The Kinks - Album by Album (song by song)

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by mark winstanley, Apr 4, 2021.

  1. ThereOnceWasANote

    ThereOnceWasANote Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cape May, NJ
    Yeah, I remember that. I didn't own but I remember seeing it.
     
  2. TeddyB

    TeddyB Senior Member

    Location:
    Hollywoodland
    Underneath the Neon: Ray must have a lot of thoughts these days about the internet and people’s “second lives”. I might have thought this song, which is very pretty, was one too many in the “Ray complains about the unreality of modern life” song file, but maybe it’s prophetic instead. The Matrix, anyone?
     
  3. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    I like this, it's fun and I think fairly imaginative.... it's certainly grown/growing on me quite a bit... I'm not sure I find it quite as engaging as the Preservation series ... for me personally... but hey that's better than 3 months ago, I didn't really like it much at all lol
     
  4. pablo fanques

    pablo fanques Somebody's Bad Handwroter In Memoriam

    Location:
    Poughkeepsie, NY
    Well said. Can't imagine your original write-up topping it
     
  5. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    Hilarious!
     
  6. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    He originated using an index here?
    Either way he wrote some essays that were better than I had read in most Stones books by some margin.
     
  7. The late man

    The late man Forum Resident

    Location:
    France
    I'm not telling the whole truth here. I did try to smoke a joint 3 or 4 years ago. Inhaling the smoke was a real challenge, but I finally made it. I don't remember what the exact substance was, and I don't know which one between the tobacco and the "additive" had the more effect on me, but I spent an indeterminate number of hours prostrate beside the toilet seat, while my wife lay half conscious on the living room sofa, hearing me throwing my bowels up. Thankfully the kids were in bed. Pathetic old man.
     
  8. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Nah mate, nothing pathetic about that ... tobacco will make you ill if you have too much and aren't used to it.
    If there was weed in there it may have caused a low blood sugar reaction, but shouldn't make you sick.
    One should never spoil good weed by cutting it with tobacco :)
     
  9. mark winstanley

    mark winstanley Certified dinosaur, who likes physical product Thread Starter

    Holiday Romance.

    [​IMG]
    Single by The Kinks
    from the album Soap Opera
    B-side
    "Shepherds of the Nation"
    Released 11 October 1974
    Recorded August - October 1974 at Konk Studios, London
    Length 3:12
    Label RCA
    Songwriter(s) Ray Davies
    Producer(s) Ray Davies


    stereo mix, recorded Sep 1974 at Konk Studios, Hornsey, London

    [​IMG]

    On the subway train he sees adverts
    for holidays in Jamaica, a weekend in
    Rome, a cruise round the
    Mediterranean, and dreams of a quiet
    week in a little seaside resort away
    from his wife, the ducks on the wall,
    the soap operas, the office and his
    friends - and who knows, he might
    encounter a holiday romance.


    Holiday Romance

    I had a break for a week
    So I booked my seat
    And confirmed a reservation
    At a quiet little seaside hotel.
    I packed my bags
    And I caught my train and
    Reached my destination
    Just in time for the dinner gong--ding dong.
    Then I saw Lavinia
    Standing at the bottom of the stairs.
    And I fell for Lavinia
    The moment that I saw her standing there.

    Lavinia looked so divine
    As she walked up to the table to dine
    And then Lavinia's eyes met mine.

    I thought can this be love,
    Can this be lovey-dove
    Or just a holiday romance?
    Can this be long lost love at last
    Or is it just a flash in the pan?

    Then after cheese and liqueurs they struck up the band,
    I plucked up my courage and I asked Lavinia to dance
    That was the start of my holiday romance.
    Just a holiday romance.

    We did the foxtrot, samba and danced through the night
    The last waltz came and we held each other so tight.
    That was the start of my holiday romance.

    Just a holiday romance
    A simple holiday romance.
    I wonder should I take a chance?

    We walked on the beach,
    And we paddled our feet,
    And we watched all the swimmers,
    And my holiday treat felt complete.
    We drank lemonade,
    And we sat in the shade,
    I thought I must be on a winner
    And I acted cool and discreet.
    For I knew that Lavinia
    Was the shyest lady that I'd ever met,
    And I knew that Lavinia
    Would only be my lady for the week.

    It was just a holiday romance
    A simple holiday romance.
    I wonder should I take this chance?
    Just a holiday romance.

    Can this be love,
    Can this be lovey-dove
    Or just a holiday romance?

    I tried to kiss her, she walked away,
    She said "Better stop, my husband's
    coming to collect me today".
    That was the end of my holiday,
    Sweet and innocent holiday,
    End of my holiday romance.

    Written by: Ray Davies
    Published by: Davray Music Ltd.

