Reference guide Oct 1963 - Nov 1966 1967 Apr 1967 Mr Pleasant - Alt version - Beat Club - live - beat club - instr (whistling) This Is Where I Belong - Ray live - Ray with Francis Black May 1967 Mr Pleasant EP Mr Pleasant This Is Where I Belong Two Sisters - Ray live (with chat) Village Green - Instrumental - Ray May 1967 Waterloo Sunset - instr. - live 73 - Ray live 78 - live 94 - Ray and Damon Albarn - doco excerpt - Ray and Bowie - Ray live (Peter dedication) Art Nice and Gentle May 1967 Waterloo Sunset EP Documentary Jul 1967 Death Of A Clown - Dave Live - Dave live 2002 Sept 1967 Something Else By David Watts - Live 84 - Dave live 97 - Ray live 2010 - Alt mono - alt version Death Of A Clown Two Sisters No Return Harry Rag - BBC - Ray 2010 - alt version Tin Soldier Man - Sand On My Shoes (original) - Alt backing track Situation Vacant - mono Love Me Till The Sun Shines - BBC - live 69 - Dave 97 - stereo Lazy Old Sun - alt version Afternoon Tea - German Stereo - Alt stereo - Canadian Mono Funny Face End Of The Season Waterloo Sunset Little Women backing track Dave And Ray interview sixties Echoes Of The World - The Making Of Village Green Preservation Society Oct 1967 Autumn Almanac - stereo - Top Of The Pops - live fan jam - Ray - breakdown Nov 1967 Sunny Afternoon LP Nov 1967 Susannah's Still Alive - stereo - video 1967 BBC sessions - Sunny Afternoon Autumn Almanac Mr Pleasant Susannah's Still Alive David Watts Death Of A Clown Good Luck Charm Jan 1968 Live at Kelvin Hall Part 1 Part 2 Jan 1968 Wonderboy - video - Top Of The Pops - stereo mix Polly - stereo mix April 1968 The Kinks EP June 1968 Days - stereo mix - Glastonbury 2010 - live 1969 - video edit - Basil Brush - Alt stereo - Acoustic - 1991 EP version Aug 1968 Lincoln County - stereo mix - Dave live There Is No Life Without Love Colour Me Pop Medley She's Got Everything Promo film July 1968 Colour Me Pop - Dedicated Follower Of Fashion A Well Respected Man Death Of A Clown Sunny Afternoon Two Sisters Sitting By The Riverside Lincoln County Picture Book Days Nov 1968 The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society - the gold disc award The Village Green Preservation Society - Alt mix with studio banter - Live 73 Do You Remember Walter - Euro Stereo - Backing Track - live 94 Picture Book - real stereo - live 69 - live 73 - Ray 2011 Johnny Thunder - alt mix - stereo - original stereo - Ray (+VGPS) 2008 - Ray 2010 - Crouch End Chorus Last Of The Steam Powered Trains - alt ending - live 69 - live 70 - Dave live Big Sky - alt stereo - live 69 - Crouch End Chorus Sitting By The Riverside - Stereo Animal Farm - alt stereo - Ray 2004 - stereo Village Green - alt vocal - backing vocal Starstruck - alt vocal - video - stereo - Ray 2008 Phenomenal Cat - alt mix - stereo - stereo US link All Of My Friends Were There - stereo Wicked Annabella - stereo - Dave 97 Monica - stereo People Take Picture Of Each Other - Euro stereo (big band) - stereo - live 73 extra tracks Mr Songbird - stereo Berkley Mews - stereo - single mix Rosemary Rose - mono Misty Water - stereo - alt stereo Did You See His Name? - mono Till Death Us Do Part - stereo - Chas Mills vocal - Anthony Booth vocal Lavender Hill Pictures In the Sand - instrumental Easy Come, There You Went Egg Stained Pyjamas Mick Avory's Underpants Spotty Grotty Anna Where Did My Spring Go? - video When I Turn Off The Living Room Light Darling I Respect You Village Green At The BBC Days Waterloo Sunset Love Me Till The Sun Shines Monica Village Green Preservation Society Animal