‘Tommy’: The concept album Ray Davies has never heard
Some albums are so integral to music history that they have become essential listening. Any admission that you haven’t heard of one of those esteemed records will often result in gaping mouths and immediate questioning. How could you possibly not have heard The Dark Side of the Moon or Unknown Pleasures or, God forbid, the White Album? While most of us would scramble to come up with an answer that justifies our ignorance, Ray Davies is unfazed by that pressure to listen to the classics.
As the frontman of The Kinks, Davies penned and produced a number of classics of his own. From the band’s now iconic self-titled debut, which produced an all-time great in ‘You Really Got Me’, to the slightly more unexpected stylings of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, there are several records created by Davies that could be considered essential listening.
The band’s seventh record, Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, is another album that might elicit some shocked faces if you admit to not having heard it. Released in 1969, the record didn’t perform particularly well sales-wise when it was first released, but it was beloved by critics who lauded it for its take on the concept album format.
Davies had penned it as a television musical inspired by a family member called Arthur. “I lived with him and his wife, my older sister, as a boy,” the Kinks songwriter explained during a conversation with Uncut, “All I would hear at dinner was how Britain had been betrayed, after the war. They were lured to Australia by cheap housing. It was a profound loss for me.”
Davies penned the record inspired by this character, and although it never made it to television, it provided the story for a masterful concept album. Around the same time that Davies was writing Arthur, fellow rockers The Who also dove into the world of concept albums, writing their own rock opera titled Tommy. Both albums were released in the autumn of 1969, leading to comparisons from critics.
The connection between the two records still exists to this day, as Davies commented on it during his 2014 interview. “To this day, I’ve never heard Tommy through,” he admitted, “It’s not like getting to the South Pole, it doesn’t really matter who was first.” While some fans of The Who would consider this to be blasphemous, the rejection of a pivotal rock opera may have made Davies immune to the comparison the two records were subjected to.
There certainly were some similarities between Tommy and Arthur — the albums even had similar titles named after their protagonists — but Davies was right when he asserted that it wasn’t a race. Both The Kinks and The Who had delivered excellent entries into the world of concept albums, each with their own personality and place in music history.
Tommy would kickstart an entire world of performance and media about the title character, with Roger Daltrey starring in the role in Ken Russell’s 1975 film, while Arthur was followed up by another of The Kinks’ most beloved records, Lola Versus Poerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, producing the truly iconic ‘Lola’.
Both Tommy and Arthur could be considered essential listening by many, but it seems that Davies will never give in to the pressure to listen to Tommy. And perhaps he doesn’t need to — he created an equally excellent concept album himself.
