Fact #104188
When:
Short story:
Full article:
THE KINKS - FACE TO FACE
All-too-often dismissed as a transitional album, Face To Face actually ranks alongside The Kinks' finest releases, and here's why.
Convention holds that the band's presiding genius, Ray Davies, reached his songwriting zenith with the 1968 concept offering The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, and that Face To Face was little more than a halfway house between The Kinks' revolutionary rock style (arguably the start of heavy metal) and the more sophisticated quintessentially English observational rock they pioneered in the latter half of the decade.
That argument holds some water if Face To Face is considered in the form in which it first reached the market place - a fourteen song album whose highest profile song - in terms of chart success - was the hit single Sunny Afternoon.
In this form, it was an excellent album by any standards but, curiously, it's a bunch of Kinks' classic that don't appear on the original album which justify its elevation to Viny Icon status. Yes, I know that sounds nonsensical, but on some re-issues, enlightened compilers have added Well Respected Man, Dedicated Follower Of Fashion and Dead End Street - a clutch of classics which, to any but the cloth-eared, clearly sit very comfortably among the Face To Face tracks.
I will, of course, be taking a good look at the 'original' album but bear with me while I justify those extraneous additions.
On its release (September 17, 1965) Well Respected Man was recognised as being not quite like anything else in The Kinks' canon. Up til that moment, The Kinks had been the UK's heaviest rock band and, when they strayed into quieter territory, Davies' lyrics were generally instrospective and not a little angst-ridden.
Suddenly, though, he threw Well Respected Man into the mix. Not only was the sound musically lighter, more sophisticated and unmistakeably retro, but the lyric was an outward-looking social comment about the upper-middle class milieu that working class Davies had found himself in, largely because of associating with the band's well-heeled management team of Robert Wace and Grenville Collins. Kinks' bassist Pete Quaife once said, "Robert was so upper class we had to teach him how to swear. He couldn't do it. He could say 'F**k' but it didn't sound like a swear word."
Wace and Collins, as well as supplying much needed seed-money, had introduced The Kinks to sophisticated society, and the central character of Well Respected Man could easily be either of them.
Davies was smart enough to realise, though, that this song - the first of an entirely new batch - didn't belong on the album they were making around this time (The Kink Kontroversy) and released it only on an EP -The Kwyet Kinks - where it was less out of place.
Davies next song in the same musical style was Dedicated Follower Of Fashion. Released on February 25, 1966, it dished out the same treatment as Well Respected Man had, but focussed instead on a foppish fashion victim. It was a Top 5 single in the UK, but its very success caused Davies considerable anxiety. "People started coming up to me on the street and singing the chorus in my face: 'Oh yes he is, oh yes he is,' as if to say that I knew who I was. Unfortunately, my inner and somewhat distorted sense of reality told me that this was not who I wanted to be: I didn't know who I was."
Once again, perhaps because of Davies' antipathy, the song did not appear on a Kinks album - although it would have been perfect for Face To Face.
Pete Townshend of The Who was one of many who understood what was happening to Davies' creativity. "The Kinks were quintessentially English," Townshend has said. "I always think that Ray Davies should one day be Poet Laureate. He invented a new kind of poetry and a new kind of language for pop writing that influenced me from the very, very, very beginning."
In essence, The Kinks had started out as a heavily American-influenced rock band, but were now transforming into the epitome of Englishness.
Although it lacks Well Respected Man and Dedicated Follower Of Fashion, Face To Face was the album that brought this transformation to fulfilment, an achievement all the more remarkable because it emerged from a period of intense unhappiness in the band.
Not long after the success of Dedicated Follower, Ray Davies suffered a nervous breakdown. "I was a zombie," he told Phil McNeill of the NME many years later. "I'd been on the go from when we first made it til then, and I was completely out of my mind."