Farm Last Of The Steam Powered Trains Picture Book Do You Remember Walter? Dedicated Follower Of Fashion/Well Respected Man/Death Of A Clown Picture Book Preservation Overture Ray in Denmark with the Denmark Choir And Orchestra Colour Me Pop 1968 International EP's 1968 Four More Respected Gentlemen Pete Quaife - interview - Kast Off Kinks - I Could See It In Your Eyes - Dead End Street 67-69 Dave Davies Solo Album This Man He Weeps Tonight - mono - acoustic Mindless Child Of Motherhood - mono - live 69 - BBC Hold My Hand - demo - mono - acoustic Do You Wish To Be A Man? Are You Ready? Creeping Jean - stereo - live 99 I'm Crying - better master Mr Reporter Mr Shoemakers Daughter Groovy Movies Climb Your Wall Dave Live various Rasa Didzpetris Davies March 69 Plastic Man - stereo - beatclub 69 King Kong - stereo - video Oct 1969 - Arthur - liner notes Victoria - mono - live 69 - live 73 - live 1980 - live 2010 Yes Sir No Sir - mono - alternate Some Mother's Son - mono - live 1970 Drivin' - mono - alternate Brainwashed - mono - live 69 -live 72 Australia - mono - single Shangri La - mono - 2019 remix - backing track - Ray live The 69 US Tour - Then Now And Inbetween - God Save The Kinks Fillmore West, November 27th 1969 Preservation Live Starmaker Tv Play
Shangri-la is the biggest song on Arthur, maybe in some ways the biggest song the Kinks ever did. Designed as the centerpiece of their most ambitious and focused concept LP, it’s a very different beast than most of their other classic songs. Most are either flat out rockers, unassuming little vignettes or vaudeville tunes with hidden layers of sophistications, whereas this one is for the ages, wearing its ambition on its sleeve, with in your face multi-parts, changes of time signatures, switches and developments of moods and atmosphere, fabulous musicianship (the drums!), a tremendous rocking bridge, the closest they ever got to prog structurally, with various movements and colors. It could (almost) be mistaken for a Genesis track from Selling England by the Pound. As part of Kronikles, I know it holds a special place in the heart of many American fans. For us Europeans, it’s the most unexpected of the deepest cuts, the holy grail moment in the band’s discography, the hidden treasure, the magnum opus we could’ve never imagined before listening to the LP. Yet, all that being said, this song also explains why I’ve often been unfairly lukewarm towards Arthur. It is the biggest song on there, no doubt, and one of the biggest in their career, but it’s still not a top tier favorite of mine, if I’m honest with myself (and with you all on this beautiful thread ). Some of their kitchen sink miniatures like Two Sisters or music-hall rejects like Pictures in the Sand reach something deeper in me. Even an inspired little escapist moment like Drivin’ gets me in a more effective way. I mean, A Day in the Life is the biggest song on Pepper, but it’s also the best as far as I’m concerned. So as a listener, I find myself in complete synch with its ambition and purpose. Not exactly so with Shangri-la. It’s a great piece of work/art, I admire it, but it’s at best my 5th or 6th favorite song on Arthur (the 4 opening tracks and the surf bit of Australia are all greater in my opinion), if only because its various melodies are much more conventional than Ray’s very best and his delivery’s at times more outré than usual. I’ll argue they’ll do a truly better – and less forced – “epic production” the following year, with the mighty and sublime This Time Tomorrow.
