Oct 1963 - Nov 1966 Apr 1967 - Feb 1970 1965 Never Say Yes Nov 1970 Lola Vs Powerman And The Moneygoround The Contenders Strangers - live 1970 - Dave live Denmark Street Get Back In Line Lola - TOTP - video - alt version Top Of The Pops - video Moneygoround - mono This Time Tomorrow - 2020 mix A Long Way From Home - live 70's - Ray live Rats Apeman - video - alt stereo - alt mono - ToTP - Calypso - live 94 Powerman - mono - 2020 mix - live 70's Got To Be Free Anytime The Good Life 1971 Golden Hour Of The Kinks Feb 1971 Percy (movie) - trailer Mar 1971 Percy (soundtrack) God's Children Lola The Way Love Used To Be - Ray live Completely Running Round Town Moments - Ray live Animals In The Zoo Just Friends Whip Lady Dreams Helga Willesden Green God's Children Outro The Follower Ray On Wonderworld 1971 You Really Got Me - Mini Monster EP Nov 1971 Muswell Hillbillies 20th Century Man - single - Alt Instr - Ray live Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues - live 73 - John Peel Holiday - live 73 Skin And Bone - live 70's - Ray live Alcohol - live 75 - cartoon Complicated Life Here Come The People In Grey - live 72 Have A Cuppa Tea - alt version - live 72 Holloway Jail The Kinks Live AT The BBC 1973 Preservation Live Starmaker Tv Play Oct 2018 Dave Davies - Decade If You Are Leaving (71)
This is where things become personal for me. Not that I have any "baby" in jail, don't worry, but this song was the reason I fell in love with Muswell Hillbillies in the first place, transforming me into a Kinks nut. Whenever you discover an artist or a band, you look for more of the same, more of the same, more of the same. But the true lifelong pacts between artists and fans come when they give you something else, and you realize you love it even more. That’s what happened for me with this particular tune. Something about the slide guitar, the entry of the drums, the instant groove it manages to create and the intense beauty of the time-defying melody. Many orthodox white blues musicians (and the Kinks themselves in previous attempts) manage to reproduce the spirit of it, the musicianship of it, the guitar of it, but they tend to forget a very important thing : blues is also a highly melodic form, as proven by the likes of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Elizabeth Cotten. And Holloway Jail is a case in point, adding a certain "spirituals"/chain-gang flavor on top of the country-blues elements, without ever sounding like a pastiche. Lyrically, I see it as a kind of reverse-twin song of Alcohol. This time, it’s not the guy who's doomed by his relationship with a "floosie", but the girl falling under the influence of a “spiv”. “Floosie”, “spiv”, this thread is a turning into a fascinating english class for me, I can tell you! As @mark winstanley noted in his customary perfect opening post, the groove and guitar sounds are extraordinary highlights, as are the female backing vocals (I think I read somewhere Vicki Brown, Joe's wife, is featured). With its incredibly original subject (how many female prison songs do you know ?), this should be a classic, but I'll take it anyway as my own personal deep cut, and one of the defining songs of this wonderful record's musical concept. And back to the intro, the hair-raising moment the drums kick in on that high slide note, with that dry sound and balancing groove, it never fails to stop me on my tracks, like a punch right between my stomach and my heart, taking my breath away.
It really is a stunning piece of work.... I almost don't care about the lyrics, because the music and the groove is so good it almost doesn't matter, but you make a great point about female prison songs ..... I hadn't even considered that
I always thought the lyric to this was really unusual and interesting with regards to female roles and what's implied or more to the point not said about the relationships mentioned... @Fortuleo already beat me to the point that this is the inverse of 'Alcohol'.. with the lines 'succeeding in the city, beginning to excel' it strongly suggests that Ray's 'baby' is some kind of businesswoman or entrepreneur: it's quite an unusually progressive female role for this kind of blues idiom. I mean, maybe she's a Mary Kay Ash type or she could just be the madame of a brothel, I dunno but she's clearly going out in the city and making her own way in the world on her own terms until her downfall. The thing I always wondered was, if she's really the narrator’s 'baby', where the hell is he when Frankie Simes enters the picture? Why does Frankie have so much sway over her, and why is he so involved with her? Did the narrator ever even go to the city when all this went on? It doesn't really sound like it. Frankie is the equivalent in this narrative of the floozie in 'Alcohol', so are they having an affair or is he just a bad business associate? Whether intentionally or not, I always thought here's an unspoken question hanging over the narrators passivity. It's one of The Kinks most fascinatingly unresolved lyrics imo.
“HM Prison Holloway was a closed category prison for adult women and young offenders in Holloway, London, England, operated by Her Majesty's Prison Service. It was the largest women's prison in western Europe,[2] until its closure in 2016.” HM Prison Holloway - Wikipedia
As @Fortuleo also mentioned, it's Vicki Brown, wife of Joe Brown singing female backing vocals on this track. She's also on 'Skin and Bone' apparently, though less obviously. It's interesting that they have her come in on female vocals here as it's between Rasa being in the studio group and female backing singers being added to the live group from the Preservation era on: Rasa was still with Ray at the time but either she didn't want to be involved with recording anymore of Ray wanted a different vocal style.
Holloway Jail Perhaps my favorite song on the album. Nicely atmospheric, and full of portent--a convincing contemporary blues. Even if the album is on in the background and I'm only half paying attention, this one will grab me. Of course the female singers and references to the underworld prefigure Preservation.
