Book review: On Track…THE KINKS – every album, every song (Martin Hutchinson)

January 1st, 2023 by Davoski

SonicBond Publishing [Publication date: 01.04.22]

I remember picking up a 1970 Kinks double-vinyl compilation back in my student days from a junk shop and feeling like my horizons had been instantly expanded. I bought it for the string of mid 60’s hits I knew pretty well, but was taken aback by the quality and depth of writing on some of the material I was less familiar with such as ‘Dead End Street’, ‘Death of a Clown’ and ‘Do You Remember Walter’.

This was the mid-80’s and I began garnering their back-catalogue with undue haste. The Kinks were on their third re-invention by then – following the early chart success and then the concept album phase, the band was currently filling arenas in the US with pop-infused, theatrical hard rock. Ironically, for a band billed as quintessentially British, they had barely scratched the surface of UK charts for years.

The ‘On Track’ series captures theses twists and turns succinctly and accurately. Martin Hutchinson does a good job of narrating the essentials of the band’s varied, dynamic 30-odd year catalogue. There’s enough room to provide some detail about the early days such as the controversy around the recording of ‘You Really Got Me’, the mood of transience about the band’s early success and the emerging of Ray Davies’ quirks and frustrations.

Perhaps the most interesting content is around, roughly speaking, the band’s middle period from ‘…Village Green Preservation Society’ to ‘Schoolboys in Disgrace’, when Ray Davies wrote and directed a series of concept and thematic albums. This period includes possibly my favourite album, ‘Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)’, dealing in nostalgia, class commentary and emigration. Hutchinson pulls out the motivations behind Ray’s narratives for each of the albums.

The book describes the band’s subsequent change in musical direction and Ray’s relocation to the US, which saw them release a series of much more hard-rock infused album from ‘Sleepwalker’ onwards. There’s also commentary on the coming and goings within the band during this period.

The band were incredibly prolific right through to the early 90’s – sometimes two albums a year – and there’s a lot to pack in to only 150-odd pages. The narrative does become a little cursory in places, challenged with such a wealth of material. Though it is worth saying that the book is not intended to be an in-depth biography of The Kinks or Ray Davies. Fans need to look elsewhere for that and a (brief) bibliography is included at the end. Instead, the book serves as an easily accessible, comprehensive and well-written introduction to the band’s outstanding back catalogue. ***½

Review by Dave Atkinson

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