Between Headmaster Avid Winstanley & Avid Steve62, as well as Avid ARL, they have been great in discussing "Shangri-La", one of the Kinks' greatest songs, but I'll give it the old community college try: 1. In the first verse you have "you can polish your car" & then several lines later you have "Gone are the days of dreaming about that car". Contradiction? I think more of along the lines of owning a Ford Capri rather than a Jaguar XKE. 2. I agree w/Avid Steve62 about the "seven shillings a week" applying to Radio/TV, although I was thinking more along the lines of the license fees that the BBC charges for the privilege of listening/watching. 3. As for "Shangri-La's" chances in the Hit Parade, there were a few singles around that time that did well that were complex/out of the norm, like "Good Vibrations" (& to a lesser extent "Heroes & Villains"), "Hey Jude" & "MacArthur Park". I think the problem w/"Shangri-La" was that the subject matter was relatively mundane & wouldn't appeal to the record buying public, no matter how brilliant the song was. I think that the only chance that it would have if the TV movie was made, especially seeing the context of the song.
I'd always assumed it was Dave singing the high chorus part on "Shangri La.". But thanks to this thread, I'm getting much clearer on the timbre of Rasa's voice. Isn't that her, or at least her doubling Dave? What a majestic chorus! And beautifully, hugely ambivilent. And, beating a dead horse... at least until we return to the early 80's... @Fischman What seemed to be unusual was that commercial Boston radio still supported local bands and had local hits. The national corporatization of rock radio was in full swing by this time, and the idea that one radio market might be quite different from another was nearly dead. So! Boston still made its own decisions. That applied to the unusally strong supportage of local bands (the three examples I listed... though there were many others), but also resulted in unusual decisions about where other bands stood in the ranking of things. As far as we could tell in the Boston suburbs, "Give the People what they want " was as big an album as "Tattoo You." As an example of how ridiculously NOT specific to a location rock radio would be from that point on... When I worked at KNDD in Seattle in the early 1990's, we were in the epicenter of an incredibly supportive local music scene. Of course we all know who the 4 or 5 big international players were. But there were _many_ others, and they were truly stars, locally. Still, KNDD, the most popular local station, owned by Comcast, only played these local acts on Sunday night speciality shows. It drove the music director crazy, and he did what he could to buck the pressure (and was a hero), but there was only so far he could push. Now... why the Kinks resonated especially with New England, that part I don't know!
Mark, I know it’s more trouble but would you be willing to add Kinkdom Come (post #8315) to the index? You had posted that film and I think it’s superbly done.
It is really well done, but this morning I noticed that it has been deleted .... That was disappointing. I'm actually noticing a lot of stuff being deleted on Youtube, which is very disappointing, and it has me paranoid they're watching our thread lol
Another masterpiece. First heard on the Golden Hour comp and love it as much today as when I first heard it. I think I agree with Mark that it may be too complex for a single - at least one British DJ misunderstood it and refused to play it. I've searched online to find a reference to this but have come up with nothing. Let's hope I didn't dream it! I think Mark has done a great job disecting these lyrics and for me the song poses the question; if you are not happy to be in work, provide for your family, being able to buy a car, a house, then what exactly is going to make you happy? What is the alternative? Go and live in a commune? Most of us tend to be a little anti-establishment when we are younger but as we grow old and the wisdom kicks in we tend to leave those ideas in the past and go on to accept that owning a property, a nice car, and a few creature comforts, whilst at the same time providing for our families, is really all there is to it. If we manage to leave something for our kids when we are gone then all the better. There used to a sit-com on tv here back in the 1960's called The Likely Lads. Two working-class lads working in the same factory - one who wants to better himself and move up the classes, the other continuously moaning about the system and getting nowhere fast. For those familiar with the show I hear Terry singing Shangrilla to Bob who is sitting in his armchair, with his pipe and slippers, content at his achievements. Ray Davies explained the story behind the song to Q magazine: "I'd been living in this semi in Muswell Hill and I was pressured by a couple of my sisters to get a bigger place. So I bought this big manorial house in Elstree, bordering Borehamwood. I felt so ill at ease there I sold it and moved back to my semi. But up there in Borehamwood I wrote a lot of The Village Green Preservation Society, and the beginnings of what became Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire), which included Shangri-La. A few years before that I'd visited my sister who'd moved to Australia and the words were partly inspired by her new home. But, really, it's about anyone's quest for their Shangri-La, their pebble-dashed Nirvana. You see it a lot in places like Potters Bar. That idea that you can only go so far as Potters Bar." Nothing wrong with Potters Bar Ray.
