I just looked up George Starostin: “The critics hated it, the people never bought it, and I can sure tell why.” “In fact, I really don't remember a more painful experience since listening to Clapton's Pilgrim. The closing tracks don't have the least chance to get caught in my memory - it's all a hard-rockin', hard-friggin' mess.” Ha ha. Obviously, I don’t agree as I’ve just “wowed” the 5 closing tracks (above in my preliminary thoughts). And I don’t even think this guy agrees with himself as he speaks highly of ‘Hatred’ and ‘Somebody Stole My Car’…which are two of the closing 5 songs.
I believe @ajsmith was referring to this cover, not the one with the newpaper ? I guess it's Dave on the left though.
Phobia This was also my first Kinks album bought in real time - and the last, of course, as far as studio albums are concerned. A CD version with Did Ya at the end. I remember having a general positive feeling towards the album. There was nothing to make it bad. But then Did Ya overshadowed the rest of the album, and like many others here I tended to neglect listening to it in its entirety owing to its length. Also, there is little variety in instrumentation and sound, which tend to give it a monotonous feeling, though I realise now that the compositions are more varied than I thought. I hate the cover, I thing it's horrendous. It's better when you see the whole picture, but you don't. They should have kept the illustration without collaging the Davies's faces over it. It's overcrowded and incoherent. It lends an amateur overtone to the whole album, together with the directly-plugged-in electroacoustic guitar sound that I think I hear on many of the tracks. Also, seeing only the brothers and not the band reinforces the impression of a Dave & Ray endeavour. Actually, Rodford and Henrit seem to be mostly undermixed and mechanically supportive. I don't hear the band energy that enhanced UK Jive. The sound, though, is a bit of an improvement on Jive, but a step back from Did Ya, though they were recorded around the same time. But then maybe all this exists only in my head. As has been said, the album is too long, and many songs are too long as well. (Thanks to @pantofis for summing up my feeling about this). So how did I approach this record, after years of not having listened to it ? One thing is, I think of it as a double album, as it was released at some moment. 4x4. Just as avid @Fortuleo , this count bothers me, but it's the best I could do to break the monotony and start individualizing the tracks. And it worked. Now I can tell I like the second album much more than the first. What am I going to do with this ? The idea that someone put forth of 2 albums with the studio tracks of To The Bone added is one possibility; though it tortures my sense of chronology. One thing I discovered this morning thanks to Mark is that Did Ya and Look Through Any Doorway were actually recorded within the same time frame as Phobia. Another idea is to trim the album down by suppressing a few tracks and ruthlessly editing down most of the others. Someone has done it on one of those "alternate albums" sites, but of course his choices are not mine. I don't have the time now, but some day I have to do that editing job, to see if there is a nervous, dense quality album to be milked out of this collection of extended mixes.
Maybe, i had always thought it was Bob Geldof standing in and wondered if Ray was at the off license! As for the rear cover is that the plague or black death?
The Maxwell Bail Scramble headline may be related to Robert Maxwell. From wiki: “In 1991, his body was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean, having apparently fallen overboard from his yacht. He was buried in Jerusalem. Maxwell's death triggered the collapse of his publishing empire as banks called in loans…” -skip— “The Maxwell companies applied for bankruptcy protection in 1992. After his death, huge discrepancies in his companies' finances were revealed, including his fraudulent misappropriation of the Mirror Group pension fund.[2]” —skip— “The Maxwell companies filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992. Kevin Maxwell was declared bankrupt with debts of £400 million. In 1995, Kevin, Ian and two other former directors went on trial for conspiracy to defraud, but were unanimously acquitted by a 12-person jury the following year.”
I remember getting Phobia during my lunch break from work when it came out from Ted Cole’s Music Shop here in Salem. The artwork to me seemed pretty brutalist (I hope that Avid Martyj will come back w/his expert opinion) and like one of the songs on the album, it seemed almost like a prediction of 9/11, w/the buildings on fire and the people coming down the streets in a daze. Like many of the Avids, I felt that there were too many songs on the album and I felt that the album could have been better w/the addition of the first and last songs from the Did Ya EP and the subtraction of a few songs. I did see the Kinks for the next to last time at the Avalon at Fenway in early 1993, as I previously stated here. Despite a major publicity push, including an appearance on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, Phobia barely cracked the Top 200 album chart here in the States and Columbia dropped them, a victim of changing music times (it was the grunge era and the Columbia Records people wanted to have younger acts instead of “dinosaurs” like the Kinks).
I’d have liked the album better if my copy had that awesome cat on the cover! To me, however, only Scattered is a real keeper, and a great one it is. Otherwise, it feels to me like a situation where an outside producer could’ve sculpted a pretty good album from what’s here.