Bassist Pete Quaife didn't see it the same way. "He was faking it or at least exaggerating it," asserted Quaife. "I really don't think he cared about whether the band survived or not at that point. In fact, we were all just wishing it would fold and we could get away from the responsibilities."
Whatever the truth may have been, when the band went into Pye Studios to record Face To Face in May 1966, they got off to a racing start, laying down three tracks - Sunny Afternoon, Fancy and I'm Not Like Everybody Else.
According to Davies, "I tried not to write, but when I was coming out of the breakdown, I started. I wrote End Of The Season, Sunny Afternoon, Too Much On My Mind and I'm Not Like Everybody Else."
Sunny Afternoon, he says, "worked a treat" and was recorded in one take the day after a late night rehearsal. Describing his singing approach, he has said, "I didn't want to sound American. I was very conscious of sounding English."
Fancy, too, came quite easily. "I remember writing Fancy really late one night. I had this silly old Framus guitar that I played on all those records. I had the wrong strings on it but it had a nice quality. It was a picking sound, and it could sustain one note, as Indian music does. The song deals with perception. I think love is like something that you hold. You've got to put love in your hand like that, but you must never grasp it."
Things were looking promising until, on June 4 1966, Pete Quaife was badly injured while driving back to London from a gig in Blackpool, forcing the already unstable band to draft in a replacement, John Dalton.
Sessions for the album had to continue, but despite the problems, producer Shel Talmy has stated, "I always remember The Kinks as being professional in the studio. I respected their opinion and they mine. They'd just come in and record. I think the studio was an oasis of sanity by comparison with what was going on outside."
Other standout tracks include the atmospheric Rainy Day In June, whose thunderstorm effects mirror Davies' mood at the time. "It was from my fantasy in the back garden," he later revealed. "I love rain and the moistness after a storm, and it was about fairies and little evil things within the trees that come to life."
Dandy (memorably covered by Herman's Hermits), tackles territory not dissimilar to Dedicated Follower Of Fashion, but the central character is rumoured to have been Ray's guitarist brother Dave Davies, whose wild lifestyle and sexual dalliances apparently provided lyrical inspiration.
Even more intimately revealing is the heartfelt Rosie Won't You Please Come Home, a direct plea to Ray's sister who had moved to Australia. "I lived with Rosie," he explained. "I called Rosie 'Mum' until I was five years old."
The last song recorded for the album was Little Miss Queen Of Darkness on June 21 and perhaps it was a little rushed, because drummer Mick Avory has cited it as the one track he'd like to re-record. "I did a 16-bar drum solo with phrases as an overdub," he says, "and it went out of sync with the track near the end. The producer thought it was ok, but I hated it, particularly as I could have corrected it in a few minutes."
Space doesn't permit detailed examination of every track on Face To Face, but the quality is very high indeed, far outshining any previous Kinks effort. That Ray Davies was, creatively at least, in a purple patch, is underlined by the fact that even before the completed album hit the shops, The Kinks were back in the studio to record Dead End Street, another undeniable Kinks' classic.
"I wanted to write a song, a modern-day depression song, like the songs of the American Depression, because I felt that's what was happening around me," Davis later explained. The twin inspirations for the song were the despair felt in the wake of the Aberfan Coal Mining Disaster, and the recollections of his wife Rasa's parents who had survived hard times in Germany. Once again, it did not appear on any contemporary Kinks album, and is clearly a close companion of the songs on Face To Face. It just arrived a few days too late to be included.
Subsequent re-issues of Face To Face have, astutely I feel, included Well Respected Man, Dedicated Follower Of Fashion and Dead End Street and my advice would be to seek out one of those rather than an original version. With those inclusions, Face To Face stands revealed as the moment when Ray Davies hit his peak.
(Extended version of a feature by Johnny Black which appeared in Hi Fi News during 2014)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ray Davies (leader, The Kinks] : I didn't like that sleeve. I wanted the cover to be black and strong like the sound of the LP instead of all those fancy colours. I was starting to let things go and accepting things that I shouldn't have.
