when i first heard come dancing, i had hoped that maybe the kinks would bring a horn section on tour and bring back alcohol, skin and bones, slum kids and other songs that were played pre-low budget. not to be, unfortunately. still a great song from the last (to me) great kinks album.
I can't imagine how shocking it would be for your daughter/sister to go dancing and just drop dead... it must have been devastating.
It is interesting and funny to me that I keep reading... probably for the last six months, last great song, last great album I have no idea what the stuff after Word Of Mouth is like yet, but Word Of Mouth is a great album.... and I reckon it has some great songs...
Come Dancing Growing up, before I became an avid Kinks fan, this was just another one of those 80s songs, but it still seemed unique, and really unlike most of the other "those 80s songs". There's certainly a throwback sound, with the organ, the Roy Orbison-esque guitar licks during the chorus, and the almost Kalypso sound (that I now recognize as running through various songs over the previous 20 years of the band). I was too young to experience this as a current hit at the time, so it was probably 1988 or so when I first heard it. It is only years later, after listening to the Village Green Preservation Society and really going through their entire discography do you understand the many layers of this song, the lyrics and what it all means -- in context of Ray's life and career up until that point. There is such a story here, it could be a feature film, but here Ray delivers it all in less than 4 minutes. This song comes from the same narrator who was asking Walter if he remembered. But for purposes of this post, I am going to say that the narrator is Ray. That intro verse, just turning pages of history, is like looking through a Picture Book, flipping photos of the parking lot, supermarket, the bowling alley, and finally the local palais. These memories. We have been here a while. To paraphrase Ray, places often change, but memories of places can remain. The intro is all in the present tense. But we are going back in time, many moons ago, and we zoom into the palais. But Ray did not go there. He was just a kid. But his sister did! Any description of the palais is generic -- it's where the big bands used to play. And there was dancing. That's about it. Other than that, the song is not about the palais. It's all about what Ray witnessed at home. Her sister going out. The boyfriends waiting for her to come down the stairs. There's a brief buried backing vocal right after "make him wait". Ray saw her go out, and Ray saw her come home... But she'd come home late, with their mom worrying. Even all this, the narration is still in the present tense, telling the story of how it was. And then we get the "out of my window" monologue, mentioning the same garden gate that Ray and Walter shared a cigarette? Anybody notice the buried backing vocal of their mom "What are you doing out there? Come on, you're gonna be out there all night?" In this section, we are back in time and Ray is now singing in "present tense" but as a kid... "two silhouettes saying goodnight", not "two silhouettes said goodnight". It really places you right there, at that window with Ray. And then the "part of my childhood died, just died" as described by @Michael Streett, with the hard darker guitar tone. This was devasting. It hurt his sister, and that really affected Ray. Ray had never been to the palais. But now, no more childhood memories of seeing his sister so happy. It's heavy. This section in the past tense again, looking back, but we are taken back to that moment in time, and the anger Ray felt (through Dave's guitar). But then.... we get the acoustic guitar intro again and we time-warped back to the present, with Ray describing his life now. The kid is now in a band, but there is no palais. His sister's now married, and when she's not home in bed by half-past eight, she's up late waiting for her daughters to come home. From where? Not the palais -- that's still gone. It's almost as if Ray is asking her to imagine going out again, the way she did. Come on, be nostalgic with me. Just like the palais, where the big bands used to play. "Do you remember, sister?"
Come Dancing: In one of the articles posted the other day Ray mentions how the song changes to E♭ when the brass band instruments come in. He seemed proud of that and rightly so, as it reminded me how some brass instruments like the alto sax, trombone, and tuba are in E♭, so it's a comfortable key for them to play in (and I have since learned that sheet music for these instruments is typically transposed so that C reads as E♭). So it's another nice touch in a great song. Like Lola, having heard Come Dancing so many times due to it's popularity it's not something I seek out, but the story the lyrics tell is so interesting and well-written that when I hear it still captures my attention from start to finish.
Spoiler alert...the last great Kinks song is the last track on their last studio album. And that applies whether you have the version with the bonus track or not.
Come Dancing God, RD is just the king of this, he can transport you back to a past you never experienced and put you there so deep you can smell it, then yank it away and make you feel painfully nostalgic for places you've never been and people you've never met. Did Chrissie hear an early version of this and say, right, now I'm going to write My City Was Gone? If you were trying to be all hip and young and relevant in 1983, you wouldn't be doing a grandpa-style song about some period in the misty post-war past, let alone releasing it as a single. So along with being beautiful and bittersweet, it's also pretty brave. Musically, it's another "deceptively simple" song that integrates all sorts of little disparate bits -- the Starmaker spoken word narrator, the sudden ripping electric guitar chords that just as suddenly disappear, the harmonies, the horns. I just can't think of another band that came of age in the early '60s that could've pulled off something like this without sounding either faded and uninspired or like a novelty/nostalgia act. Whatever compromises RD may have been making for the market, it hadn't corrupted the purity of his talent.
