i was just browsing the used books section of the world wide web, as is my wont, when i came across this 94-year-old book of 250 helpful hints for hunters, anglers and outers called kinks. ray and dave davies can stop feuding now because i have stumbled upon the cover for their definitive brotherly boxed set. they’ll have to pay a mere $75 to a bibliophile by the name of ned sanders, just two precious letters away from ned flanders.
see the semi-definitive collection of kinks videos here.
#840: the kinks - the last of the steam powered trains/picture book (1969, julie felix show)
whether or not two songs are technically enough to qualify, this is the single best post-victorian bucolic british invasion medley ever aired by the british broadcasting corporation. if i were a fighting man i’d duel over the honor of the picture book bass line.
#692: wye oak (with shearwater’s jonathan meiburg) - strangers (2010, onion av club undercover)
i’ve been listening to such an incredibly excessive amount of kinks lately that it’s sort of difficult to accurately describe. for example, besides the actual kinks albums that are worth listening to everyday, because the kinks are the third best british band (right behind no. 1 and no. 2), i recently bought a $1 copy of the two-record 1974 compilation golden hour of the kinks, which, when i got home to play it, turned out to have a third record hidden inside that was golden hour of the kinks, vol. 2—but even all that isn’t enough, and i’ve had to move on to kinks covers, like elliott smith’s waterloo sunset. and thank god there’s also wye oak, the best young girl-boy band from baltimore not named beach house, doing strangers, the lola-era ballad that i happen to know michael h. miller of the new york observer considers to be the kinks’ finest moment. they’d make michael h. and the kinks proud.
the japanese album cover for the kinks’ best american song about a british beverage.
#680: the kinks - have a cuppa of tea (1973)
everything you’ve always wanted to know about elizabethan mason-dixie boogie woogie.
#679: the kinks - milk cow blues (1966)
clearly mid-60s to early-70s ray davies makes for an all-time top-ten halloween costume, even though the white belts and wide collars can be hard to really nail.
if you’ve got the right rosette you can do the autumn almanac ray davies, and if you don’t you can always just get a brown suit for his almanac album cover look.
you need a bowtie with a red diner jacket for the muswell hillbillies ray davies, but a bowtie with the right polkadot for the beloved holiday ray davies. if that’s your route you get a bonus point or three if you hire a horn section to follow you around.
likewise you’ll definitely want a short-haired model named ina around if it’s the terylene advertisement ray davies you want, but on the flip side you’ll have to grow a mini marge simpson hairdo for that beautiful waterloo sunset style.
more leisurely fans may want to try his milk cow blues look, for which, as you’ll see above, you only need to clap a lot in a black turtleneck while stealing a song from sleepy john estes.
and if you’re really wild you can dress up as a dying clown—see dave davies’ video or dave davies’ album cover. but that might be kinks costume overkill.
#562: the turtles - elenore (howie, mark, johny, jim & al) (1968)
there are lots of late-1960s pop songs about late-1960s pop songs, but elenore, is the best one. the three most important things about it are a chorus that mocks choruses (“you’re my pride and joy, etcetera”), a chorus that is very quietly very dirty (“and you really do me well”), and a chorus that made the turtles’ glorious mark volman do some very serious jumping around with his tambourine toward the end of this clip.
update: a previous version of this post said that elenore is from the only non-kinks album that ray davies ever produced. this is incorrect. elenore is on the turtles present the battle of the bands, and not the davies-produced turtle soup. the super groovy music video spectacular regrets the error.
#555: the lilys - nanny in manhattan (1998)
the former observer photo editor kat irannejad, whom dedicated followers of this website will remember as one of the world’s finest and most generous mix-makers, began her most recent tape for me with a band i can’t believe i’d never heard of, the lilys. they sound like a kinky (kinks-like) beach party invaded by zombies (the odessey and oracle band, not the undead monster).
the lilys’ leader is a gentleman named kurt heasley, who must be a fun guy to work with because the list of former lilys members reads like a phonebook: there’s an archie, an art, a bryant, two dons, a gerhardt, people nicknamed bear, fuzzy, pel, and pablo, two michaels, four mikes, a mickey, two stevens, a thom, a tommy, a torben, and a trish. fun times!
the lilys - tennis system (and its stars)
dave davies was taking high tea with his friend brian wilson when a hidden hydrogen bomb went off in the biscuits and they floated up to heaven, and while they floated the clouds sang melodious lines like, “dixey hangs with a tricky lot of cowards,” and “your weak spine can’t handle all my ways of soft destruction.” and just then, voila, dave and brian realized they were in a lilys song about tennis and constellations. this very song! do you know the lilys? i hadn’t until recently, and i’m glad i do. and once again i give thanks to kat.
#512: chrissie hynde (with nick cave) - i’ll stand by you (bbc, 1999)
it’s wrong that the 80s gets all the power ballad attention. with no disrespect to every rose has its thorn, it was in the 90s that stephanie seymour walked down axl rose’s aisle for ten and a half minutes while aerosmith outdid all the gems on get a grip with an interstellar slow jam. and then there’s the pretenders’ monumentally under-appreciated i’ll stand by you: this performance includes the velvet underground’s john cale looking on and nick cave slightly messing up key changes, plus there’s a joke about oasis. and god bless chrissie hynde, who came close to starting a band with the clash’s mick jones and marrying the kinks’ ray davies, but could beat both in arm wrestling.
the only thing better than ray davies’ late-60s songs were his mid-60s trousers.
#427: the kinks - autumn almanac (1967)
nostalgia for elderly english agrarian ideals doesn’t sound like it would make for good late-60s pop music, but this is the world’s least boring song about rheumatism, roast beef, dew, breezes and toast—just like village green preservation society is history’s best album about saving “little shops, china cups, and virginity.” one reason ray davies got away with so many victorian ditties about the weather and his tea (or sunsets) is that they were always at least half-ironic—the other reason is that his songs were smarter than everyone else’s, except lennon/mcartney’s.
#337: kinks - holiday (1972)
wobbliness is the world’s great secret weapon. one of the enormous pleasures of listening to billie holiday or gram parsons or ry cooder or neil young or wayne coyne or tom waits or shane macgowan is having to pray quietly that they don’t stagger and stumble and fall overboard. but a good wobble always maintains itself! except then there’s early-70s kinks (and late-60s kinks, too), who didn’t just sound like a klezmer band lost on new orleans highways, they sounded like their schoolbus had fallen into a pit of rusted clarinets and hooch.
their wobbliness made it impossible to even do proper band introductions (“john gosling on the organ! mr. john gosling!! gosling!!”), but it’s also a kind of wobbliness that sounded awfully good when there was a 3-man brass section playing along.