I'm afraid 1993 we're entering a phase where even an established producer was already too much in awe of the living legend status of 60'es artists and avoid confrontation. I imagine "Phobia" produced by Don Was or Jeff Lynne wouldn't sound all too different from what we got.
Phobia You can see this album was long-delayed by the time of it's eventual release by the track's recording dates all dating from the period between late 1990 and early 1992. Remember the back of the insert CD cover from the 1991 Did Ya CD EP release stated "Get ready for a new Kinks album and tour in '92". Down all the days and it turned into a release date of March 1993 with a year gap between recording completion and album release. Some more background: This album was originally going to be called Don't and planned for a release of June 1992 but no final track list was submitted when it was decided to bring in Bob Clearmountain to help remix some of the tracks in May of that year. These tracks were all the potential single releases. After these remixes were completed, a new version of the album, this time with a track list, was submitted to Columbia in August for a release of September and then October but surprisingly this revised submission did not include "Scattered". Columbia suggested changing the title to Phobia and Ray then decided to do more remixing in the Fall of 1992 causing even more delays. "Scattered" was added into the album at this point. It has been suggested that MCA was claiming ownership of "Scattered" whose backing track may or may have not have been the same backing track that was recorded in 1989 for potential inclusion on UK Jive. The later 1990 recording date listed for this track could indicate when the final vocals were added as Ray rewrote some of those lyrics in 1990 or it might be an entirely new recording. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I had the same reaction as a lot of you who bought this in real time and are saying, man this thing is just a bit too long with a lot of sameness in sound and tempos from one track to the next. But long songs or albums are not an issue for me however, remember I'm a prog guy too. Of course, once you learn the album over several listens, the individual songs start to reveal themselves and become their own things. I still think if you take all the songs that were recorded in this time frame, which includes the 2 new tracks released on Did Ya, and then maybe another 6 or 7 of the best tracks on the album itself and pare it down to say 8 or 9 tracks at 50 minutes max, then they would have had a pretty strong coherent album. Editing a few tracks could have also been an option. I've always thought to myself this album should have actually been called Scattered, as if there is a theme here, that sums it up as as good as any other theme we might come up with here while going through this song by song. The endless delays, the album length, the songs themselves, the cover, all seem scattered to me, even by Kinks' standards, so I always listen to this with this mindset. To some extent, the theme to The Kinks entire career can actually be summed up with this word scattered, so for this to be their final studio album, ending with that song, seems all the more fitting.
This Spanish vinyl version was the only vinyl release of this album until just a few years ago. Note the truncated track list, so it's not a release of the whole CD on vinyl. I've never actually listened to this with just these tracks, so that might be something I check out later this week to see how this works. A1 Opening A2 Wall Of Fire A3 Drift Away A4 Still Searching A5 Phobia A6 Only A Dream A7 Babies B1 Over The Edge B2 Surviving B3 It's Alright (Don't Think About It) B4 The Informer B5 Hatred (A Duet) B6 Scattered The full CD track list was not released on vinyl until the 2018 Record Store Day release as Mark showed here: Anyone here ever (ever?) buy a mini-disc back then or even had a player?
I hadn't actually noticed that ... not sure on that tracklist, but a better presentation idea for this material
I have a MiniDisc deck in my hi-fi system, bought on New Years Eve 1999 - a Sony MDS-JE530 . It's still in there, and still works. I haven't used it much in recent years, but there are some albums I only "own" as MiniDisc copies. I own one pre-recorded MD, bought at the same time as the deck - "Without You I'm Nothing" by Placebo. The current asking price for that on Discogs is £99.99. If only I had bought more MDs!
I have a Sony Mini-Disc player. The battery doesn’t charge anymore but otherwise still works. I pulled it out a year or so ago to record a couple lps I saved from my father’s collection (my phone doesn’t have an in-put jack; the MD does). I have thirty or forty discs, nothing pre-recorded, though.
I have to say that ‘Don’t’ would have been a terrible album title from a commercial POV! It’s just begging for the potential customer scanning through the new releases to subconsciously complete the sentence as ‘DON’T bother buying this new Kinks album’!
Phobia This album is pretty new to me. I had heard Hatred (A Duet), when listening to a station on Pandora a few years ago, and got a big kick out of it knowing the background of the brothers. That’s the only song I had heard prior to when I started to listen to the album a few weeks back, when on a road trip with my daughter. I’ve heard all the songs at least a couple of times now, but due to the length of the cd, I haven’t heard it straight through in one sitting yet. I’d like to give it a few more spins, and let it sink in a little more to form an opinion, but I have a very positive first impression. Looking forward to the song by song.