"Come Dancing" Even though I was born in 1978 I have no memory of ever having heard this during the 80'es, just like other "classics" like Eminence Front. I imagine I would have liked it even more as a kid. For some reason it hasn't become a radio staple like "Got My Mind Set On You" for example. Why? Is the theme too nostalgic? Is the lyric too thought-provoking? Anyway, when I first heard this in 2000 I had read beforehand about it on some review site (Wilson & Alroy). I remember imagining some typical 80'es synth-computer-drum atrocity. Instead it was that timeless, smiling warming sun of a song, no wonder it was a hit. What a gem.
Come Dancing What a great song. Always liked it. I listened a few times this morning, and thought that since the melody was kind of simple that I'd get sick of it, but there are so many little nuances in the music and lyrics that that didn't happen. I love how the organ almost sounds like steel drums giving it that Caribbean lilt. Sometimes, though, it almost reminds me more of a Tex Mex kind of thing, as in the track below. The guitar break sounds like it could have been borrowed from Everybody's a Star, and I hear the spoken part of Apeman in the spoken section of Come Dancing. It's great to have Ray's sister or sisters back in a Kinks song. Lyrically I'm a sucker for nostalgic songs. The loss of the Palais becomes a stand-in for so many long-ago feelings and reminiscences. I get an ache in my heart every time I think of a local movie theater, the RKO Keith, near where I grew up in Queens, that was destroyed in spite of the lobby having been given landmark status. Any time I think of it, I think of the magic of going to the movies there with my parents and looking up at a midnight blue ceiling painted with gold stars. I can still feel the blast of the air conditioning when you entered the lobby with its marble fountain and grand staircase, and the Baroque architecture throughout the theater. I went there many times into my early twenties, but it is the childhood memories of going with my mom and dad when I was little that I treasure.
"Come Dancing" was one of my favorite singles and videos of the summer of '83. I'm generally not a fan of changes in the key at the end of a track, but when the brass comes in at the change it's lump-in-the-throat time for me. I was not "into" the Kinks at all during this time; this was strictly a great Top 40 hit for me. I no doubt thought at then, "Oh, how cool for this old-time 1960s band having a big top 10 hit here in the bright, shining present we call the 1980s." Yet Ray and Dave were still under 40 - and look how many 1960s singers are still making good albums and touring as of 2022! What a naive teenager I was!
I've been at work all day and waiting for a chance to write something about 'Come Dancing', rather than just 'like' the many good comments on it so far! This song was the first current release of The Kinks that I was aware of in my early days of following music and it made a good impression on me; I knew enough about pop music to have the band in my head as 'respected elders' (yeah, they were ancient...I mean, at least ten/fifteen years younger than I am now!), so I felt a sense of justice that they were getting a hit with a new track. Hey, I'm all for fair play... Interesting observation. I'm quite a big fan of Madness and of course they were a significant chart force in my youth. I'm not totally convinced that Ray's flustered mannerisms are Suggs-influenced (I could be wrong); I remember Ray saying he'd based the spiv character on one of his uncles and I always put the double-take the spiv does in the first scene as being a kind of comedic device, with him feeling partly guilty that he'd been distracted (looking at a lady?!) and not concentrating on the job ("on the job"...ho ho! Excuse me, matron...) This does remind me though that I heard 'Tomorrow's Just Another Day' when it was a current hit (good song!) and a couple of years later heard 'Sunny Afternoon' for the first time...my teenage brain instantly went "Ah, that's where Madness got THAT intro from..!" I doubt any other band after The Kinks has honoured the London legacy as much as Madness have (apologies to the Libertines!) and their catalogue is probably still not as valued as it should be by the critics. Anyway, back to 'Come Dancing'. I'll be honest that now I find it difficult to separate the song from the video. This has some slightly unfortunate implications for me if I hear the song in public; as our esteemed headmaster Mark has conveyed so incredibly well in his opening post, this is a very human song on many levels. I really rate this video so highly in the way that it does justice to the subject matter but also balances great humour with unbearable poignancy. It makes me ridiculously emotional in a way I'd never have dreamt possible when I watched the band on Top Of The Pops back in 1983... I mean, it was just a good song with a bit of a nostalgic thing going on, right? A few details I love in the video: the gap in the teeth of the 'little brother' a la Ray; the knowing grin the kid has as he sits at the top of the stairs watching 'big Ray' waiting for his date: the "Ah!" expression Ray has when the date finally appears down the stairs; the shaking of the fist as he goes out of the front door; the way the mirror smashes as his "childhood dies"... And then we get to the bit which slaughters me...and I don't even really know why...the spiv standing on the balcony, surrounded by the audience bopping around, watching the current day Kinks on stage. He's static, this poor bloke out of his time...Ray onstage cups his ear as he mentions how the big bands used to come and play...the spiv shakes his head...and THEN! The key change - nothing gets you like a key change - as the full-on brass comes in, as the cleaning ladies dance with the vacuum cleaners, and the spiv is suddenly back dancing in the old days...before finally tearing down the Kinks poster, a symbolic act of disgust/betrayal at all that's been lost. I am completely incapable of watching this without being in floods of tears, which unfortunately I'm not guaranteed to avoid just from hearing the end of the song (yes, remembering not to have included the song on one of the Kinks compilations I made to play at work would probably have been wise but I'm quick with the remote control to skip when necessary!). As I said, I'm not really sure why it affects me quite to this degree; presumably I have great sympathy with the spiv's plight but even so... So, I guess to sum up, I would have to offer this song as yet more proof that those who think The Kinks 'lost it' after 'Apeman' are talking out of their...