Australia @mark winstanley yet another excellent and thoroughly researched writeup covering all angles, explorers, populations, states & borders! My mother's parents also left England for Perth and settled in the country town of Collie in 1920. Being in aged care I have heard clients jokingly call themselves "10 Pound Poms" for years so what first sounded jarringly humously fictional then for me rang a historical bell. Most folk i met arrived in the 1950's and many were dispatched up north to work on cane farms cutting sugar cane and others went onto tobacco plantations for another example. So here between Ray's change of voices, lyrics & the bands tempo changes Australia really does sound like a glossy advertising brochure sung by a group that also dip into a cabaret lounge act to good effect! The flying down to Australian on "Sunny Christmas Day" must sound amazing to a foreigner who could only imagine it just as i was hugely intrigued to plan and spend my one and only winter Christmas day skiing in Romania in 2007! The song has great lead and backing vocals that melodically work so well as it moves in all major of directions. The (travelling) jam is a fitting way to end the side though as noted is not at all typical of the group. Alas the world is a lot smaller now so we don't perpetually smile, need drugs and have chips on our shoulders that don't let us tell you things straight, but we will always have great surf and sunny Christmas days!
Boy, that mono mix of Shangri La is just no fun at all, is it? Painfully distorted by the end, drums too high in the mix, cluttered. Anyone have an original vinyl of this? Did the Deluxe use the the original mono master tape, or is this off some other source? I have a vague memory that as of the late 90's, some mono Arthur CD came from a less-than-stellar source because that's all that could be found at the time. But it's also plausible that it was just a mediocre mix at best. This album was arranged in a way that gives us such wonderful stereo ear candy. And I'm speaking as a guy who loves a mono mix when it's the better version, as is often the case with Kinks even in several 1968 songs. The 8-channel recording changed all that. (By the way... i do wonder whether a few later VGPS songs may have been recorded on 8-tracks--"Big Sky" and "Sitting By The Riverside" have such full arrangements -- but my hunch is that they just bounced 4-tracks like crazy.) It's curious that they did that, for sure. Did Ray have a hand in the remix? But to be accurate, that line isn't deleted completely, it's just delayed -- we still hear it in slo-mo at the end of the song, where it now registers as a punchline to everything that came before. In that way, it's arguably a songwriting pro move. And we get to hear that section up top as a gorgeous instrumental passage. It's hard for me to adjust to it after 30 years of the other version, but a case could be made for it. Yes.... it's subjective, but I think it's possible we will see, indeed. But if so, who else could follow that song, either?
A reference to a famous guitarist (with controversial viewpoints) being torn down on another thread that for all i know may well have been shut down by now?
Shangri-la as a single: I think it was a reasonable decision to release it as such but as the last single. So in my view: Victoria as lead single. Then? I don’t know about Drivin’. I might have chosen Yes Sir, No Sir instead as the follow-up.Yes, I know there’s some deeper themed lyrics but the main part that would stick in minds is the yes sir, no sir. And it’s catchy as hell and everyone identifies with it. And the third single: Shangri-La. Pensive and yet majestic. Shoulda been a hit.
Mediocre mono mix is being very generous to anything on Arthur. Fortunately stereo rules here. But since you brought up Big Sky, what is your take on the MONO? (listen to the opening harmonies)
I think it's Dave and Rasa doing the high parts together. Apparently Rasa is on "Shangri-La" and "Drivin'".
Do you know what any of the stills of the band playing that were on period single releases were from? They appear to be from a TV show. Maybe this one?