    So the little intro that isn't included in the lyrics adds a little context to what is happening here.... Norman didn't go anywhere...
    We need to remember that Norman is still drunk and after wandering in the illusory twilight, he has made his way to the subway/tube and is now on the train, and confronted with advertisements for vacations that may take him away from all of the robotic existence to taste some reality and excitement.... and we all need a vacation ... or do we? It will mean spending a big bunch of money, and keep us locked in the routine..... YES, we need a vacation/holiday, because a taste of something nice, and real is essential to long term sanity.

    So in his drunken dreaming mind Norman dreams of his escape, at least for a little while, from the grind (the grind he has experienced for one day so far LOL- compound that by forty or fifty years, and then wonder why people end up the way we do :) )
    Lyrically we have a funny little track here, that kind covers a lot of ground really. To some degree it highlights some of the reasons that affairs can sometimes arrive.
    Both people in this song are married.... and there is an implication that they are just somewhat bored with the rigmarole of their day to day lives.
    Interestingly if we look at the things Norman and Lavinia do, they are likely the things they each did with their actual partners before the grind of 9 to 5 life, and the wearing, repetitive nature of their day to day lives put space between them.... a space that can be removed, but we end up caught in a perpetual motion machine that often stops us from spending the time required to reintroduce romance or fun into our relationships. What's worse is, we sometimes blame each other for the way the space comes about.

    Anyway, that's just a take on the theme here.

    In many ways I can see how some folks would see this song as not fitting in with the rest of the story, but with the knowledge that this is just an internal fantasy and not an external reality, it actually fits in nicely and works as a very smooth continuation from the artificial world of the twilight of drunken revelry on a Friday night after work.
    It is more escapism, in light of that feeling of being trapped in the groundhog day of the working week's reality.

    Musically this works really well too. It has a familiar styling .. and I am not sure quite what to call it, but I know you guys will pinpoint that in the following comments.
    It sort of makes me think of a golden era of Hollywood track. The score is wonderful. The strings and the horns work wonderfully here.
    We have some nice keys from Gosling that sit just below the surface, and the bass comes across as very traditional.

    Ray, and I assume the band give us a great vocal arrangement. There is a stack of personality in the way the vocals are presented. Ray gives us a wonderfully characterful vocal, and the accompanying backing vocals work wonderfully.... and actually listening more closely, many of the backing vocals may be Ray too...... Some have a certain cartoonish styling that works well too.

    We have the band revisiting stylings that are far from traditional rock, but again for me, they work well. the Kinks seem to manage to do these kinds of odd stylings really well, and in a way that I still find accessible..... I am unlikely to buy an album by Charles Aznevour, no disrespect to Charles intended, but for some reason, when the Kinks do something like this, it generally works in the context of the album for me.

    It is interesting to me that the Kinks chose this as a single .....

    Anyway, I think this is a delightful track, that works much better than it probably should, but also carries a quite deep underlying message, almost in spite of itself.

     
  10. Fortuleo

    Fortuleo Used to be a Forum Resident

    In the “libretto”, they mention Jamaica and Rome, in the lyrics they talk about the seaside, but the music still gives me images of vacation in Austria or Switzerland, old Europe, mountains and lakes, maybe something out of a sophisticated Max Ophüls movie (director of “la Ronde”, whose title has the feel of the orchestral music arrangement here). Or could it be Slovenia? Then you’d get everything, the Austro-Hungarian empire feel, the mountains and the sea. Let’s settle for Slovenia, then! The Lavinia name could be Slavic, for all I know (I think it’s supposed to be Italian). Anyway, this is the long lost Kinks hit. It’s got a superb melody, a great dancing feel to it, it was issued as a single, the story is good, relatable, some lines are fantastic. I mean, it’s hard to beat “just in time for the dinner gong / ding dong”. I’m trying to figure out why it bombed commercially, and I’ve only come up with two reasons. 1/ as one of the rare Kinks songs with no guitar whatsoever, it’s almost a provocation. 2/ Ray’s histrionics as a singer, his seemingly endless variations of voice, accent, tone, phrasing, intent. He goes for a myriad of subtle changes, in one of his most virtuoso performances ever (just how he gets to the high pitched “chance” kills me every time), but I can understand how this could be taken as a way of being flippant about the very idea of what a pop single was supposed to be in 1975. Note how the arrangement (nicked from Van Dyke Parks’ The Four Mills Brothers, or whatever classical piece Van Dyke nicked it from in the first place) is used as the main hook. It’s always a great trick. As such, it’s pretty close to the formula that would eventually give the Kinks their 80’s hit Come Dancing. But it does lack the big chorus/refrain of that later song. I still think it should’ve/could’ve been a hit, if Nilsson or Freddie Mercury had sung it instead of the You Really Got Me guy. But it could be my Kinks fan paranoia talking…
     
  11. Vangro

    Vangro Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    Lavinia is meant to be a classy upper class name, I think, not a foreign name.
     
