Alexis Petridis came up with a particularly excellent 'ranking' article in the Graun last week centred on The Kinks (though, I must say, I'm a bit puzzled he didn't go for the 50 greatest songs, at the very least.) And this had put in mind of giving various Kinks' CDs a spin over the weekend. But funnily enough I decided to kick off with a Ray Davies solo album, Working Man's Cafe, before plunging into the hard stuff. Not sure why. Possibly because I'd generally enjoyed the CD when I first acquired it, but thought of it as a bit routine. Not genuinely inspiring stuff. And I wondered if I might have been wrong.
Yes, I was. I gave it a spin on Saturday and every track worked for me, with the title track and Imaginary Man as bona fide classics, up there in the very crowded RD top ten tunes of all time. I suppose I'd finally listened often enough to tune in completely.
I followed that with my compilation CD of all the singles up to 1970 and, as I knew I would be, was blown away by the variety & simple brilliance of it all. It's so strange to think that we all took songs as profoundly beautiful as Waterloo Sunset and Days for granted when they first came out, as if we had some kind of right to be delivered works of genius almost as the throwaways of pop culture. And after that it had to be The Village Green Preservation Society - at which point it came to me that somehow The Kinks had managed to encapsulate in one album all of my feelings about what England has somehow carelessly lost.
Finished everything off by viewing a clip of Ray Davies's 2010 set at Glastonbury at which he dedicated the two songs I mentioned in the previous paragraph to the recently deceased Pete Quaife, the original bassist with the band, and a very tasty player indeed. At which point I dissolved.
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