@Fischman What seemed to be unusual was that commercial Boston radio still supported local bands and had local hits. The national corporatization of rock radio was in full swing by this time, and the idea that one radio market might be quite different from another was nearly dead. So! Boston still made its own decisions. That applied to the unusally strong supportage of local bands (the three examples I listed... though there were many others), but also resulted in unusual decisions about where other bands stood in the ranking of things. As far as we could tell in the Boston suburbs, "Give the People what they want " was as big an album as "Tattoo You." As an example of how ridiculously NOT specific to a location rock radio would be from that point on... When I worked at KNDD in Seattle in the early 1990's, we were in the epicenter of an incredibly supportive local music scene. Of course we all know who the 4 or 5 big international players were. But there were _many_ others, and they were truly stars, locally. Still, KNDD, the most popular local station, owned by Comcast, only played these local acts on Sunday night speciality shows. It drove the music director crazy, and he did what he could to buck the pressure (and was a hero), but there was only so far he could push. Now... why the Kinks resonated especially with New England, that part I don't know![/QUOTE] I don't know if you remember, but there was a strike at WBCN back in 1979, when it was sold by a corporate owner who fired some of its on & off air staff. It lasted a bit, the replacement DJs were harassed & the new owners actually backed down, which probably didn't happen otherwise. There are those who said that the glory days of 'BCN were the early days, when Peter Wolf was a DJ & it operated as the East Coast version of a hippy free form station, but the 'BCN that I remember (1978-1990) did a pretty good job of balancing the stuff that would become the fodder of Classic Rock w/the Punk & New Wave sounds, especially locally. It sponsored the annual Rock & Roll Rumble, where various local acts competed at the Paradise Club for prizes. It also played tapes by various unsigned local bands. To me, it was kinda like a bridge between the usual AOR station & the college radio stations of the era. As for why the Kinks resonated w/New England, my guess would be that Boston would probably be the closest major US city to England culturally. I think the Kinks were popular in Boston from the beginning. I know that the Remains did covers of early Kinks songs & that Boston radio stations played their early hits. Finally, Doug Hinman, who has do so much to pull together all the information about the Kinks' recorded output & career, is a Massachusetts guy.
I don't really know what to say about "Shangri-La" that Mark didn't include in his fantastic write-up. I agree--this is a brilliant, gorgeous song. One of the best songs, if not the best, in their entire discography. I know that it's a favorite of Dave Davies, who said the band could have gone in a different direction after it (I'm not sure what the direction would have been.) Lyrically, this song touches on so many themes present in so many Kinks songs. In some ways, it's the most Kinky Kinks song. The little life of the little man. Is the man (Arthur?) sitting by the fire the same as the little man on the train? I don't think so, right? It's almost F. Scott Fitzgeraldian in some ways, this old man who has found some level of success reflecting on his life. Rags to (some) riches. But his dreams are just like everybody else's--that's where the Kinkian aspect comes in: "all the houses on the street have got a name, cos all the houses on the street they look the same" and "life ain't so happy in your little Shangri-La." The old man has been sold prefabricated goals and aspirations, and he's fulfilled these manufactured goals, he has what he was told he needs or wanted, but it rings hollow. At least that's my impression. Fun fact: the strummed acoustic break was inspired by The Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City." Apparently both Davies brothers were huge fans of The Lovin' Spoonful.
Sure! Not a single but here’s one of the images (note Dave playing an acoustic guitar): The Kinks – The Kinks (1981, Vinyl)
Shangri-La Pretty well covered already. Lyrically brilliant. Musically brilliant. Truth be told, there's a couple songs on this album I generally enjoy listening to more, but that's no fault of the song itself because it's utterly freaking brilliant!
Almost 100 per cent sure that’s the German show ‘4-3–2-1 Hot N Sweet’ from September 1969 where they mimed ‘Drivin’ (you can see the ‘4-3-2-1’ backdrop in some of the photos). Missing of course!