Greatest underrated, under-appreciated band of all time.

All Day And All Of The Night
See My Friends
I'll Remember
Life Goes ON
Misfits
Still Searching

Posted by Chris on Monday, 06/22/2015 @ 22:09pm

How is Ray Davies not inducted as a songwriter?

Posted by Chris on Monday, 06/22/2015 @ 22:12pm

He was inducted to the Songwriters Hall of Fame last year; plus The Kinks were elected first-ballot to the Rock Hall back in 1990 (and rightfully so).

Posted by Nick on Monday, 06/22/2015 @ 22:24pm

Any interest for August?

The Kinks- Picture Book
The Raspberries- I Wanna Be With You OR Let's Pretend
Dire Straits- Romeo and Juliet
The Dramatics- What You See is What You Get
The Brothers Johnson- Strawberry Letter 23
Depeche Mode- Strangelove
Pet Shop Boys- What Have Done to Deserve This? OR It's A Sin
Brandy Clark- Stripes

Posted by Greg F on Friday, 07/17/2015 @ 13:50pm

Whoops wrong page.

Posted by Greg F on Friday, 07/17/2015 @ 13:56pm

RIP, Jim Rodford, who served as the Kinks bassist from 1978 to their breakup in 1996

Posted by Aaron O'Donnell on Sunday, 01/21/2018 @ 00:25am

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/26/ray-davies-kinks-officially-getting-back-together/


I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. They clearly won't sound as awesome as they use to, but I would love to see this show.

Posted by Philip on Saturday, 06/30/2018 @ 00:38am

Phillip, if I can get a tic for < 200.00 somewhere within 200 miles of central KY, count me in.

Hope they do a fest or 3.

Posted by Paul in KY on Sunday, 07/1/2018 @ 11:24am

The Kinks are one of my all-time favorite bands, so this is VERY exciting news.

Posted by Steve Z on Sunday, 07/1/2018 @ 17:39pm

I can honestly exclaim that The Kinks are in my Top 5 FAV bands. The Kinks were inducted into the 1990 RRHOF ceremony but I still feel The Kinks are vastly underrated. Ray Davies brilliant Singer/Songwriter and they had some incredible songs. Celluloid Heroes,Lola, Waterloo Sunset, You Really Got Me, etc. I probably like The Kinks better than The Beatles and The Stones but The Kinks and The Who would be tough. 5 or 6 Overtime long if you like sports. Great to see the Davies are both still alive. So many musical legends have passed recently. Glenn Frey, David Bowie, Prince, Tom Petty, to name a few. I would quickly purchase any new The Kinks recordings. FRL Regulars: What are your Top 3 The Kinks songs or if you want extend it out to Top 5?! KING

Posted by KING on Monday, 07/9/2018 @ 04:36am

I feel like The Kinks 1966 to 71 period (outside of the song Lola) is vastly under rated. Waterloo Sunset is one of the best songs ever written.

Posted by David on Tuesday, 07/30/2019 @ 10:53am

Rest in Peace Ian Gibbons (non-induct3ed member from 1979 to 1989, and from 1993 to 1996), 1952-2019.

Posted by Joe on Friday, 08/2/2019 @ 09:50am

Rest in Peace Ian Gibbons (non-induct3ed member from 1979 to 1989, and from 1993 to 1996), 1952-2019.

Posted by Joe on Friday, 08/2/2019 @ 09:50am

Although I never had the privelege and pleasure to see The Kinks live in concert, I did see Ray Davies perform live on a couple of occasions in the early 2000s. Although he was in excellent voice, his solo shows do lack the power and grit that his brother Dave provided on guitar. It just shows how integral he was to the sound and atmosphere of the band. That's taking nothing away from how brilliant Ray is, though.

Posted by KentuckyWoman on Saturday, 02/5/2022 @ 12:32pm

Ray is my favorite rock poet. Something besides girls and parties!

My five favorites:
Around the Dial
Lola
All day and all of the night
Well Respected Man
Black Messiah

Posted by Dan on Thursday, 05/12/2022 @ 12:47pm

The Kinks have one of the greatest catalogs of music of any band in the field of recorded music.

Although they were somewhat hobbled in the sixties by being banned from the USA, and unprecedented move that caused their sensational sixties albums to be virtually ignored until decades later, the band built on their original base of rock and R&B by taking in all manner of styles and certainly, given the fact that the label they were on was much poorer, and less equipped than EMI, created the greatest catalog of music of any of the sixties bands.... yes any. Including the Beatles (and I love and own all the Beatles albums).

The band is almost always dismissed as a singles band by many folks who don't seem to actually know much about the band, or in fact have seemingly never really listened to any of their albums.
The idea that the band weren't as progressive as some of their contemporaries is a nonsense beyond belief.

