This post comes half on the back of a Facebook share the other day, with a posting of a great clip featuring some of this country’s greatest Lanarkshire-based songwriters, musicians and hip young gunslingers playing together as a sort of supergroup for an early 90s BBC Scotland show. The group, led by an unusually instrument-free Norman Blake tear their way through a faithful and loud version of The Kinks Till The End Of The Day. It had me quite rightly scampering back to the original version and for today at least, it’s been blaring out the patio windows and entertaining any neighbours within earshot.
It’s a proper Kinks stomper.
In those early-ish days, you could roughly categorise yr Kinks recordings into two distinct camps. On the one side you had the slashing, F-shaped proto-punk riffing, made more menacing and crucial with Dave Davies’s unplanned razor blade attack on the speaker cone of his Elpico amp. In those feral, thrilling early Kinks stompers – You Really Got Me, All Day And All Of The Night, I Need You et al – you can hear in their livewire guitars and monophonic thunk the birth of the Stooges and all that followed. They are undeniably influential, but more important than that, they are extremely exciting records.
On the other side you had the more reflective songs. Waterloo Sunset, Well Respected Man, Dead End Street and Dedicated Follower Of Fashion ring with brightly scrubbed major-to-minor acoustic guitars behind whistleable electric riffs, shifting the mood with their descending woody basslines and carefully worked out whimsical backing vocals. It’s these songs – every one of them a solid gold standard – that set Ray Davies apart from the leaders of any other beat groups bar The Beatles.
Some of their songs straddle both sides. The choppy riffing and wistful reflection of Set Me Free and the meaty yet melancholic Where Have All The Good Times Gone? spring straight to mind. The Kinks had the golden touch of fusing muscle with melody. Till The End Of The Day, as you well know, falls firmly into the former camp.
The Kinks – Till The End Of The Day
Three lightly vibratoed guitar chords, almost at the edge of Vox-ish breaking point, almost in tune, precede a Ray Davies line that’s totally at odds (as it turns out) with his actual frame of mind. “Baby I feel good!” he announces brightly, before the other Kinks fall in behind him like the beat group to end all beat groups. Guitars clang and buzz and see and saw, their choppy rhythm held in place by the tumbling of heavy furniture and silver cutlery that announces the drums’ arrival. The band gives it their all from start to finish, playing as if this might be the last time anyone allows them inside a recording studio, and it’s a riot.
The Kinks – and this being the murkier end of showbiz, so that might mean Clem Cantini or Jimmy Page or Nicky Hopkins as well as/instead of the actual Davies brothers and Quaife and Avory – do their fair share of the heavy lifting. It’s all in the incidentals. The drum fills are spectacular, ride and crash cymbals splashing golden metallic sunshine on the high end before taking the whole thing to heaven in double time for the closing seconds. The electric guitars are supremely disciplined, squeezing out chunky chords in the verses then galloping at a hundred miles an hour at the end of each fourth line. Dave Davies (?) rattles off a fat-free solo, the thin single coils of his Telecaster cutting through the stew for a dozen ear-splitting seconds.
If you can shake free of the heavy riot that’s unfolding around them, then it’s the backing vocals that are especially worthy of your undivided attention. Ray sings those opening lines – “Baby I feel good…right through from…” and then immediately, someone – Dave, I think, as he has that Davies family tone to his voice (and surely Ray won’t have double tracked himself on the 4 tracks, or however it was they recorded this holy riot) harmonises with a perfect “mo-or-ning“…and at the same time, the other two Kinks underpin the harmony with an almost buried descending “oooh-ooh-ooh” harmony. Four Kinks, doing their equal share of the heavy lifting. Here they come again in the bridge…and again at the end of the first verse…and anywhere else they can fit a harmony or a double-tracked key word to the proceedings. The Kinks: a beat group who can arrange the fuck out of a simple set of chords.
So, yeah, it’s essentially the band’s own All Day And All Of The Night recast as if the group had continued playing long after the needle had buried itself in that single’s dead wax, but man! It’s a ripper, a properly great modish stomper that’s as electric as The Who, as melodic as The Beatles but with a beating r’n’b heart the equal of anything the mid ’60s Stones put out. What’s maybe surprising is that it was written to order. The Kinks’ management had no sympathy for a writer suffering a rare bout of writer’s block and sent American songwriting heavyweight Doc Pomus to his door in an attempt to shake him out of it. It seems to have worked. A song that ended up with a lyric about someone feeling trapped and frustrated in a relationship was essentially Davie’s autobiographical dig at his management.
And that Bellshill Beatles Norman Blake-fronted cover that’s had me digging out my old Kinks Kompilation these past few days? I like to think that particular supergroup tackled The Kinks track purely because their hero Alex Chilton was such a fan. Chilton was certainly around that circle of musicians at the time and his influence can’t be underplayed. Should you wish, you can find Big Star’s version of Till The End Of The Day on the expanded CD of Third/Sister Lovers, but – heresy!- I much prefer the late 00’s version that Alex recorded with Ray Davies.
Alex Chilton & Ray Davies – Till The End Of The Day
Some shimmering Hammond, some great Alex ‘n Ray harmonies, a rockin’ Chilton solo that maybe even outdoes the original; it’s a great cover.
Plain Or Pan 