Working out The Kinks

The Kinks’ 50th anniversary came and went during 2014 and was, by rock ’n’ roll standards, an understated affair.

Unlike The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones, who buried old hatchets and undertook semi-centennial tours in 2012 and 2013, The Kinks, who disbanded in 1996 after a decade of going out with a whimper, quietly marked their golden anniversary with compilations of mostly previously compiled material.

The main reason that they didn’t tour was the long-simmering bad blood between Ray Davies (their main songwriter and singer) and his younger brother Dave (their lead guitarist). Not for nothing has their relationship long been rock ’n’ roll’s most infamous sibling rivalry.

They attempted rapprochement, even holding summits, the semi-promising nature of which leaked to the press and raised fans’ hopes. Ultimately, however, the Davieses only ended up burying their hatchets in each other’s oversensitive hides, forcing their fans to celebrate the brothers’ once-fruitful collaboration with Legacy Records’ two-disc The Essential Kinks and Sanctuary Records’ five-disc The Anthology 1964-1971.

As crumbs instead of loaves go, the collections are filling enough. And taken together, they make a solid case for mentioning The Kinks’ hooky and vividly etched portraits of late 20th-century England in the same breath as the sharpest songs of The Who if not quite of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.

The albums also render moot The Kinks’ 30-plus other compilations, 1972’s excellent The Kink Kronikles and Sanctuary’s almost-definitive 2008 Picture Book box set included.

The Anthology gathers practically every greatest hit and great near miss from the band’s halcyon years, uniting them with live cuts, demos, documentary interview snippets (Ray’s proud defense of “The Village Green Preservation Society” as a proud defense of England’s Englishness is the nonpareil), and other aural, period-piece souvenirs. And The Essential includes such latter-day glories as “Come Dancing,” “Do It Again,” and “Living on a Thin Line” (Dave’s bloody and bowed admission that the village-green-preservation project failed), finally gathering every Kinks hit in one place.

Well, almost every Kinks hit. “Where Have All the Good Times Gone” and the prophetically gender-confused “Lola” appear in inferior live renditions. “Lola” gets somewhat shortchanged on The Anthology too, appearing as it does in its “cherry cola” and not its original “Coca-Cola” version. And, try as it may, The Essential can’t completely mask the water-treading mediocrity of the band’s early-’70s rock-opera phase.

But, their imperfections and the 24 cuts that they share notwithstanding, both compilations indelibly etch into rock ’n’ roll history the Davies brothers’ ability to strike sparks from their interpersonal friction—and make their continuing estrangement particularly sad. That The Anthology ends with the universal-brotherhood anthem “God’s Children” could not be more ironic.

‘A little faith’

If any band can be said to have inherited The Kinks’ mantle, it’s Scotland’s Belle and Sebastian. And their new album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (Matador) finds them going stronger in their 19th year than The Kinks were in theirs.

At 46, their leader Stuart Murdoch is a lot less jaded than the Davies brothers, perhaps because Murdoch has availed himself of Christian hope. “Praying for a friend is contagious,” he sings in “The Cat with the Cream” amid pining for days of Christendom past. Four songs later, he asks his audience whether it’s “ever had a little faith.”

He’s obviously treading carefully where fools rush in. But the album’s many hooks—whether acoustically somber, electronically effervescent, or vice versa—suggest that “a little faith” might just be able to move mountains. —A.O.