Kinks
The Ultimate Collection

"Dirty old river

must you keep rolling,

flowing into the night..." *

Hello guys,

I take this Kinks collection as an excuse to say goodbye. In the previous review, I talked about my stay in London to improve my English.

The Kinks were my musical backbone along with the Small Faces from the great songs "All or nothing" onwards. But they mostly added a sense of intimacy to my London days when I would go for a walk or work, making London feel familiar to me, not as the "great" city the world talks about.

It was the living like "at home" that I liked, which made me feel like "someone," albeit in a small way, but always "someone."

The opening of this review is entrusted to "Waterloo sunset," my favorite song, which demonstrates Ray Davies' skill as a writer and (small) poet, earning the Kinks a place in the 1990 "Walk of fame" and Pete Townshend's declaration (his Who would enter the "Walk" at the same time) regarding Ray, "the man who should be considered as the 'Poet Laureate', having introduced a new way of writing into British music."

I don't know, but I can certainly say the Kinks were fantastic in the '60s, from "Face to face" onwards, for their (many) great songs and (all) great covers (including, for me, "Muswell Hillbillies").

"Waterloo sunset" was the second song I sang with a sheet of paper in hand on a sunny afternoon on the Waterloo Bridge, thinking about a beautiful young woman I admired and a young, yet younger than me, person I held in my heart, and at the same time thinking of the four who performed at the "Beat Club" (while Ray Davies, forty years later, would sing with a choir for the Bbc's "Electric Proms" (fantastic!)).

Every time I was over the river, whether at London Bridge or Putney (on the District Line - the "Green") or at Embankment, this song sprang to mind like a reflex.

"Waterloo" was written when the Merseybeat (that is, the Beatles' movement) was ceasing to exist; and the ending of the song has a touch of the "Californian," a solar quality.

When I began visiting places related to the Kinks, I started from the blue door in Muswell Hill, at the house where the Davies brothers lived.

There, my musical tour began with "Sunny afternoon" from 1966, born on the wave of the Beatles' "Taxman," against the many taxes of Harold Wilson's government, whose finance minister was Edward Heath.

In Ray Davies' case, the character in the song is one of the new bourgeoisie of the time, grappling with a tidal wave of taxes and his girlfriend fleeing with his car and telling stories of "drunkenness and cruelty" to her parents.

Next came "Dedicated follower of fashion" on Carnaby Street, where the literary aspect of Davies' lyrics is very evident in the definition of "Carnabitian army," which means "the army of Carnaby," in a track that ironically comments on Swingin' London.

In the same year (1966), the group filmed a video at Little Green Street, a (private) alleyway in the city's north that starts like a creuza (a narrow Ligurian coastal path) and ends after 20-25 meters with a tiny gallery (and houses on the side), for a song that went like this:

" There's a crack up in the ceiling

and the kitchen sink is leaking.

Out of work and got no money

a Sunday joint of bread and honey " **

I'm talking about "Dead end street," a song about the poor still present in '60s England, whose video, in which the four are dressed as early 1900s undertakers, was censored by the Bbc because it was considered "depressing," in a celebratory moment, as London was at the time.

I had other special moments in Kinksian London, though briefly, in visits to Soho, where the adult cinemas and porn shops perfectly match "Lola," in the green park beneath the house where I lived in Archway (the pub opposite the subway was where the cover photo of "Muswell Hillbillies" was taken) I found myself humming "Village green" and "The village green preservation society" and, skipping a year from the last mentioned songs, every day on the bus ride from home to Holloway Road tube station (north of London) for work, I saw all the identical "chimney pots" and couldn't help but think of "Shangri-la" (also once seeing the sky over the houses on Fulham Road and nearby areas from the tube train).

When it was time to move for work to a small Surrey village (the London hinterland), I had the more seasonal Kinks with me, specifically the "autumnal" ones from "Something else by the Kinks": "End of the season" (an amazing minor masterpiece, in my opinion) and "Lazy old sun" (psychedelia with a Rolling Stones flavor). While alone, "Autumn almanac," about English traditions (with a food-related line dear to me: "Tea and toasted, buttered currant buns"***) and "Mr. Pleasant" described by the author as a song about "someone superficially enjoying life for the things he owns, not realizing the rot behind it" (like "the wife who ran off with someone else").

Due to my family upbringing, I tend to love music from the past, especially a past that doesn't belong to me. I certainly would never want to live in a time before I was born, but to imagine it... yes (even though much music I listen to gives me the sensation of being made now and not decades ago).

If "Muswell Hillbillies" was the posthumous album of the Kinks' glorious phase ending with "Lola," for me, it's the album (but even more so the song) that always reminds me of my first period spent in North London, a London that wouldn't have been intimate without the Kinks.

* Old and dirty river / that keeps rolling, / flowing into the night.

** There's a crack in the ceiling / and the kitchen sink is leaking. / I'm out of work and got no money / a Sunday meal of bread and honey.

*** Tea and toasted, buttered currant buns.