kinks Songs 1963-1992 (Ish!) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-kinks-best-unreleased-songs-1963.html
Non-Album Recordings 1963-1991 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/the-kinks-non-album-recordings-1963-1991.html
The Kinks Part One: Solo/Live/Compilation/US Albums
1964-1996 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/the-kinks-part-one-solo-dave.html
The Kinks Part Two: Solo/Live/Compilation Albums
1998-2014 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/the-kinks-part-two-ray-and-dave-davies.html
Surviving TV Appearances 1964-1995 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-kinks-surviving-tv-appearances-1964.html
Abandoned Albums and Outside Productions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/aaa-extra-kinks-abandoned-projects-and.html
Essay: The Kinks - Why This Band Aren’t Like
Everybody Else https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/the-kinks-essay-why-this-band-arent.html
Landmark concerts and key cover versions
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-kinks-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
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