Re: Kinky! (maybe not....)
Date: May 11, 2007 15:55
Review from The Independent:
A careful balance of nostalgia and realism shows sign of genius
By Nick Hasted
Published: 11 May 2007
The Sixties star who came closer than anyone to matching Lennon and McCartney song for song has had tough times since his 2004 shooting in New Orleans. But last night, Ray Davies confirmed a kind of immortality.
For all the intimations of mortality, Davies still looks drain-pipe-legged and ageless. And, as his opening song attests, he is still "not like everybody else". "Where Have All The Good Times Gone?", his working-class reality check from the Sixties, is then lashed out with a touch of the brute force with which The Kinks invented heavy metal.
"A Well Respected Man" - taken as a closing-time Cockney sing-along - and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" reveal his other side, the wry social satire that raised Ray a cut above. But it is a song from his new album Other People's Lives, "Next Door Neighbour", that finds the heart of his imagination: the tiny north London neighbourhood of his birth, Fortis Green.
Typically balancing superficial nostalgia and realism, it trawls his old street for warm humanity. Quickly following it with "Celluloid Heroes", the most sadly beautiful song ever written about celebrity, takes something you can only call genius. A broken Greta Garbo and a forgotten, TV-hurling neighbour scraping bottom find equality in Davies's world.
The recent "The Tourist" skewers the fatal condescension of the idle Western rich with a horror movie shriek, before the brand-new "No one Listens" describes Davies's own, bullet-ridden fall to the syndrome. 1971's "20th Century Man", a protest against the whole era into which he was born, reinforces the mix of community man and outsider.
"Come Dancing", their Eighties UK comeback hit, revives the Fifties dance halls into which the child Ray would watch his elder sisters vanish. "Village Green" then sinks into his English ideal, of "the church, the clock, the steeple", even as he imagines it colonised by tourists. His heartland is always being paved over, or flattened.
If such subtlety seems hard work, there is "All Day And All Of The Night". Their second, 1964 hit had, Davies confides, a dirty guitar riff by brother Dave deemed too "working-class". "Sunny Afternoon", number one when England won the World Cup, and "Dead End Street", another resistance song to the Sixties, add ammunition for the historically minded. But the current "The Getaway", a heart-felt blues about failed suburban escape, refutes the notion he is a relic.
"So Tired" and "Set Me Free" are two more Sixties songs of temporary release. "Days" is essayed with his hand in his pocket, "Lola" given over to another sing-along: landmarks which would last careers, tossed away. Ray Davies, after all, has "You Really Got Me" to storm the Albert Hall's remaining defences. "Waterloo Sunset", a song about private loneliness now the anthem of Londoners, reminds you what a pop song can be. Then Kinks drummer Mick Avory slopes on as a Cub Scout for "Victoria", and we're all in "Waterloo Sunset" paradise.
You might have to scrape me off the floor at the end of the tour, but it'll be really good scrapings. - Mick Jagger