THE KINKS - Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)

“I am sentimental about my childhood - not my own particular childhood, but the civilisation which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick”

“Coming Up For Air,” George Orwell

This is a quietly bitter record. Ray Davies put this together at the tender age of 25 whilst battling with the insecurity of his role as breadwinner for both family and band. He was recovering from a breakdown, adapting to fatherhood and in career limbo due to an American touring ban, which had The Kinks reduced to playing the Northern cabaret circuit. The songs bear witness to the psychological unravelling of a British subject, mirroring the decline of the Empire itself with Davies drawing on his own family for inspiration. But somewhere along the line, the archetypal affection for his subject matter got lost. In fact the sweet hummable tunes and chipper delivery make the lyrical desperation at the heart of it, all the more harrowing. The political stance is ambiguous but as a summary of the first 69 years of the 20^th century, it stands as an eviscerating portrait of working-class servility. And it makes me think about my own family.

From a childhood smothered in the fag-end “Land of hope and gloria, land of my Victoria”, Arthur miscomprehends his future. “I was born lucky me, in a land that I loved”. Job, family, methodism for the straight and narrow, “Scenes from the Afghan War” ‘tween skits at the Pally for entertainment. But in a heart-beat, the military drums of “Yes Sir No Sir” establish a life routine exercised on the shiny wet parade ground of school and barrack. “Stop your dreaming and your idle wishing, you’re outside and there ain’t no admission to our play”. An angry and pivotal song, it reads like a manifesto of oppression. I think of my Dad’s Dad and his first trip from home in 1915. Train from Oldham Mumps to Milton Haven, vomit filled boat to Channel fort , training in weapons of mass destruction, application in Flanders mud and blood. “Give the scum a gun and make the bugger fight and be sure to have deserters shot on sight, if he dies we’ll send a medal to his wife.” My Grandad was buried alive on the Western Front but dug himself out in time to witness the Canadian’s amphetamine charge at Vimy Ridge. “Some Mother’s Son”, recounts heartbreaking sacrifice. “One soldier glances up to see the sun and dreams of games he played when he was young” One minute it’s cowboys and Indians in the rhododendron bushes of Alexandra Park, “…a second later he is dead”.

Moving on into the post-war, we’re in the bread and circuses of consumerism, courting in a rented jalopy, “Drivin’” to adventure, in… Potters Bar. Forget, forget, forget. Like a thunderbolt “Brainwashed” deviates from any semblance of the universal to directly address the condition of our eponymous hero, punning on his genuflecting, carpet fitter profession. “Look like a real human being but you don’t have a mind of your own. Yeah, you can talk, you can breathe, you can work, you can stich, you can sew but you’re brainwashed. Yes you are, yes you are. Get
down on your knees!”.

In 1934 my Grandad was on his knees, convalescing on the dole and my 4 year old Dad went with mother to visit the cotton mills of Massachusetts. This was no holiday, it was reconnaissance for escape. It didn’t happen. Arthur contemplates a similar still-born fantasy in “Australia” where “nobody has to be, any better than what they want to be”, where “nobody has a chip on their shoulder”, where “…everyone walks around with a perpetual smile across their face”. The song starts in playful style like the Terry Gilliam-esque artwork on the sleeve, but the aboriginal sounds and tooting jazz soon turn it into an end of pier nightmare. There is no crock of gold. The crumpled Thomas Cook pamphlets, salvaged and smoothed out on Whitehall desks, selecting Australia as test site for the Bomb. A future destination for the airmen sent like lab-rats into the atomic clouds billowing over the vaporized atolls.

Arthur reaches the summit in an alternative “Shangri-La” somewhere in one of those suburbs that spread like gravy over the Nation’s tablecloth. “Put on your slippers and sit by the fire, you’ve reached your top and you just can’t get any higher”. It’s the emotional and musical peak, with urgent strummed guitars, tinkling harpsichords and lyrics hammered out like last rites. “You need not worry you need not care, you can’t go anywhere”. You can’t go anywhere!

