Muswell Hillbillies

Product Information

Slaughter, Matthew (4 October 2013). "Muswell Hillbillies (reissue)". Drowned In Sound. Archived from the original on 23 April 2015 . Retrieved 31 December 2014.

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.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/ 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. Promoting his recent Americanaproject in an insightful interview with The Quietus, Ray Davies sums up his uncomfortable politics succinctly: “I haven’t found a political party that adequately expresses how I feel about the world. My dad was a working-class socialist, but as a person . . . I just don’t want people in shops to have to sell their businesses. I don’t know what that makes me.” In these lines, one hears clear echoes of the 1968 song “Village Green”, in which the singer laments, “I miss the village green / and all the simple people.” In the body politic, Davies was far more interested in the body than the politic. Ray went on to study at Hornsey College of Art, but kept the band going with gigs at local pubs like the Clissold Arms and the Archway Tavern – which features on the Muswell Hillbillies album cover. They also played Hornsey Town Hall on Valentine’s Day 1963.

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 album’s penultimate song, “Uncle Son”, captures the true political concern of the record: the unexceptional person just trying to live an authentic life amid political, economic, and social machinery. “Liberals dream of equal rights / Conservatives live in a world gone by / Socialists preach of a promised land / But old Uncle Son was an ordinary man.” Muswell Hillbillies laments the toll our struggle forward has on the liberty of individuals along the way. 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. Now with a new record company and a new image, I could bring some of the old wild western spirit into my music." But come 1971, were the Kinks still relevant? Well, yes. Not just because of their legacy, but 71’s Muswell Hillbillies was an excellent and widely acclaimed album. Sold sod all at the time, but a damn fine release all the same. The following year’s Everybody’s In Show Business maybe a little less so, as it saw a change in the song writing direction, which would become more theatrical and vaudevillian.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. Muswell Hillbillies was the band's first album for RCA Records, [2] their prior recordings having been released on Pye Records ( Reprise Records in the United States). Their contract with Pye/Reprise expired the same year. The album was recorded between August and October 1971