The Kinks - Album by Album (song by song)

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by mark winstanley, Apr 4, 2021.

  1. Fischman

    Fischman RockMonster, ClassicalMaster, and JazzMeister

    Location:
    New Mexico
    Never Say Yes

    Yard to assess this one as recorded. I'm not really keen, but I would have liked to have heard what it would have been like if cut less"King"-y and more Kinky. I imagine this with some You Really Got Me distortion in the guitar and a biting hard rock Dave vocal rather than the more smooth croonery vocal as recorded here.
     
  2. Invisible Man

    Invisible Man Forum Resident

    Location:
    Lemon Grove
    "Never Say Yes": I wasn't going to :D. Doesn't sound remotely inspired, just a run-of-the-mill mid-'60s "beat group" number, possibly constrained by writing to order. Never heard it before yesterday. Unlikely I'll ever bother hearing it again. Well below the Ray Davies standard by 1965. 2/5.
     
  3. palisantrancho

    palisantrancho Forum Resident

    "Never Say Yes"

    Maybe Ray should have titled it "Never Say No" and then maybe Elvis would have said yes? I can hear Elvis doing a version of this. It's certainly miles better than the song that made the album. I mostly love Spinout. It's one of the better soundtracks and this type of song would have worked well on that album. Too bad. It would have been great to hear Elvis sing some Ray Davies! This has been mentioned before with other demos. It seems Ray had several songs he could have lent to Mr. Presley.

    I don't have much to say about Golden Hour. I like the cover and actually almost bought a t-shirt recently with this cover. It looks like an excellent compilation for a brief introduction to the band. My first Kinks album was a different Golden Hour with Lola, Percy, Village Green, and Something Else tunes all jumbled together. I went to play it last night and I couldn't find it! I hate when this happens. I must have given it to someone or sold it because I eventually had all the proper albums. I still wish I had it though!
     
  4. ARL

    ARL Forum Resident

    Location:
    England
  5. LX200GPS

    LX200GPS Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somewhere Else
    Golden Hour

    This was my second Kinks purchase - I had previously bought the Lola compilation and so have fond memories of this record.

    Looking back at it now I think there are some odd inclusions and some really odd omissions. But this was an opinion I couldn't have held at the time because my knowledge of Kinks output was almost zero. Although not a Greatest Hits album it sure contained a lot of them but not the bands last two for the Pye label. I wonder if it was always the intention of Pye to release a later collection which did include these, hence the Lola And The Apeman Come Face To Face .... double release in 1974.

    So, although it didn't bother me back then, I think the track selection is poor, and, of course, the sound quality of the album is atrocious. When I bought Vol 2 I discovered that some of the tracks didn't even have the vocal so returned it to the shop but decided against a replacement.

    Pye probably spent about two and six on the Golden Hours. I wonder if they made much on them.
     
  6. Adam9

    Adam9 Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй.

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    Maybe one channel on your stereo wasn't working? Some of the stereo tracks had vocals to one side.
    I had a UK copy of this back in the day and the vocals were all there.
     
  7. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I don't really know anything more about this Elvis demo recording than what you've already written.

    One thing that's interesting to me is that there are lyrical similarities between Ray's song and the Pomus/Shuman song of the same name that was selected:

    Ray: Kiss the girls and tell them that you'll love 'em and you'll never let 'em go
    Pomus/Shuman: Tell 'em that you love them so/You hate to leave but you gotta go

    Ray: I got everything I ever need/Guess I'll always love this life I lead
    Pomus/Shuman: That's the kind of life for me/Being free like I want to be

    This suggests that they not only gave the songwriters the title beforehand, but they must also have given them very specific guidelines about what they wanted the themes of the song to be. So this really was a write-to-order piece of work more than something Ray just came up with on his own.

    Within those guidelines, we see how Ray inserted some characteristic cynicism though. Pomus and Shuman's song is about being carefree and not tied down to one woman. Ray hits those points, but he also expresses a sense of suspicion and "don't trust anyone" in his song. That was probably darker than what the filmmakers wanted and one of the reasons his song "lost" the competition.

