Another record I've yet to hear, but I've read a few compelling write-ups about it. I'm not generally real interested in hearing what 60 year old men with incredible resumes have to say quite a few years after their heyday, but I really enjoyed Neil Young's
Prairie Wind this past year. Also, for some reason, Ray Davies strikes me as someone who could pull this off pretty well. Any thoughts or opinions to share?
From Guardian Unlimited
Like a lot of 1960s rock stars, Ray Davies' reputation precedes him. It's somehow fitting that the most English of songwriters should have an English kind of reputation, characterised not by tales of bed-hopping drink-and-drugs excess, but a combination of rainy melancholy, John Bull-ish rudeness and aggression and a wilfulness that borders on perversity.
It's understating the case to suggest that Davies has never made things easy for himself: this is, after all, a man who once attempted to commit suicide in front of 15,000 fans at London's White City Stadium. At the zenith of the swinging 1960s he was to be found writing a song called - without irony - Where Have All the Good Times Gone? He felt the height of the psychedelic counter-cultural revolution was the ideal time to release The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, an album that seemed to make a stand for everything said revolution was doing its best to overthrow. The Kinks' influence on Britpop was obvious, but they chose its annus mirabilus, 1995, to split up, quietly, after 31 years.
Their erstwhile leader's debut solo album has been endlessly delayed, not least by his getting shot last year. Serendipitously enough, it arrives just after the Arctic Monkeys' debut, an album that revels in precisely the kind of English pop satire that Davies invented 40 years ago. With the influence of his mid-1960s golden period still pervasive, the obvious route would be that followed by everyone from Elton John to Paul McCartney in recent years: recruit a hip young producer and make an album that knowingly harks back to your best-loved work. However, this is Ray Davies. Given his previous form, he might conceivably consider this an opportune moment to unveil a penchant for soft metal balladry or tech-step drum'n'bass.
Other People's Lives isn't that extreme, but nor is it likely to draw in younger listeners who have recently noticed that the distance between Dedicated Follower of Fashion and Fake Tales of San Francisco is really no distance at all. In fact, it sounds like the kind of album rock legends used to make before anyone thought of hiring a hip producer and knowingly harking back to their best-loved work: polished, adult-oriented rock, performed by crack session musicians and with a distinctly mid-Atlantic flavour. The latter has happened by design rather than default.
Davies' sleeve-notes mention trying to escape the Godfather of Britpop tag via writing workshops in New York and recording sessions in New Orleans. It leads to some uncomfortable musical hybrids. Davies' voice is among rock's most distinctive - mannered and so ambiguous that the listener is never sure how much sympathy Davies feels for the characters in his songs - but as the anaemic R&B covers on the early Kinks albums proved, it is not a particularly adaptable instrument. If it sounded a bit peculiar belting out Long Tall Shorty in 1964, it sounds absolutely bizarre 40 years on, quavering away over the swampy, Southern-soul-influenced The Tourist and The Getaway (Lonesome Train).
More troubling are the moments when it seems that Davies' greatest weapon - his satirist's eye - has become a blunt instrument. Stand Up Comic is an attack on cultural dumbing-down that arrives about five years too late and sounds worryingly like something written by the late Lynda Lee Potter for the Daily Mail. Its approach is so heavy-handed that Davies announces "this is all about yob culture" in a thicko voice - which, coming from the man who once subtly, incisively skewered the vulgarity of aristocracy and aspirant classes alike on House in the Country and Most Exclusive Residence For Sale, won't do at all.
But then, Other People's Lives also offers up evidence that the man who wrote those songs is alive and well and as subtle and incisive as ever. Things Are Gonna Change (The Morning After) and Is There Life After Breakfast? perfectly capture the existential despair of a hangover. Next Door Neighbours serves up Davies' speciality - a beautifully observed vignette of suburban life that can't quite decide whether it's repelled or fondly amused by what it depicts. Plenty of other people have tried something similar, but no one can quite match him: at moments like this, Davies seems like the national treasure that, behind all the bitterness and gloom of his public persona, you rather suspect he wants to be.
It is a shame there aren't more of those moments on Other People's Lives. Instead, Davies has produced an album that delights as much as it disappoints, leaving the listener not celebrating the rebirth of one of England's greatest songwriters, but slightly confused. At 61, it seems, Davies is still not interested in making things easy for himself.
