Muswell Hillbillies

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Original artwork for the Muswell Hillbillies album is included in a deluxe release (Image: Marketing Mix/BMG Rights Management) A contract with Pye records in 1964, saw them top the charts with You Really Got Me. Other hits followed including Sunny Afternoon, Days, Dead End Street, and Lola. On the 50th anniversary of the Kinks’ classic album Muswell Hillbillies, the time has come to appreciate the unique genius of Ray Davies’ political vision.

Everybody’s In Show-Biz opener Here Comes Another Day is a definite shift, a bigger production with keyboards and brass. Likewise You Don’t Know My Name is a bright and uplifting song with layers, piano and lot of additional touches. a b c d e Stephen Thomas Erlewine. "The Kinks: Muswell Hillbillies> Review" at AllMusic. Retrieved 9 November 2011. The Kinks at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark on June 30, 1972. Left to Right: John Dalton, Ray Davies, Dave Davies, John Gosling (Image: 1972 Jorgen Angel) Saunders, Mike (3 February 1972). "The Kinks: Muswell Hillbillies". Rolling Stone. No.RS 101. Straight Arrow. ISSN 0035-791X. Archived from the original on 24 January 2008.

Credits

My eldest sister, Rosie, brought me up. It’s a song about her going to work in a factory, and her way of escaping was the movies. No Nintendo. No PlayStation. No apps in those days. Rosie’s escape was the movies. I used her as a springboard and then I drifted off into my own world. As she walks to the corner shop, she’s “walking on the surrey with the fringe on top”. “The Surrey With The Fringe On Top” is a song from Oklahoma!. It’s the song that my other sister, Rene, was dancing to [at the Lyceum in 1957] when she died. A lot of inner messages are linked into the words. Only people who know me would fully understand them.

And to finish, 4 CDs (each in gatefold card sleeves), which replicate the two original albums, the bonus remixes and a CD of a travel montage from the 1971 tour. One lesson the album has for us today is that it is a mistake to separate social, political, and economic ills from their origins in mechanical thinking. The technocracy Davies describes is “Controlled by civil servants / And people dressed in grey.” This maintenance of this Orwellian vision is enforced by a police state run amok: “Don’t wanna get myself shot down / By some trigger happy policeman.” This moment has direct relevance to a source of political strife today. Still, because the band’s politics are so slippery, so incoherent to contemporary definitions, the album might frustrate partisans of any stripe. Here the police brutality is faceless and not comprehensible through moral judgments of individuals. It’s the age of machinery, after all. The problem of police brutality in this album is an outcome of the dehumanizing effects of our mechanical nightmare. What's a Muswell Hillbilly? Well, Muswell Hill was a community in England that the Davies family had to move to after their neighborhood in North London was razed and gentrified. You do the math, kiddo. Slaughter, Matthew (4 October 2013). "Muswell Hillbillies (reissue)". Drowned In Sound. Archived from the original on 23 April 2015 . Retrieved 31 December 2014. Concluding that records like Muswell Hillbillies are conservative because they map to some vague notion of Andy Griffith Show“family values” is reductive. Even a cursory glance at the Kinks’ discography dispels any serious ideological conservatism in the band. 1970’s “Lola”, one of the group’s biggest and most beloved singles is stunningly trans-positive for its time. 1983’s “Young Conservatives” openly lampoons its subject, referencing older Kinks songs along the way as if to make a statement about the bands’ historical positions on such matters.

The Muswell Hillbilly festival is Saturday, September 10, Noon-8pm, with Fortis Green Road closed to traffic. A deluxe box set of Muswell Hillbillies and Everybody's In Showbiz, Everybody's A Star including photos, remixes, remastered original songs and a Kinks north London 'roots map' of key locations, is released on September 9. Visit thekinks.info/latest/muswell-showbiz/ Dave Davies commented on the song, "There's that love and fondness for Americana and for country music because I had quite a big family, and all the great films like South Pacific and Oklahoma! – all these influences from the States – were embedded in our culture when growing up. It was kind of like a London version of The Beverly Hillbillies in a humorous way." [2] Release [ edit ]

The album was not a commercial success (it failed to chart in the United Kingdom and peaked at #100 in the U.S. [10]), and its sales were a disappointment following the success of Lola the previous year. Stereo Review magazine called the poor-selling record "album of the year" in 1972 (even though it was released on 24 November 1971). In the 1984 Rolling Stone Album Guide, Rolling Stone editors gave the album five stars out of five and called it Davies' "signature statement" as a songwriter. In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the album a wide-ranging collection of Ray Davies compositions which focus on the tensions and frustrations of modern life. [2] Re-releases [ edit ] But my only concern is, do two albums combined justify this? I’ll let you decide. Still, well put together and lots to enjoy. Muswell Hillbillies’ and ‘Everybody’s In Show-Biz’ original albums remastered in gatefold wallets, with original artwork.

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Whatever the trends and changes in direction, these are two excellent albums with excellently crafted songs, overlooked criminally at the time. The album resonates not because it easily fits into a political tribe but because it lays the blame for societal collapse at the feet of all, liberal and conservative alike. Mechanistic thinking that ignores the profound effects of change on actual people are the target of Davies’ political ire, not any single party. The original LP was a double, disc 1 new studio material, the second a live set from Carnegie Hall, New York, 1972.