I admit that I have not found very much contemporary music to excite me recently. I admit I have not been looking very hard. But where does one look, after all? If a group says that I should check out their MySpace then the chances are that I just will not bother. It feels too lazy, too easy, and MySpace is so horribly ugly, which in itself would be reason enough to abstain. Plus, I have always preferred the seduction of words to the ease of just listening to the music as a means of being encouraged to explore new sounds.
So I am probably just being contrary, as usual; but again, I wonder, where does one find out about new things?
Very little of the music press interests me. There is too little that comes across as thrilling and intriguing; too many beards and too many obsessions with perceived authenticity. Some things never really change.
Needless to say I stopped reading the broadsheet newspapers regularly many years ago too. During the recent two-week holiday, however, in a moment of extreme boredom, I bought the Saturday and Sunday papers. Leafing through them it struck me just how little has changed over the years. Everything felt eerily familiar. And if the names of the columnists had changed, then the general thrust certainly had not. Something about parenthood, something else about the state of the nation, some complaints about youth and Julie Burchill wittering on about Madonna. Now I like Julie Burchill, but still… I felt like I was being transported at least a decade back in time. Scary. And it all reminded me why I had stopped.
The book and music reviews in the papers felt the same too. Nothing grabbed me at all. Except perhaps for the review of Zachary Lazar’s Sway, and even then probably only because I have been in a sixties frame of mind recently and the thought of a novel with Jagger and Richards as protagonists is a seductive one. I have not read it yet, but it is in my pile, awaiting sunny afternoons, along with a few Nestor Burma / Leo Malet books which I have managed to find without taking out a second mortgage.
But much as I like the idea of Sway featuring Mick and Keith, I’d much rather see something with Ray and Dave Davies. I have been immersing more and more in the The Kinks of late. I always seem to come back to them and have been re-reading Jon Savage’s essential biography from 1984. I first read this in the mid to late eighties, taken there via Kevin Pearce’s equally seminal The Same Sky fanzine. The Same Sky was my first real introduction to The Kinks. Kevin wrote a conversation piece about what records would immediately be replaced if one’s collection was destroyed or stolen. It’s a classic question, and Kevin’s protagonist quickly focused on the trio of Kinks albums from Face to Face through Something Else to Village Green. I had not really heard those records at that time, and they were a revelation.
It is hard to remember just how relatively hidden those and many other records were at that time. There is a general consensus now that Village Green is a classic album, but I remember when people did not seem aware of it. There was a stealth operation to reclaim the record and the interest in it eventually filtered through. These were times when you could not just go online and find things. Even in places like Glasgow it could be difficult to find some of those records. For people living in the sticks, as I was, a not insignificant amount of effort was required. And great as it is having almost instant open access to information these days, sometimes I really miss the need for that effort.
That Jon Savage book on the Kinks is so great. Sharp, concise and eminently engaging, it hooks you with barbs that make you want to go and hear the records. This is how books about groups and music should be. No wonder Kevin used a similar design (mixed with a bit of Up-Tight) in his equally classic Something Beginning With O for Heavenly.
Great as it always is to revisit those classic 1960s Kinks records, the real treat for me recently has been listening to some of their albums from the 1970s. I had previously only got as far as The Muswell Hillbillies, but the past few weeks I have been also delving into those theatrical pieces. Preservation Part One and Part Two, A Soap Opera and Schoolboys In Disgrace. The, ahem, concept of a concept album is still one that I find troublingly ‘Prog’ in its form, and for sure each of those Kinks records is at times awkward and unwieldy, but there are certainly treasures to be found in each. ‘Sweet Lady Genevieve’, ‘Sitting In The Midday Sun’ and the return of Johnny Thunder in ‘One Of The Survivors’; ‘When A Solution Comes’, ‘Artificial Man’ and ‘Mirror Of Love’; ‘Ordinary People’, ‘Starmaker’; ‘The First Time We Fall In Love’, ‘The Hard Way’ and ‘The Last Assembly’. For sure too there is a point to me made about cherry picking the best of the three vinyl Preservation set to make one great record, and thanks to iTunes playlists of course that is now possible. Still, there is something about the context of the complete albums that I warm to, and I do admire that strange sense of a mediated, mythical England that Ray Davies always alludes to. Now I see where Setting Sons had at least part of its genesis.
The appeal of the Kinks also ties into that magical tension between mass production/acceptance and the outsider impulse. Ray Davies is a classic example of this, and for me it is what makes many of his finest songs so special. There is a lovely quote from his first wife Rasa about a 1982 show at the Lyceum:
“It was unbelievable – one of his best concerts. He came on in his beautiful pink suit and he was a real showman, an artist. But when I went backstage he switched off. … He is a loner, but he comes alive when he’s performing because he can lose himself in a sort of fantasy land. I think it is a conflict for him even now.”
I keep saying it, but that sense of conflict, that tension between the loner and the performer is crucial to great Pop. And what have the Kinks always been if not one of thee great Pop groups?
I know what you mean about not being as excited about new music as you used to be (same here), but there really is still some marvelous new stuff out there.
Just have a listen to swedish one-man project Cocoanut Groove (go on, put your hatred against myspace to the side, and have a listen ... hahaha).
His music is wonderful, like a Love/ Left Banke/Zombies/Duncan Browne "give me take you" for the naughties !
The single he has out on Phonic Kidnapping Records is absolutely gorgeous, especially the b-side "shadow". That really is a future classic.
BArt (Belgium)
Posted by: Bart Van Laecke | May 04, 2008 at 12:20