(Source : not known)
Tweet this Fact
All-too-often dismissed as a transitional album, Face To Face actually ranks alongside The Kinks' finest releases, and here's why.
Convention holds that the band's presiding genius, Ray Davies, reached his songwriting zenith with the 1968 concept offering The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, and that Face To Face was little more than a halfway house between The Kinks' revolutionary rock style (arguably the start of heavy metal) and the more sophisticated quintessentially English observational rock they pioneered in the latter half of the decade.
That argument holds some water if Face To Face is considered in the form in which it first reached the market place - a fourteen song album whose highest profile song - in terms of chart success - was the hit single Sunny Afternoon.
In this form, it was an excellent album by any standards but, curiously, it's a bunch of Kinks' classic that don't appear on the original album which justify its elevation to Viny Icon status. Yes, I know that sounds nonsensical, but on some re-issues, enlightened compilers have added Well Respected Man, Dedicated Follower Of Fashion and Dead End Street - a clutch of classics which, to any but the cloth-eared, clearly sit very comfortably among the Face To Face tracks.
I will, of course, be taking a good look at the 'original' album but bear with me while I justify those extraneous additions.
On its release (September 17, 1965) Well Respected Man was recognised as being not quite like anything else in The Kinks' canon. Up til that moment, The Kinks had been the UK's heaviest rock band and, when they strayed into quieter territory, Davies' lyrics were generally instrospective and not a little angst-ridden.
Suddenly, though, he threw Well Respected Man into the mix. Not only was the sound musically lighter, more sophisticated and unmistakeably retro, but the lyric was an outward-looking social comment about the upper-middle class milieu that working class Davies had found himself in, largely because of associating with the band's well-heeled management team of Robert Wace and Grenville Collins. Kinks' bassist Pete Quaife once said, "Robert was so upper class we had to teach him how to swear. He couldn't do it. He could say 'F**k' but it didn't sound like a swear word."
Wace and Collins, as well as supplying much needed seed-money, had introduced The Kinks to sophisticated society, and the central character of Well Respected Man could easily be either of them.
Davies was smart enough to realise, though, that this song - the first of an entirely new batch - didn't belong on the album they were making around this time (The Kink Kontroversy) and released it only on an EP -The Kwyet Kinks - where it was less out of place.
Davies next song in the same musical style was Dedicated Follower Of Fashion. Released on February 25, 1966, it dished out the same treatment as Well Respected Man had, but focussed instead on a foppish fashion victim. It was a Top 5 single in the UK, but its very success caused Davies considerable anxiety. "People started coming up to me on the street and singing the chorus in my face: 'Oh yes he is, oh yes he is,' as if to say that I knew who I was. Unfortunately, my inner and somewhat distorted sense of reality told me that this was not who I wanted to be: I didn't know who I was."
Once again, perhaps because of Davies' antipathy, the song did not appear on a Kinks album - although it would have been perfect for Face To Face.
Pete Townshend of The Who was one of many who understood what was happening to Davies' creativity. "The Kinks were quintessentially English," Townshend has said. "I always think that Ray Davies should one day be Poet Laureate. He invented a new kind of poetry and a new kind of language for pop writing that influenced me from the very, very, very beginning."
In essence, The Kinks had started out as a heavily American-influenced rock band, but were now transforming into the epitome of Englishness.
Although it lacks Well Respected Man and Dedicated Follower Of Fashion, Face To Face was the album that brought this transformation to fulfilment, an achievement all the more remarkable because it emerged from a period of intense unhappiness in the band.
Not long after the success of Dedicated Follower, Ray Davies suffered a nervous breakdown. "I was a zombie," he told Phil McNeill of the NME many years later. "I'd been on the go from when we first made it til then, and I was completely out of my mind."
Bassist Pete Quaife didn't see it the same way. "He was faking it or at least exaggerating it," asserted Quaife. "I really don't think he cared about whether the band survived or not at that point. In fact, we were all just wishing it would fold and we could get away from the responsibilities."
