Video: The Kinks - Dead End Street

​Imaginary Movie Soundtracks are just that -- the soundtracks to movies that don't exist. We pick the songs, write the story, and your mind makes the movie. A haunted house story is always good ... Continue reading "The house that madness built" >

Kinks Week kontinues! (Sorry. I wish I could say that I won't do that again, but I just can't make that promise.) Here's a goofy video, complete with wigs, mustaches, and corpses brought back to life. The undertaker theme seems darkly fitting for this ragtime-y, brass band tune, which makes the whole clip vaguely reminiscent of a Python sketch. Meanwhile, the footage is interspersed with still photos of real life down-on-their-luck Londoners. This was well within Ray Davies' ultra-English phase, when every song he wrote examined some aspect of British life. This parochialism didn't [...]

You know, some days I really do think that the Kinks' Ray Davies was the greatest songwriter of the second half of the 20th Century. It is absolutely amazing to me that a song as musically and lyrically sophisticated as the above "Dead End Street" was written a mere two years after "You Really Got Me," the primal stomper that first made Ray's reputation; in fact, I can barely believe that they were the work of [...]

Although Wes Anderson soundtracks suggest that the best time for a mid-period Kinks song is when your quirky good time turns unexpectedly melancholy, my devotion to that era of the band doesn't need a specific cue. Right now, I've been particularly enamored with 1969's Arthur and more recently 1966's Face to Face . Below is the shoddy video for a swell track they slapped on to my re-issue of that album. It's been covered by former Portland sad sack Elliott Smith, but it has nowhere near the oldies radio ubiquity that their earlier, cruder songs enjoy. Love [...]

• the Kinks - Dead End Street