Disc of the day
Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement
From Sheffield, synth pop and funk to stick it to Thatcher. Currently being played live!
Features Disc of the day
The Kinks
The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society
(Pye, 1968)
Gold-plated-but-melancholy escapist fantasy. Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliates need apply!
In 1968, with the release of Are You Experienced, Beggars Banquet and The White Album, there was no shortage of bonced, Year Zero-minded rockers getting their minds together, calling for palace revolutions and talking about piggies crawling in the dirt. How unlike the home life of our own dear Kinks, or so you'd think listening to their opus The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. Their sixth album was an affecting meditation on place, memory and the changing nature of things, devised by a psyche (Ray Davies's) that seemed naturally calibrated to not fit in. Davies believed in the past and early youth, but wasn't so sure about the here and now - for proof see People Take Pictures Of Each Other and Picture Book, which both refer to photographs capturing fleeting happiness. But alongside the anxiety (see All Of My Friends Were There's masochistic lines, "oh the embarrassment, oh the despair!"), narrators find comfort in the incidentals of idealised lives, as in the title song's idiosyncratic listing of antiques, draught beer, Old Mother Riley and Dracula, or by doggedly sticking to the old ways, as on the born-40-years-too-late Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains, which brings a great railway journey of the blues to the English countryside. Throughout, the playing and singing are languid and melodic, creating a maudlin, summer-into-autumn sound that adds to the escapist melancholy. The LP didn't even chart. But bets are, if that long-awaited Kinks reunion ever happens, that they'll play this wondrous LP in its entirety.
Ian Harrison
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 10:21 AM GMT 03/06/2009
Further Listening
The Kinks – Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire) (Pye, 1969)
The Small Faces – Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake (Immediate, 1968)
Madness – The Liberty Of Norton Folgate (Lucky Seven, 2009)
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Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement
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6:00 AM GMT 18/03/2010
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