Whatever the truth may have been, when the band went into Pye Studios to record Face To Face in May 1966, they got off to a racing start, laying down three tracks - Sunny Afternoon, Fancy and I'm Not Like Everybody Else.
According to Davies, "I tried not to write, but when I was coming out of the breakdown, I started. I wrote End Of The Season, Sunny Afternoon, Too Much On My Mind and I'm Not Like Everybody Else."
Sunny Afternoon, he says, "worked a treat" and was recorded in one take the day after a late night rehearsal. Describing his singing approach, he has said, "I didn't want to sound American. I was very conscious of sounding English."
Fancy, too, came quite easily. "I remember writing Fancy really late one night. I had this silly old Framus guitar that I played on all those records. I had the wrong strings on it but it had a nice quality. It was a picking sound, and it could sustain one note, as Indian music does. The song deals with perception. I think love is like something that you hold. You've got to put love in your hand like that, but you must never grasp it."
Things were looking promising until, on June 4 1966, Pete Quaife was badly injured while driving back to London from a gig in Blackpool, forcing the already unstable band to draft in a replacement, John Dalton.
Sessions for the album had to continue, but despite the problems, producer Shel Talmy has stated, "I always remember The Kinks as being professional in the studio. I respected their opinion and they mine. They'd just come in and record. I think the studio was an oasis of sanity by comparison with what was going on outside."
Other standout tracks include the atmospheric Rainy Day In June, whose thunderstorm effects mirror Davies' mood at the time. "It was from my fantasy in the back garden," he later revealed. "I love rain and the moistness after a storm, and it was about fairies and little evil things within the trees that come to life."
Dandy (memorably covered by Herman's Hermits), tackles territory not dissimilar to Dedicated Follower Of Fashion, but the central character is rumoured to have been Ray's guitarist brother Dave Davies, whose wild lifestyle and sexual dalliances apparently provided lyrical inspiration.
Even more intimately revealing is the heartfelt Rosie Won't You Please Come Home, a direct plea to Ray's sister who had moved to Australia. "I lived with Rosie," he explained. "I called Rosie 'Mum' until I was five years old."
The last song recorded for the album was Little Miss Queen Of Darkness on June 21 and perhaps it was a little rushed, because drummer Mick Avory has cited it as the one track he'd like to re-record. "I did a 16-bar drum solo with phrases as an overdub," he says, "and it went out of sync with the track near the end. The producer thought it was ok, but I hated it, particularly as I could have corrected it in a few minutes."
Space doesn't permit detailed examination of every track on Face To Face, but the quality is very high indeed, far outshining any previous Kinks effort. That Ray Davies was, creatively at least, in a purple patch, is underlined by the fact that even before the completed album hit the shops, The Kinks were back in the studio to record Dead End Street, another undeniable Kinks' classic.
"I wanted to write a song, a modern-day depression song, like the songs of the American Depression, because I felt that's what was happening around me," Davis later explained. The twin inspirations for the song were the despair felt in the wake of the Aberfan Coal Mining Disaster, and the recollections of his wife Rasa's parents who had survived hard times in Germany. Once again, it did not appear on any contemporary Kinks album, and is clearly a close companion of the songs on Face To Face. It just arrived a few days too late to be included.
Subsequent re-issues of Face To Face have, astutely I feel, included Well Respected Man, Dedicated Follower Of Fashion and Dead End Street and my advice would be to seek out one of those rather than an original version. With those inclusions, Face To Face stands revealed as the moment when Ray Davies hit his peak.
(Extended version of a feature by Johnny Black which appeared in Hi Fi News during 2014)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ray Davies (leader, The Kinks] : I didn't like that sleeve. I wanted the cover to be black and strong like the sound of the LP instead of all those fancy colours. I was starting to let things go and accepting things that I shouldn't have.
(Source : not known)