Jonathan King's BBC series (Entertainment USA) is generally credited with helping the Come Dancing single becoming a UK hit. The video was shown and it was like "Look these guys are British. Their latest single is huge in the US. It was released a few months back in the UK and you ignored it". That's how I remember it.
This is very clearly the same Kinks who recorded "Apeman". Ray's vocal, the Caribbean flavor, and the melody make it undeniably a Kinks classic. I'm happy that The Kinks had a hit like this. It's like the stadium rock never happened. If you had never heard anything past 1970, this is what I think you would expect the Kinks to sound like in the 80s. I think that's one of the reasons why it was a big hit. It has many of the same elements that made them a unique band in the 60s and 70s. The video is also fantastic and must have appealed to kids as well as older Kinks fans. It hits all the right notes, and you cannot help but get caught up in the nostalgia that is on full display. Ray has done it again with his masterful songwriting. Dave even gets some power chords in the mix to remind us the Kinks can still bash 'em out. I don't listen to this song much because I feel like I have heard it 1,000 times over the years, but it's a well deserved smash hit! When Ray was singing "Come Dancing" I was in my room trying to do the moonwalk in front of a mirror. This would be a good time to use the dancing banana.
Come Dancing: I hated it at the time. Like Wondergirl, my friends and I would watch mtv endlessly and we always were vehemently against this video. We all liked the kinks, but this wasn’t our Kinks, our kinks kicked @$$ with YRGM and Low Budget. This was soft and pandering (said the 18 year old punk with the long curly hair, the Iron Maiden tee and $#/¥ kicker boots). Can you blame me? I was a metalhead. I didn’t know that the kinks were the underdogs and had released 100s of shoulda-been-a-hit songs. They deserve this hit. This song might not be my first choice for them to have a hit with, but in retrospect, they earned it, whichever song it happened be. So, sure, if I knew then what I know now, I would have been cheering that they had a big hit, not deriding it. …but I’m not too important to admit now that I was way off base. Wr-wr-wronng I was. I love it now! Great lyrics and the music is fun and different than what was out at the time, somehow leaning back to the earlier, sweeter Kinks of TKATVGPS. Unsurprisingly, I especially like the little section where Dave steps in for a quick hello and some cool rock riffage! Dig the longer version too, I am not a horn guy but when the kinks incorporate them, they deliver value almost always, so the longer version with the trailing horns only out to sounds great. This song hits all the marks for me. Eminently singable, great lyrics and fun music to dance to. What’s not to like? (…provided you are not a lunkheaded metalhead like i was at 18!)
Bigger lunkhead here. I was 21 in '83, and such a "rebel" contrarian that I refused to watch MTV or even listen to the "sell-out, arena rock" Kinks. In the last few weeks I've learned just how much great music I missed out on for a good 40 years.
Great songwriters that they are, neither McCartney, Townshend or Jagger/Richards were able to conjure up something as perfect as "Come Dancing" in the 1980's. It's why, at the end of the day, I believe Ray Davies may be the best of the bunch.
I don’t think there was anyone around that expected decades upon decades long pop/rock music careers. It was always, “are they still around?” back then. So I don’t think you were naive, just realistic.
Ah yes, the 12" promo. I never bothered with this as it contains the standard album mix, but I do have the US 7" promo. Why? Because it has a mono fold down on one side of course. Thanks for mentioning this in some detail. This key change works wonders as it modulates from the cliffhanger E minor (in C maj?) DOWN a half step to the release that the Eb modulation provides. Just great. Townshend used key change tricks (a lot - too many times actually) but he almost always went up a half step (and at the end of the song) and that kind of change provides a different listening experience. Here's a little more of Ray's comments years after the fact. Most of this is redundant but there are a few cool tidbits in here that I had forgotten about. This is from the booklet included in the 2000 Velvel re-release of the Come Dancing best of compilation with the revised track list.
It's funny that from the perspective in 1983 that 15 years earlier were those legendary, older days of 1968 rock - already considered the "classic rock" era by the 1980s. Now 15 years ago is 2007. Errr, that feels like barely a couple of years ago. Even a group I think of as "new" like Muse already had 3 or 4 studio albums by then.