    I'm inclined to think it's not the Kinks backing Ray here. What do you guys think?
     
  8. LX200GPS

    LX200GPS Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somewhere Else
    The guy in the record shop played it and confirmed there was a problem. Back in those days shops were reluctant to exchange or refund because of defective product. At least that's how it was here. Not just for records but if I had a penny for evertime I heard "no one else has complained about it" I'd be a rich man. Different nowadays though.
     
  9. DISKOJOE

    DISKOJOE Boredom That You Can Afford!

    Location:
    Salem, MA
    Do you mean like this?

     
  10. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Cheers mate.

    To be honest I hadn't even considered the backing band.
     
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  11. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Ok guys, I know it is early, but I have the Nieces coming over tonight doing Pumpkin stuff with Steph, and I am going to be painting all weekend with little breaks here and there, to check in and see what everyone is saying, so here is the start up for Percy.... so there are n't any hold ups for anyone tomorrow.... It's pretty basic stuff, because I know very little about it, and I couldn't find all that much either ... So Percy on my friends!


    Percy.

    [​IMG]


    Directed by Ralph Thomas
    Written by Hugh Leonard Michael Palin Terence Feely
    Based on Percy by Raymond Hitchcock
    Produced by Betty E. Box Nat Cohen
    Starring Hywel Bennett Denholm Elliott Elke Sommer Britt Ekland Cyd Hayman
    Cinematography Ernest Steward
    Edited by Roy Watts
    Music by Ray Davies
    Production company Welbeck Films
    Distributed by Anglo-EMI Film Distributors Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (US)
    Release date 11 February 1971
    Running time 103 minutes
    Country United Kingdom
    Language English
    Budget £300,000[1][2]

    Edwin (Bennett), an innocent and shy young man, is hit by a nude man falling from a high-rise building while carrying a chandelier. Edwin's ***** is mutilated in the accident and has to be amputated; the falling man is killed.

    Edwin becomes the recipient of the world's first ***** transplant: he receives the very large ***** of the womanizer killed in the same accident. With his new bit of anatomy (which he names "Percy"), Edwin follows the womanizer's footsteps, meeting all his women friends, before settling happily with the donor's mistreated widow.

    Producer Betty E. Box discovered the novel when she and director Ralph Thomas were meeting a publisher about optioning the film rights for another book. They were not available at the time, but the publisher gave them a manuscript by Raymond Hitchcock about a ***** transplant. Box took it back to the office to read. "I zipped through it, laughing aloud as I read", she wrote. "Very unusual. I might sometimes smile at a book, but I hadn't laughed like this since I read Richard Gordon's Doctor in the House."[3]

    Ralph Thomas enjoyed the book too so they decided to option the rights. These ended up costing four times more than Box originally thought after Hichcock had his own agent, as opposed to the publisher, do the negotiations. Box and Thomas paid for the rights themselves "not without a fair amount of heart-searching", Box wrote, "as we didn't expect it to be a straightforward financing operation – with the amount required to make a film it seldom is – but this was certainly not a subject I expected Rank, our traditional partners, to finance. They very soon turned it down without even reading it."[4]

    Finance was obtained from Nat Cohen at EMI Films - they provided the entire budget.[5] The poster was designed by John Troke, a publicist who had introduced Box to the book of Doctor in the House 15 years earlier.[4] A script was prepared by Hugh Leonard while Thomas and Box filmed Doctor in Trouble. The film was shot at Elstree Studios and on location in London. The film's sets were designed by the art director Robert Jones. Ray Davies of The Kinks wrote the film's soundtrack Percy.

    During the making of the film, another comedy about a ***** was being shot, The Statue. Box always regarded this as a rip off.[6]

    ----------------------------------------wikipedia---------------------------------------------------------------

    I know absolutely nothing about this movie, except for what I just read there …. And I have to say that it does sound like it might be pretty funny.