    Last edited: Feb 1, 2022
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  12. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    Underneath The Neon Sign

    Dave's guitar figures remind me of the Allman Brothers (Jessica perhaps) with an occasional moment of the Doobies thrown in.
    I get another Avids comment about this being a slowed down Sweet Little Sixteen bar a chordal change though somehow I can hear Surfin' USA!

    A pleasant song not very Kinky, horns not very horny and a subject matter i have little empathy for now i am so old and mature though perhaps i will appreciate it more when given more than 5 minutes awareness in my life?
     
  13. Steve62

    Steve62 Vinyl hunter

    Location:
    Murrumbateman
    Underneath the Neon Sign
    This is a splendid slow song with Ray in crooner mode. I see the neon sign as a metaphor for the concrete and technology of the modern world, which Ray has tackled a few times before (e.g. 20th Century Man, Apeman). A pleasant way to begin Side 2.

    Holiday Romance
    This is close to the most enjoyable song on the album for me - mainly because it's as funny as anything Ray ever wrote. Preposterous accents, the exaggerated high notes on taking a "chance", Lavinia's name, Lavinia's voice. I find it all extremely amusing.
    On the storyline, I think it's rather shameful that Ray would be looking for an affair so soon after sleeping with Norman's wife! Maybe Ray was fitting the role parodied by one of Spinal Tap's drummers when asked about life after music "As long as there's, you know, sex and drugs, I can do without the rock and roll." :D
     
  14. Zeki

    Zeki Forum Resident

    Holiday Romance:

    Category? Show tune. As usual, perfectly crafted by a master tunesmith, this is the show stopper of the musical theater show.

    Would I have had even the remotest inkling that this was The Kinks if I’d heard this in the wild back in 1975? Absolutely not.

    Would this have received airplay on any of the FM stations I was listening to in 1975? Highly doubtful.

    Do I like it? Yes. It’s a fun track. I could envision turning up the AM radio and singing along to “Just in time for the dinner gong-ding dong.”

    And, after a breath…”Then I saw Lavinia…”

    Very clever, catchy, a novelty number on the pop music dial. I recognize the intro from somewhere, at least I think I do, but can’t put my finger on it. Maybe I did hear this on the radio?
     
  15. Vangro

    Vangro Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    Could it be this album is underrated? It's looking that way! So "Holiday Romance" is very much in the vicinity of Noel Coward and conjures up visions of chaps with brilliantined hair lighting cigarettes in holders for young ladies who look like Louise Brooks. Is Ray a fan of Noel Coward? I would imagine so. I'm still not convinced that this has anything to do with the plot and isn't just a good song that Ray was determined to use no matter what.
     
  16. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    Phonetically it still will be though you know think....aw-fun!
     
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  17. ARL

    ARL Forum Resident

    Location:
    England
    "Holiday Romance"

    Perhaps the most show-tuney of anything in the RCA era, this is a very enjoyable track with Ray going through the full gamut of his vocal tricks. I could do without the "can this be love/can this be lovey-dove?" lines as that makes me shudder a little. It conjures up visions of old-time seaside holidays at posh resorts (i.e. not Southend), although I feel it's only earned its place in the Soap Opera story courtesy of a very large shoehorn. What this really needed was to be on Top of the Pops with Pans People doing one of their very literal interpretations of it, but I don't imagine it was played on Radio 1 very much, if at all.
     
  18. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    So you are saying I should not have given away my London Think Visual CD back in 2009 (when Nadal won his 1st of 2 Australian Open Titles) even though it was to a one time friend of Mr Dave Davies?
     
  19. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
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  20. stewedandkeefed

    stewedandkeefed Came Ashore In The Dead Of The Night

    "Holiday Romance" is really quite charming. Musically, I have very little interest in a song like this on paper but there is something so compelling about Ray and his vocal delivery that it is hard to not get caught up in this song. By this point Ray and the Kinks were fully in musical theatre territory and absorbing all sorts of non rock n roll sources to put together these series of songs telling a story. I mean Quadrophenia tells a story but musically it is very much consistent with The Who's music from the previous couple of years whereas on Preservation and Soap Opera, I am surprised by the variety in the music the Kinks incorporated.
     
  21. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    Why not, she's Norman's wife not his!
     
  22. ajsmith

    ajsmith Senior Member

    Location:
    Glasgow
    Welp, it looks like I've been big fat wrong again when I've been going on about the album version of the storyline being intended to take place over longer than a day! Seems like I never paid enough attention to the liner notes (to be fair I've only owned the album for 23 1/2 years so it's been hard to find the time to read them properly...). Still, I maintain that with those extra songs, the LP version of the story still takes the audience on a significantly more substantial journey than the TV version, even if Norman doesn't spend any longer in his delusion within the fictional timeline.

