Top 102 Albums⁺ No 23 Something Else

Top 102 Albums⁺ No 23 
Something Else - The Kinks

If anyone asks me that threadbare identifying question from the sixties: "The Beatles or The Stones?", my response is "The Kinks." A much harder question is what Kinks album to put into this list. Face To Face; The Muswell Hillbillies; The Village Green Preservation Society; Arthur....

Well, as you've probably guessed from the title at the top of this post I went for Something Else. It always astonishes me that this album was a flop: "It made number 35 on the LP charts for 2 weeks in the UK and barely scraped 153 in the USA for 1 week." It starts and ends with masterclasses in how good songs can be: David Watts and Waterloo Sunset, and the 'filler' is pretty fine, too. This is not a 'concept' album but it does really move the idea of Englishness into an even more central place in The Kinks worldview, something that would reach its apotheosis on Village Green Preservation Society.

X-Ray

X-Ray by Ray Davies

Kronikles of a Kink

This is a genuine oddity - rock autobiography as metafiction. Rather than give us a straightforward memoir (never really on the cards) Davies talks to us through a fictional nineteen year old orphan who has been brought up to be a faceless mediocrity by the all powerful Corporation and has now been told to "document the life and times of one Raymond Douglas Davies, who was a composer and the lead singer of the Kinks, one of the leading beat groups of that era*." (*the sixties)

A series of interviews then take place in "the legendary Konk studio" "festooned in cobwebs and dust." MetaDavies waits in the gloom and one of the first things he says is that "There is no time here. No future nor past."