    For me it was interesting to note that Michael Palin was one of the writers, and I have enjoyed Michael’s work, obviously with the Monty Python crew, but also Ripping Yarns was always a favourite of mine, back in the day.

    Hywell Bennett, I am mildly familiar with, due to the movie Twisted Nerve, which I saw a hundred years ago, but I seem to remember it being a kind of strange movie that was very good, but having said that, the number of times I have revisited an old movie that memory told me was very good, I have often been very disappointed and wondered what I saw in it at the time lol.

    Elke Sommer and Britt Ekland are well known to most males who were young at the time… it’s just one of those things.

    I’m not sure that I have all that much to say about a movie that I haven’t seen, but I may have to check it out at some point, if the missus is cool with the idea.

    Having watched a couple of clips now, the movie seems to be, from the clips at least, in the grand English 60's and 70's tradition of the Carry On movies, Adventures in The Life Of A Window Cleaner, and that kind of gear... So I doubt it has dated well.

    Here is a youtube clip
     
  12. donstemple

    donstemple Member of the Club

    Location:
    Maplewood, NJ
    Never Say Yes

    Sounds like the title of a would-be Bond film. Seems like it could have fit on either of the first 2 albums.

    But yes to this:
    It's ridiculous how the quality of the writing, the recording, and performances, the complexity just exploded through 1967, 68 and 69. Imagine if in today's world, we'd be saying that what we hear as pop music in 2021 would be so drastically different from what was popular in 2017...
     
  13. Steve62

    Steve62 Vinyl hunter

    Location:
    Murrumbateman
    From my recollection the main thing missing from that summary is the ‘dramatic tension’ running through most of the movie over whether or not the transplanted Percy will ‘work’. No prizes for guessing the climax of the story!
     
  14. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Percy (the album soundtrack)'

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    Soundtrack album by the Kinks
    Released 26 March 1971
    Recorded October 1970 – January 1971
    Studio Morgan Studios, London
    Length 33:03
    Label Pye NSPL 18365
    Producer Ray Davies


    Ray Davies – vocals, acoustic guitars, harmonica
    Dave Davies – 6 and 12-string electric guitars, vocals
    John Dalton – bass, backing vocals, lead vocals on "Willesden Green"
    Mick Avory – drums
    John Gosling – keyboards
    Additional personnel

    Stanley Myers – additional arrangement supervision


    Side one
    1. "God's Children" 3:16
    2. "Lola" (instrumental blues jam version) 4:46
    3. "The Way Love Used to Be" 2:15
    4. "Completely" (instrumental) 3:41
    5. "Running Round Town" (instrumental) 1:06
    6. "Moments" 2:57

    Side two
    1. "Animals in the Zoo" 2:22
    2. "Just Friends" 2:38
    3. "Whip Lady" (instrumental) 1:20
    4. "Dreams" 3:45
    5. "Helga" (instrumental) 1:57
    6. "Willesden Green" 2:27
    7. "God's Children – End" (instrumental) 0:29

    1998 and 2004 CD reissue bonus tracks (mono mixes from the film)
    14. "Dreams"
    15. "Moments"
    16. "The Way Love Used to Be" (version one)
    17. "The Way Love Used to Be" (version two)
    18. "The Way Love Used to Be" (version three)

    2014 Sanctuary Records deluxe edition Disc 2 bonus tracks
    14. "Dreams" (remix) 3:24
    15. "Lola" (1970 mono single mix) 4:06
    16. "Apeman" (1970 mono single mix) 3:53
    17. "Rats" (1970 mono single mix) 2:42
    18. "Powerman" (mono mix) 4:26
    19. "The Moneygoround" (mono alternative version) 1:41
    20. "Apeman" (mono alternative version) 3:41
    21. "God's Children" (mono film mix) 3:18
    22. "The Way Love Used to Be" (mono film mix) 2:07
    23. "God's Children – End" (mono film mix) 0:50

    The 2014 deluxe edition of Percy is the second disc of the Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One deluxe edition. The 2-disc set is titled Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround & Percy.