In short fashion the Second World War breaks out and as “Mr Churchill Says”, “ gotta fight the bloody battle to the very end”, with the conflict erupting in a surreal barrage of raga-rock. Post-war austerity follows and the raucous pantomime of “She Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina” parades working class pride in the face of adversity. In the interval, Palestine and Mau-Mau on the newsreels, for the main feature, “The Dambusters”. Then coming up for air Arthur reflects on his “Young and Innocent Days” indulging in a nostalgia, that seems not what it used to be.  

In “Nothing to Say”, the albums grinds towards it’s close with a glimpse of the isolation of age. I think of Dad and his Dad, I think of us all watching the football, their shared Unionism, their local pride and their stoicism but I also think of their strangely distant and jarring communication. For Arthur, his son is on his own aspirational path. “I’ll have to go soon cos I’m getting bored, I gotta be home early to see a good play”, and I think of my Dad’s transcendence of both his parents and his class.

By 1969 Britain had effectively become an archaic vessel in receipt of American culture, so it is strangely appropriate that the title track concludes as a country-style hoe-down. Davies had been commissioned to write the album for a Granada TV play, but it never got off the ground due to funding issues. The album was thus delayed and on release unfavourably compared to the heavy sounds of the day. “Shangri-La” was issued as a single but found no takers. Like the country The Kinks were suddenly out of time. But the lifting of the American touring ban opened up new horizons and like my Dad's speculative journey in 1934, The Kinks set sail in search of a new land of “hope and glory-ia”.

 

AMON DüüL II - Yeti

Only a generation after it was at war with nearly everyone, Germany was evidently at war with itself. The nation, divided by political ideology, was culturally and physically separated: one half apparently in colour, with all the trappings of modern life; the other almost in shades of grey, one eye cautiously looking over the wall at how the Other Half lived, the other eye frantically looking around for Stasi informants.

For the capitalist Westerners, life was grand. The middle classes were doing just fine and apparently extremely comfortable with the situation as it was… apart from a spirited proportion of the youth. Outraged that the older generations weren’t suitably ashamed of the atrocities they had taken part in - or at best, placidly gone along with – and railing against the traditional middle class system, they mobilised into movements, communes, to shake the Olds out of their cossetted armchairs and shock them into actually thinking.

Amon Düül II rose out of the ashes of the original Amon Düül commune (with band members who could actually play their instruments this time), whose mission was to play music which was diametrically opposed to the bland, saccharine, mindless Schlager pap that was infesting the nation at the time, a cultural manifestation of the unthinking sleepwalk their elders were stumbling through.

By 1970 it arguably reached its zenith with the astounding Yeti. Nothing about this album is comforting: the cover is an ominous, shady character with a scythe - presumably eyeing up Heino, or some other egregious middle-of-the-roader - and the music is gloriously brutal, unsettling, cacophonous and dissonant. This is not an LP to have on while you do the dishes, it’s one to start raging fires to.

The opener Soap Shop Rock is a kind of expressionist mini-opera, played out in a fever dream of interweaving vocals and stabbed guitar lines… it’s phenomenal, even if I have zero idea what it’s going on about, and lines like ‘SMOKE… COMING OUT OF THEIR EYES’ have etched themselves into dark recesses of my brain, to resurface when I wake, blinking and confused at 3am.

It’s an LP full of collisions: She Came Through the Chimney starts out as a calm, lilting guitar arpeggio, until jarring strings collide to make it feel like a bad acid trip. Archangels Thunderbird is almost mainstream with its crunching guitar riff, and at the same time unconventional due to the 6/4 rhythm and Renata Knaup’s unhinged vocals which barely manage to stay in tune. The Return of Rübezahl sounds like an eastern-tinged heavy prog version of Spirit’s Fresh Garbage, but it only lasts for a couple of minutes. Eye Shaking King sounds like the name suggests: it’s a slow, twisted, assault on the senses which occasionally adheres to harmonic and rhythmic structures, but possibly only by accident.

It’s a remarkable LP, about as far away from comfort, contentment and consonancy as it is possible to get; as a reaction to the societal norms of the time, it’s as stark and as jarring as they come.