I live 5-10 minutes from it. Ironically, given the subject matter of a lot of the album, the site is due to be re-developed and housing built. We will have to wait and see whether anyone who lives in the area will be able to afford to live in these new homes but, given its location, I doubt it. Still I'm sure there will be plenty of Chinese billionaires and Russian gangsters prepared to buy them as an investment and leave them lying empty - so some people are getting rich at least! Hurrah! Pity there are people begging at the traffic lights just down the road and sleeping in the street the other side of Holloway Road but, you know, that's progress from the bureaucratic, big government 70s. Talking of subject matter, this really doesn't have anything to do with the 'concept' of the album, it's set in North London but that's about it. Great song though.
From this perspective it is an interesting lyric. It seemed from my reading, that she went off to the big black smoke as a business woman of some description... whether a secretary, clerk, accountant or assist, or some such thing.... it seemed like Frankie may have been her boss, or a business associate, and it seems like we are looking at white collar crime, embezzlement?... something along those lines..... although, if she was in law, there was an awful lot of cocaine and alcohol through the law community in the eighties, but I'm not so sure about the seventies.... so drug charges would be a possibility also. Being 71, I'm assuming this was either written letter or phone call information he received about his "baby", but he may only have found out after the fact..... as is often the case.... It did strike me that some form of "affair" was possible, even likely..... I have always found society's interpretation of female roles and how much they did or were allowed to do interesting, because there are famous female figures all through history doing things that were supposedly men's jobs, and from a personal perspective, due to necessity, my mother was a welder for a few years in the late seventies, and she was a real girly girl....
It’s my understanding (from my copious reading of British mystery/detective novels) that The City is a reference to the financial district of London. And now the criminal investigation division is pursuing Frankie…perhaps for financial crimes? Embezzlement, maybe? Or a Ponzi scheme?And then he points the finger at her?
The song is like a mini movie. Yes, I imagine it's about white collar crime, and Frankie is a smooth talking fraudster. The city is of course The City, which is shorthand for the City of London, which is the main financial district in the UK and one the most important in the world. Ah, Zeki beat me to it! This is a song that has certainly not gone out of date, even if Holloway Jail is no longer there!
Yea, the city is a funny one ... it always made sense to me because we always used it the same way. Again, the wife chuckles if I say something about going to the city.... because in the US "the city", is referred to as downtown as far as I can gather.
Fell behind a day here while traveling, first: Cuppa Tea: Only Ray can make a song about tea into a barroom sing along. Dave shreds nicely in the background (must be all the caffeine that got him fired up). Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Another winner! Holloway Jail: An oddly catchy song, I often find my self singing “they took my baby, to Holloway Jail ” randomly during the day [when I am not randomly singing “hallelujah! hallelujah! Rosa Lee”]). Although I don’t understand the use of the word “impaled” in “now she’s impaled in Holloway Jail”.
By the way it's unlikely that 'succeeding in the city' means the heroine was a successful businesswoman - in the City of London? In the 1970s? No chance! More likely she was a secretary or some kind of office worker on her way up, but not too far because, ouch, glass ceiling!
I have to say that struck me as well... and it is used more than once, and closes us out.... an interesting one, that I could use some input on
Studies show 30% of businesses in Victorian England were owned by women, so although the likelihood of business people in the seventies being men was high, there's no logical reason to believe that there were no business women in the sixties and seventies.
Holloway Jail This is a moving story over a modern blues backdrop which is very well played by all. Mark Doyle (Songs of the Semi-detached) said this song was based on real people according to Ray. Frankie could have been Ray's Uncle Frank but I'm not aware of any family link to the jail. Whether or not it's a personal story it is a convincing one. I especially like Ray's use of the word impaled because it conveys the pain of this woman's imprisonment (as well as being a nice rhyme for jail). I love this song.
Unbelievably not in full unlike near all other Australians it seems. There's me going against the grain Mark, can you believe it?
Yes, but what kinds of businesses though? Also, if we assume 'the city' to be the City of London, which is a fair assumption, then, well into the 21st century, it was notoriously a boys club and poisonously sexist and misogynist. A woman in the City was more probably likely to be working as a lap dancer than an investment banker - unless they were privately educated and from a wealthy background, which seems unlikely in the case of the heroine of the song, she wouldn't have gone to prison if that were the case for a start!
Holloway Jail. Masterpiece. Not just a great blues, but a very particular brand of early blues made modern. A set of updated St. James Infirmary or St. Louis Blues. The really amazing thing is we have references that mark the lyricist as a Brit (C.I.D.), but overall the lyrical thrust sounds perfectly in line with the very American music (maybe the group's most American song ever). That clean acoustic guitar to open is just gorgeous. Then we get the overlay of the dirty electric and once again the brothers Davies show their uncanny ability to bounce the two off each other to maximum effect. Throw in the classic upright piano and the mournful female background vocals, and you get an A++ song. Masterpiece
"Holloway Jail" is somewhat like the Zombies' "Care of Cell 44" in that both songs deal w/incarcerated people, but the said incarcerated subjects are women, which to me, is somewhat unusual. Unlike the Zombies song, "Holloway Jail" is a great bluesy folksy mix that tells the sad story of the protagonist's girlfriend who went to jail for an unworthy person. This is also another of Ray's cautionary tales of naive women in the Big City, like "Big Black Smoke" & "Pretty Polly".