    --------------------------------------------wikipedia-----------------------------------------------------

    EP

    [​IMG]


    The Kinks from the soundtrack of the film Percy

    God's Children 3:16
    The Way Love Used To Be 2:11
    Moments 2:55
    Dreams 3:40

    --------------------------------------------discogs------------------------------------------------

    This album is much better than I had imagined it to be.

    When we started the thread I thought I should probably track it down, because I had avoided it for years to be honest, as it seemed like a couple of songs, and few instrumental versions of songs weren’t really going to be very interesting. The thing was though, I could only find very expensive copies and I wasn’t going to spend a bunch of money on some dubious soundtrack album…. I am not a record buyer very much these days, and after several really annoying online purchases, I wasn’t going to buy the record online….
    Anyway, I finally realized that the soundtrack was on the extra disc of the Lola vs Powerman and the Moneygoround 2 cd version, so I jumped on it.

    It was so much better than I expected, and I would say even if you don’t like the instrumentals, and I do, the songs are worth the journey.
    This is a nice run down of the album The Kinks Forgotten Album: Percy

    I suppose I have all kinds of questions about this album really, rather than answers. The main question I had was how the band, or Ray were approached to do the soundtrack, but I couldn’t find the info, so I will rely on our experts to fill in that blank if they are able.

    Anyway, I am very much looking forward to going through these songs, because they are a high quality batch of songs, and although I have read some fairly negative things about the instrumentals, I actually enjoyed those two. In their context I think they work pretty well.

    So the Kinks move from strength to strength in the seventies and I look forward to reading people’s thoughts on this most unlikely of soundtrack albums, that becomes yet another excellent album in the Kinks Kanon.
     
  15. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

  16. DISKOJOE

    DISKOJOE Boredom That You Can Afford!

    Location:
    Salem, MA
    A couple of interesting facts about a couple of people involved in Percy. First Raymond Hitchcock, the author of the book which the movie was based, was the father of Robyn Hitchcock, formerly of the Soft Boys, who some of my fellow Avids may be familiar with. Also, Hywel Bennett, the lead actor, was married to Cathy McGowan of Ready Steady Go! fame.

    Robyn Hitchcock has written several songs about his father. Here's the video of a song about him from his last album, "Raymond and the Wires", that incorporates old family home movie footage:

    [/QUOTE]
     
    Last edited: Oct 15, 2021
  17. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

  18. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Japan 1971

    [​IMG][​IMG]
    [​IMG]
     
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  19. ARL

    ARL Forum Resident

    Location:
    England
    All I can say about Percy the movie is that I have seen it once - it was shown on TV on either Channel 4 or Channel 5, back in the 90s probably, late at night on a Friday. I remember pretty much nothing about it, except at one point there is a billboard erected (ooh err missus) imploring someone to come forward and be the donor of the eponymous Percy. I don't remember thinking it was particularly good, and I suspect it would seem somewhat "of its time" if I watched it now.
     
  20. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Interestingly it appears that this was only ever released on LP up until the cd era
    1987 saw cd and cassette releases

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
  21. sharedon

    sharedon Forum Zonophone

    Location:
    Boomer OK
    As has been mentioned elsewhere, I think, the film was based on a novel by Robyn Hitchcock's father!
     
  22. Zeki

    Zeki Forum Resident

    “It’s pining!”
     
  23. Adam9

    Adam9 Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй.

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    "For the fjords!"
     
  24. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    "Mate, this parrot would go vooom...."

    Ahhh Python.
    So many jolly hours watching the guys be silly.
     
  25. Wondergirl

    Wondergirl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    the fact that this website doesn't allow the use of the anatomically accurate word ***** (pen!s) is so silly. Is ****** allowed? let's see...
     

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