    As I intimated above, this is kind of the last track released under the name The Kinks that goes full bore for that old timey sound. Baroque pop, music hall, vaudeville, soft shoe, call it what you will, and I appreciate I'm horribly misusing and conflating these terms in a purely technical sense but you know what I mean. What I guess I mean is that this track goes full on for that sound and makes no concession to being performed by a rock group first and foremost in a way that The Kinks were able to do with an effortless blend in their 67-69 zenith and would still do so intermittently in the following years but I would venture never really did after this LP. Of course it's a lot camper and self conscious than they were in 67-69: (it's very true that that stuff is rightly eulogised for it's unique magic and good taste).... I do enjoy all the daft voices and phrases (except as @ARL says the 'lovey dove' bit, WAY too precious) but I can see how it could just seem like an irritating try-too-hard mess to some. Then again, as already mentioned above, the likes of Queen were ripping up the charts at the time with such campery. I do think Ray gets held to a higher standard for what he'd already done, which means people (well the British music buying public post 1972 anyway) weren't willing to give what he did after a chance on it's own terms

    That said there are for me, two brief but magical moments when those ghosty backing vocals come after 'for/that Lavinia' where I could swear I can just see Dave and Pete and Rasa crowding around the mics like it's 1967 once more. Now I know it's obviously not Pete or Rasa here, and there's probably a good chance Dave isn't even involved (though I hope he is) and it's just Ray doubling himself but in that brief instant something about it manages somehow to sound pure Something Else to me.

    NOW here's a sideways relevant digression about something I've been meaning to mention at some point in this thread, and that I wonder if anyone else has encountered, In the potted histories of The Kinks that appear in general rock encyclopedias, (I used to look up loads of these back in the 90s on the trail of new factual morsels on the band when more specific information was harder to come by) I used to come across 3 'facts' about their personnel changes that I later found out to be incorrect:

    1) that John Dalton actually replaced Peter Quaife permanently in 1966 and that Quaife's photos were just used on album covers and publicity shots for the next 3 years: A ludicrous 'Paul Is Dead' level conspiracy but reported as fact in otherwise well researched tomes like Pete Frame's Rock Family Trees and Martin C Strong's The Great Rock Discography. I think this whopper may derive from a misreading of one particular article from 1966 which kind of gave this impression.

    2) that John Dalton returned briefly to replace Andy Pyle in mid 1978 (much less hard to believe, but I've never seen any evidence of it and there's nothing in Hinman), and....

    3) that, disillusioned with the direction of the group, Dave left The Kinks for a year or 2 in the mid 70s. This last one is again patently disprovable through all available evidence, but I do wonder if it the acorn of truth it derives from is that he isn't on this single, at least not as an instrumentalist. As @Fortuleo mentioned, there's no guitar on this at all so other than (maybe, hopefully?) b/vs it's hard to see where he'd fit. I wonder if 'Dave isn't on the new Kinks single' was mentioned in the press somewhere and got misreported second hand as he'd left the group circa this timeframe.
     
    Last edited: Feb 1, 2022
  23. Zeki

    Zeki Forum Resident

    Interesting, though it doesn’t surprise me. This song could be by Ray and the Norman Free Big Band Ensemble with nary a Kink in sight.
     
  24. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    Holiday Romance

    I have known of this little gem for 20+ years courtesy of the Waterloo Sunset The Songs Of Ray Davies CD.
    @Michael Streett is there mix differences from how it was first heard in 1975?

    When I first heard this it took quite some time for me to get used to, appreciate and then ultimately really come to enjoy.
    The spoken scenario amid strings makes us think visual and takes us on holiday amidst imagery of a bygone era that Ray has always preserved.

    I love the slow, cautiously developing relationship and the simple, quaint innocent things they get up to to feel more confident and assured to wonder if they should take this..... "chance!"

    Vocally Ray gives a deft masterclass full of light and shade, hope and humour and even slips in a Beatles song title, I Saw Her Standing There.

    At weeks end when it's all over i see Ray reminisce with this postcard to himself that runs like a diary of pleasantries in his mind!
     
  25. All Down The Line

    All Down The Line The Under Asst East Coast White Label Promo Man

    Location:
    Australia
    Love your timely post as in my post i forgot to relate Holiday Romance back to something Ray may well have written and produced similarly in their latterday Klassic Pye era!

    N.b. Many moons ago when I knew little of the Kinks backstory I actually thought it fact that Dave Davies had left the band for a year or two somewhere around 1973-'74 circa White City and Preservation Activities!
     

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