X-RAY SPEX - Germfree Adolescents

The late 1970s in the UK, as in much of the world, were a time of turmoil politically, socially and economically. The Vietnam War had ended in abject failure for the USA, countries in South America had overthrown elected governments and wars started in Angola, Lebanon and the Cold War was at a high point. The enthusiasm and sense of hope that people had felt throughout the 60s was fading as the entire world seemed to be heading toward depression.

Throughout the 70s there was a growth in what would become the dominant form of music, at least in the singles charts, club scene and amongst the young and racially and sexually mixed younger generation of the time. The hedonistic and borderline solipsistic influence of disco presaged the direction the world would take in the coming decade, but in the 70s it was the abandonment of the dominant morals of the time, even if all it amounted to was people dancing and drinking on the deck of a sinking ship; but coming over the horizon were a bunch of bad tempered, ill-mannered buccaneers keen on tearing everything apart.

Punk arrived like a boot to the crotch of society and a lot of people with a vested interest in the status quo felt the pain. Punk shared some elements of the approach to society of disco, and even the hippy movement that went before that, in that it was inclusive, non-discriminatory and wanted to change the society in which it was created, but that was where the common threads ended. Punk lacked the hedonistic sense of the previous sub-culture, chose confrontation rather than peace and an aesthetic of the used, cheap and torn over designer labels and glamour, and few bands would ever express this attitude more than X-Ray Spex.

X-Ray Spex were a political statement as a band, regardless of the music that they would produce. Five teenagers possessing various levels of musical ability fronted by the gloriously named Poly Styrene, a mixed race woman with very obvious braces on her teeth, as a collective they looked like the kids who had become friends because there was no-one else who would be friends with them, possibly because they had something to say and they were damn well going to say it.

The first song that brought the band to the attention of the public was the provocatively titled “ Oh Bondage, Up Yours! ” which started with Poly Styrene speaking the line “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard but I think; oh bondage up yours!”, with the name of the song yelled into the microphone. This was not a reference to the style of clothing that would become associated with the punk movement, but more to do with a sexual practice favoured by right wing members of parliament; it was also the statement of a rejection of the restrictions placed on women and their place in society. Curiously this track would not feature on their debut album “Germfree Adolescents” but the tone of their debut single would continue throughout.

From the opening track “Art-i-ficial”, with its themes of consumerism and identity, through the final track “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo”, with its imagery of fake products and waste, there is a continuous focus on consumerism, misogyny, authoritarianism and the mental states these factors can induce. “Obsessed With You” turns the normal focus of obsession on its head, foreshadowing the tracking of digital identity across multiple platforms, with the notion that it is those in control who are obsessed with the commercial activities of individuals, an idea that is extended in “Plastic Bag” to the ubiquity of advertising affecting the way people think and see themselves, once again an idea that we would be all too familiar with today. “Identity” expands on these ideas, drawing on representation in media and how that reflects back on those who consume it, often resulting in people adopting false personas in the hope of fitting in or impressing others, as alluded to in “Warrior in Woolworths” and “I Am A Poseur”, the latter being possibly the most self-explanatory of all their titles.

Several tracks on the album, though still dealing with the notions of identity and consumerism, take a darker turn. "Germ Free Adolescents" is about the repressive effects of obeying societal norms, but also reads like a description of OCD, while "I Live Off You" is quite blunt about the way modern society needs to exploit people for gain. “I Can’t Do Anything” speaks of someone who is stuck, unable to progress, with a suggestion of attempted suicide; a description that today would be easily recognised as depression, while “Let’s Submerge” employs imagery of hell, as an allusion to night life and the underground, that would not be out of place in Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy. “Genetic Engineering” has a strong dystopian, Brave New World influenced feel, but the way the song starts, with Poly Styrene counting to four in German, suggests that there may be a different meaning to a song about science creating “a perfect race”.

“Germfree Adolescents” would be the only album that X-Ray Spex would release, the group breaking up due to the negative attention that fame, however minor, would bring, yet this album would go on to influence bands in the years that followed; not least of which was the Riot Grrrl movement over a decade later, though how much it was an influence is open to debate. They were a different voice in the early punk movement, not as aggressive or confrontational as The Sex Pistols or extremely political as Crass, with much wider musical influences than most punk bands of the time, but what they had to say is still very much relevant to this day