You Really Got Me is obviously the baseline of were hard rock, heavy metal and punk came from, but it certainly doesn't end there.
See My Friends is probably the first western pop song to enter the realm of emulating a style derived from Indian raga, and they didn't even need to use any Indian instruments to do it.
Face To Face was one of the first pop/rock albums to be conceived as a continuous flow of music, linked with sound effects and incidental sounds, but the record company prevented them from releasing it in its originally imagined form. Yet remnants of the original idea survive on the available released version.
To some degree the band was on the front end of psychedelia, with Rainy Day In June and Fancy, also from the Face To Face album, but in typical Kinks fashion, they turned their backs on the trends of the day and went in a completely different direction to their acid soaked contemporaries.

The band had been introducing elements of Music Hall and traditional anglo-european folk style music into their repertoire as early as 1965, and in 1968 they released the monumental The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society, which encompassed so many styles of music, in a flowing integrated way, that it should be recognised worldwide as the masterclass of songwriting and performance that it is.
Typically the album bombed, because yet again the band were too unique for the mainstream majority to take it all onboard.
The album is almost like a complete dismissal of the goofy free love and hippy movement trying to create a new world based on utopian idealism, and Village Green Preservation Society instead examines the virtues of traditional values and the people and places of a small Village Green, how they interact and the simplicity that endears people to each other.
The songs though, as is generally the case with the Kinks, are anything but simplistic, with style, writing and variation that make the album wholly unique ion its presentation and execution.

They followed this up with another concept that explored the decline and fall of the British Empire, via the life of a simple man and his family Arthur.... and Arthur may well be the greatest album the band ever made. It manages to marry wonderful straight rock music, with all the various styles the band had done up to that point, and is a lyrical masterpiece, like most of Ray Davies writing.
At the same time Dave Davies was working on material for a solo album that never eventuated, but later on we got the excellent Album That Never Was.... and in 2011 the wonderful Hidden Treasures album that compiles most of the Dave tracks form the sixties together, to highlight that he was no slouch either.

Were the Kinks done yet?
Not even slightly.
Lola Vs Powerman gets a lot of good word of mouth, as it should it is a great album, but it was certainly helped by the fact that Ray wrote the all time classic Lola, that sadly is often about the only song many folks seem to remember easily of the band's.

This was followed by the soundtrack Percy, which is not really essential Kinks, except for the fact that the four actual songs on the album are top class... It is worth getting, even though much of the album is incidental music.

Then we get the wonderful Muswell Hillbillies where Ray decides to make an album that is essentially an Americana style album, that points the way for many of the nineties artists that moved into this style.
Muswell Hillbillies could easily be seen as the Kinks best album by many, but the reality is that if we disclude the Percy soundtrack, the Kinks have been releasing worldclass unbeatable albums from Kontroversy all the way through to this point.

Not forgetting that they also had a run of singles success on par with any band out there.

This also doesn't take into account that many many songs went unreleased and on releases such as the Great Lost Kinks Album, and others, we get many tracks that would be on par with many other bands best releases.

For some, the mid seventies are the wilderness years for the Kinks, but don't let that fool you into thinking that they failed to make great music.
Ray dived deeply into the idea of creating more story based play type albums.... rock opera and such is a term that is often flung around, but Ray was writing more elaborately than that, these albums certainly had the scope to be full on Broadway musicals, yet they still retained that essential element of the Kinks, the rock band.....

Preservation Act 1 and Act 2 often seem to be overlooked, but on recent examination they are both magnificent albums and again show the band stepping into areas where most don't, and doing it well and convincingly.

Yet we haven't even gotten to the band's most successful era, particularly when it comes to the USA market.
The run of albums - Sleepwalker - Misfits - Low Budget - One For The Road - Give The People What They Want - State Of Confusion - Word Of Mouth are a fantastic run of fairly straight rock albums, with that Kinky twist that makes them a bit special.

So the Kinks .... look I love a lot of music. Music is my thing, and I love all sorts of artists. Zappa, Gentle Giant, Acdc, Cold Chisel, Ultravox, Mahavishnu Orchestra and hundreds more... I mean I love music.... and in a recent deep dive of everything that that band ever recorded, I am convinced that the Kinks catalog of music is among, if not the best catalog of music available .....

Kinks albums take a couple of listens, because they are all different, and sometimes it takes a slight calibration to fully appreciate how good these albums are, but if you love music, it is very much worth getting and listening to the Kinks albums. Music that covers most styles and genres, with lyrics that are at the very least thought provoking, and generally so deeply human and relatable that they lodge in your heart and mind for the duration.

The Kinks are thoroughly human, and that is the greatest compliment I think an artist can get

God Save The Kinks

Posted by Mark Winstanley on Saturday, 08/6/2022 @ 07:19am

Rest in Peace John Gosling, 1948-2023.

Posted by Joe S. on Friday, 08/4/2023 @ 14:01pm