Hot Potatoes Oh, how my tastes have evolved! When I first bought this album I think around age 20, I was disappointed in the album in general, and probably would have cited this song is Exhibit A as to why. Today, I thoroughly enjoy it. It is not a musical style I was big on, but today I don't care. The lyrics aren't as artful as the best of the classic run that preceded this album, but today that matters not. There's no great, captivating instrumental interplay or killer solos, but today I know a song can be great without all those trappings. Really, there's a dozen or more reasons to bin this one, but I find myself enjoying it despite myself. As far as I'm concerned, the magic is still there.
Hot Potatoes: it may be “fluff” as noted above, but it’s adorable fluff. It seems that we have gotten to a point where the expectations are that every song on every album will be expected to be perfect, both in message, delivery and performance. If anything, I like it when a serious artist does some thing just for fun. This song may be a throwaway, but I have been singing it out loud so much it’s starting to drive my fiancé crazy. La la la la hot potatoes indeed! ….and I don’t even like potatoes much.
Yes, Brie is soft, but it's not actually liquid. More importantly, no French cheese, no matter how stinky, would have an ingredient list including: Maltodextrin, Milk Protein Concentrate, Sodium Phosphate, Whey Protein Concentrate, Modified Food Starch, Sodium Alginate.... Nope. Nobody can weaponize cheese like us Americans. Other great American innovations in cheese:
Hot Potatoes Not read anyone's review yet save our headmaster's so here i go unprepared without a mixing bowl. Agree with the George Harrison slide guitar opening and hear an Itchycoo Park piano motif as early as 1:38 into the track. A fair track but I find Dave's vocals add to my interest of a Ray menu that's full of starch. 2 years ago we were hearing the phrase to "Get Back In The Line" however now our protagonist doesn't want to bother as after all knows he's got his meals and sexual gratification all waiting at home for now however....... if he totally gives up on work i can see one commodity running out and he being told to sit on the other and rotate! Now onto matters more savoury, the Wiggles recently reprised Hot Potato, Hot Potato alongside Mr Britain's Got Talent Simon Cowell for a Uber eats style commercial!
"Hot Potatoes" is not only my favorite song on Show Biz, it's actually one of my favorite Kinks songs of all time. It's been that way ever since I first heard the song 40+ years ago. I remember looking at the sleeve of the record wondering how a song entitled "Hot Potatoes" was going to sound like. I played it & I loved it then & still love it now. It's such a goofy song, but like a lot of Ray's songs, it's so sing alongable, especially the chorus & "I want your loving..." part. It's very easy to say that your fave rave Kinks songs are the usual suspects. I think that it takes guts to admit that a song like "Hot Potatoes" gives you the same sense of joy, happiness & entertainment as the better known ones.
Hot Potatoes Fischman expressed my feelings better than I could. I used to think of this song as the first I would throw away when "rearranging" the album, but now I transfered this title to "Unreal Reality". There is a natural, sincere quality to the former that is absent from the latter. "Hot Potatoes" comes as a relief. Maybe it's so obvious that nobody needed to say it, maybe it has been said, or maybe it's plain wrong, but when reading the lyrics this morning, it appeared to me there is a narrative progression in the song, which could be summed up this way: Her: "Get up and get a job or you won't get anything to eat but potatoes" Him: "I don't want to work, I'm fine with potatoes as long as we have a lot of sex" Her: "Ok, you'll get the potatoes but no sex" Him: "well I'm not so fond of potatoes after all" Is it how you understand it too ? @All Down The Line already mentioned the similitude with "Get Back In The Line". Both songs share the same distance to the general plot. Our entertainer is not 100% on the road, in between tours he's unemployed and financially precarious. It's a little farther fetched (can you even say that ?), though, considering the placement within the album. One day he's all over the world, his head buzzing with entertainment frenzy, the next he's unemployed, the day after he's back on top and reflecting about how lonely it is there. (I'm trying to suggest a comparison for Monday's song. Same year, by the way). I have a tenderness for songs about potatoes, I wrote one myself a long time ago, back in my county-wide glory days (no "r" missing here). The potato is my personal emblem. Don't mess with potatoes.
No problem, Avid Luckless Pedestrian. The only thing is that it's probably OOP now. Hopefully, you can find a copy at a good price or find it on one if those new fanged streaming thingies. I remember I got my copy when the local Leachmere's went out of business.
Should also point out that "Boiled, French fried/Any old way that you wanna decide" is an epically strangulated internal rhyme resulting in awesome metric chaos.
Thats great, now remain seated calmly we're sending a van around now to take you to a place where there's lots of potatoes!
I do too, Avid The last man. To me, it's like one of those old blues songs, where the protagonist wants his woman's loving, but doesn't want a job, so he's willing just to eat potatoes to get the loving, but at the end, she gets wise & denies her loving anyway.
Hot Potatoes This is definitely going into novelty song territory, but I don't care. Sometimes I love novelty (see further below). And I love this. Do I wish the lyrics were a bit more serious? Yes, I think that would make it even better in my book. But this is such a light, fun, swingy country-rock-folk song that I don't mind the novelty lyrics. That "la la lalala..potatoes" refrain is one of the catchiest singalong chorus' Ray has come up with. And yes, absolutely, having these brothers trade lead vocals and then sing together is always just one of the best sounds in rock to me. Gosling's tickling piano lines are great again. The story of this song does remind me as an almost inverse of Situation Vacant, where here Johnny is the one satisfied by not working and just eating Suzy's hot potatoes. And then the twist at the end that it turns out that he's had enough of the hot potatoes and needs more. Regarding the lyrics, "I want your love, I need your love" is so cliché. A bit too cliché for Ray Davies' talents. But what comes before interested me... these lines: I want your lovin' 60 minutes an hour, I want your lovin' 24 hours a day, I want your lovin' 7 days a week. To me, these lines are taking the "comedy rule of three" and flipping it on its head. Usually, when you craft a joke like that you start with the one or two things that are expected, and then you throw the unexpected punch line as the third line. "7 days a week" is a common phrase. "24 hours a day" is a common phrase. But "60 minutes an hour" is not very common and that would be the punchline. But here, Ray starts with the odd "60 minutes per day", then follows up with the more expected common phrases. Finally, regarding novelty, I can absolutely see a fellow British band like the Darkness doing a song like this. And I love the Darkness, even if they are dismissed by some as a novelty act. They have the same sort of fun/novelty lyrics in many of their songs, but the most novelty may be in songs like Knockers (which actually has an almost similar drum intro and mentions "stones" as a measure of weight), Dinner Lady Arms, and Stampede of Love.
It could be argued that the 60 minute thing contains an echo of this early rock novelty/single entendre classic by The Dominoes:
Thanks so much for taking the time to find this - I'm stunned to find that the intro to the song in the film is identical to Unreal Reality's intro ("all that I See ...")! It was probably 40 years between hearing these two songs, how is it possible I could have made the connection after all this time? It's magical, mystical how you can travel time given few notes in a song - like taking a bite of Madeleine I suppose .
What plot? There isn't one. Rock concept albums are full of songs that the writer obviously liked and didn't want to waste and so shoehorned on to the album and hoped no-one would notice the song had nothing to with the overall 'concept'. Or else they were just too frazzled to notice or care.
EISB is definitely the loosest concept album of the RCA era. I guess any larger concept was tied into the unreleased tour film and so a lot like Arthur it could be considered the soundtrack to a visual project that was never finished (although in this case the filming was actually done). As others have already mentioned, maybe the seemingly more inconsequential tracks on this album would have made more sense in the context of soundtracking backstage and downtime tour footage.
