The Kinks - Album by Album (song by song)

The show tune?

Speaking of which, I noticed that ‘Oklahoma’ (the movie) will be playing at our nearby theater this evening. Julie Andrews on the marquee.

 

Give the people what they want.

 

It seems odd. . Also flying back to the UK to play such a short set... it seems at least incomplete

 

I can only guess that's what it is

 

Playing truant from headmaster Ray?

 

Without anything further to go on, I'd think the most likely scenario is that that set is derived from an attendees memories, and they only remembered/were familiar with the 60s hits.. 'Plastic Man' in full seems unlikely but there was a Kinks Koncert tradition (apparently started in 1969 by uber-fan Frank Lima, as previously discussed on this thread) of throwing paper plates with obscure requests which were sometimes honoured with impromptu busked versions onstage, so I can maybe see it happening that way. Who knows for sure without a recording though, maybe it was a full blown well rehearsed full band 'Plastic Man '81' version. Or the attendee mixed it up with Superman...

 

At 9:30pm!

 

Haha i was kind of expecting your review to detest this song and had set my watch by it!

 

"Destroyer" was probably the most played song from Give The People What They Want on the radio. I know that WBCN did play it a lot. At first, I didn't really care for it because of its quoting of "ADAOTN" (musically) and "Lola" (lyrically), but I do appreciate it a lot more now, probably because of the nostalgia factor.

Avid Ajsmith, the reason why the 1981 & 1984 SNL Kinks appearances are so rare is that Peacock, NBC's streaming service, omits the musical guests on the post 1980 SNL shows. The shows from 1975-1980 (the original cast) have the musical guests intact because they came out on DVD and they did get permission to use the musical guests, which includes the Peacock broadcasts. The post 1980 shows never came out on DVD. My copies of the 1981 & 1984 appearances came from someone taping them from a VCR back in the day.

 

They played Destroyer again 3 years later on SNL?

 

No, sorry for any confusion: They played 'Destroyer' and 'Art lover' on SNL in 1981. They played 2 'Word Of Mouth' songs on their 1984 appearance. (I think the title track and something else). I've never seen either due to their unavailability as outlined by @DISKOJOE immediately above.

 

Thanks for the explanation. Damn! it's quite weird to me that I've still never been able to see these two, and they never seem to have appeared online.

 

I don’t know if this will load or not here but …

 

Maybe
There were floodlights, and night cricket was the new thing... so we'd play our little World Series Cricket under the lights...
Maybe not til 9:30 though.... it's hard to remember lol

 

If I were keeping score, I wouldn’t know which column to place this in. Like? Dislike? Indifferent?

 

Way off topic, but of interest, especially for Our Headmaster and our Aussie Avids. I usually read old LIFE magazines on Google Books. Below is the link to the March 18, 1942 issue which has an article about Australian slang on p.16. I'm just wondering if our Aussie Avids know any of these terms in the article:

LIFE

 

Stick it in the Life column, Avid Zeki

 

Thanks! Now Dave DID turn up for this shoot, but given the amount of screen time he was allotted compared to his brother, you can understand why he might have started playing hooky from other appearances around this time!

 

Yeah, I just found this today and it looks like the other SNL performances are on this same site too. Wasn’t sure the link would work outside the US so I’m glad it works! First time I’ve seen this in decades.

 

Destroyer

With GTPWTW being my first kurrent Kinks album following kasual familiarity with a few US radio hits, I really took to this song. With my basic level of exposure, the Lola reference and the self plagiarized riff gave me threads of continuity I could really latch on to. Some said it was cheap and indicated a lack of new ideas, others said it was an inartistic of to capture new fans in the US market. If so, it worked with me and I didn't give one hoot what was behind it. I heard a group having some fun with their history, and so did I. And they were clearly doing so in a new context, so it was all good.

Does anyone else love the keyboard intersections in this song? The Kinks made the transition from four-piect to five-piece exceptionally well I think.

 

(Not that I’m counting or anything…but, if I was, it’s 2-1 ratio of likes over dislikes; with three (as determined by me…and this includes your “life”!) thrown into the mixed bag/indifferent column. So far.)

 

It is interesting, and a few of those have changed over the years...
Drogo has me puzzled though... I wonder if they mean Drongo ... a drongo is essentially an idiot, but more often than not used in a non-aggressive way "Oh mate, don't be a drongo"

 

Well, I had Life Magazine on my mind.

 

Destroyer

Put me in the “not a fan of this song” camp. I agree with the idea that perhaps “you had to be there” for this one. I was not there. My Kink fandom started in the late 90s, and I was only familiar with this song since (never owned it and it wasn’t in my mp3 collection that I gathered around 2000). Never heard it on the radio since I was barely born when this song was all over the radio. It seems like a novelty or parody song to me. Yes, it rocks, and quotes Lola (lyrically) and All Day and All of the Night (musical and lyrically with the “Girl, I want…”), but the verse melody/delivery also reminds me of the verse melody/delivery from He’s Evil.

I just can’t get passed the recycling aspect of it. At least the recycling is made plainly obvious, I guess. But that doesn’t do it any favors for me. I think this is different from Ray more subtly borrowing or recycling riffs from previous deep cuts on new deep cuts, that only members of this thread would pick up. But Destroyer is too obvious and right there for be casual fan, and that lessens the specialness of it in my opinion.

If I knew it from release date for 40 years now, I may have a different opinion of it.

 

When you say they were possibly testing Come Dancing as a single by playing it live in December 1982 are you talking about for the USA as was it not first issued as a 12" single in November 1982 in the UK?