The 1971 album Ray Davies barely dared to make: “I knew they’d never promote it”
True artistic freedom is a scarce resource within the music industry; even a group as successful as The Kinks during their swinging sixties heyday were still at the mercy of record company executives and marketing teams. As a result, it took Ray Davies multiple years to record and release the album he sees as his magnum opus.
A constant battle is waged between major record labels and their budding young artists, and it was a battle that very nearly saw The Kinks defeated during their early days. After the band’s inaugural two singles flopped, failing to reach the singles chart in any great capacity, Pye gave Davies something of an ultimatum: record a hit record, or find a new label.
Luckily, both for the band and the future of British rock, the single Davies conjured up was ‘You Really Got Me’, a platinum-certified number-one single and one of the defining sounds of the 1960s.
Nevertheless, the harmony between Pye and The Kinks didn’t last forever. As a constantly evolving artist, Ray Davies soon got sick of writing imitations of ‘You Really Got Me’, expanding his repertoire into timeless tracks like ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and ‘Sunny Afternoon’, in addition to the more experimental narratives of albums like The Village Green Preservation Society.
While that bold new era for the band, exploring themes like phoney nostalgia and blind patriotism, cemented Davies among Britain’s greatest songwriters, it didn’t have the same mass appeal as The Kinks’ earlier work. Eventually, then, Pye stopped trying to market the band at all, leading to a notable decline in their commercial success.
Then, when the band secured a lucrative new deal with RCA in 1971, following on from the unexpected success of ‘Lola’, they experienced a kind of creative renaissance. With a far greater degree of artistic freedom and support than the comparatively tiny Pye, the first record that the band recorded for the new label was Muswell Hillbillies, a stunning autobiographical effort which had been languishing in the back of Davies’ mind for some time.
“Politics and art and commerce and art join hands at that point,” Davies told Analog Planet in 2005, discussing the freedom that came with signing for a new label.
“Muswell Hillbillies is the album I always wanted to make at Pye, but I knew they’d never promote it, they’d never do anything with it. It happened that RCA was good to us, it’s what they wanted.”
Ray Davies
In the end, that 1971 album wasn’t a colossal success for the band in any commercial sense, but it remains one of the most important records in Davies’ extensive discography. A homage to his working-class upbringing in Muswell and the various characters that his young world contained, the LP is beautifully autobiographical and contains some of his most underrated songwriting efforts.
As fate would have it, The Kinks never scored a charting album at RCA, or indeed during their time at Artista later on in the 1970s. Nevertheless, the heightened degree of artistic freedom afforded to the band post-Pye was clearly a contributing factor to the longevity of their reign, lasting until the mid-1990s, long after many of their 1960s contemporaries had thrown in the towel.
