Thank You for the Davies

In the current issue of MOJO Magazine, the esteemed British pop/rock periodical, there’s an insightful, articulate interview with Kinks frontman Ray Davies. As is MOJO’s wont, the questions are far-ranging and not restricted to recent projects or other such grandstanding. Here’s one of them:

MOJO: Many documentaries on The Kinks fast-forward from Lola Vs. Powerman to Sleepwalker, missing out the band’s “theatrical” period in the mid-‘70s.

Davies: Yes, in this country, certainly. But during that Preservation era the band was really tight. I know The Kinks had a reputation of being unpredictable on-stage, but oddly enough, on the shows that had themes to them—Soap Opera, Schoolboys in Disgrace, Percy—the band was much tighter as they were playing to cues. There’s less space for improvisation., so it’s very tight.It showed a good evolution of a band that was born to make R&B evolving into making its own style of music.

And that’s about as far as that theatrical thread of the discussion goes, though it’s more than most writers have managed in the 40 years since that rock-operatic period of Ray Davies’ illustrious career flourished. A sidebar to the interview picks up some slack. Titled “Concept Yourself,” it purports to list “Ray’s best big projects. As chosen by [regular MOJO contributor] Pat Gilbert.” Gilbert notes The Kinks Are the Village Green Society (which he brands “The Bucolic One”), Arthur (“The Nostalgic One”) and Preservation Acts 1 & 2 (“The Audacious One”). In theatrical terms, they might just as easily be branded “The Bookless One” (since Village Green is plotless concept album about a fading image of old British style and culture), “The Nonstaged One” (Arthur, subtitled “Or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire”—and, I am obliged to add for the uninitiated, is wholly unrelated to the Dudley Moore or Russell Brand movies by that name—was intended as the score for a BBC-TV musical which was never televised, allowing The Who’s Tommy to snag honors as the first rock opera) and The Operatic One (the three-LP, two-act, multi-hour large-cast Preservation, of which the later album Schoolboys in Disgrace is a sequel).

Those albums had tours which dramatized some of the songs. Preservation was given its theatrical premiere by the Boston Rock Opera company in 1998. (The troupe specialized in adapting overtly theatrical rock albums for the stage, from The Pretty Things’ SF Sorrow to Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies.)

MOJO chooses not to mention the most fully realized Ray Davies theater piece: the songs he wrote for a musical version of Around the World in Eighty Days which had a short run at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1988. Snoo Wilson scripted the adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel, Des McAnuff (who had not yet done his production of The Who’s Tommy, which went from La Jolla to Broadway in 1992) directed.

Luckily, there’s a whole chapter on that ill-fated endeavor in the fascinating book The Greatest Never Sold: Secrets of Legendary Lost Albums by

The only recording of the songs are as underproduced demos performed by Davies. “Those demos,” — exclaims, “represent some of Ray Davies’ most brilliant work since his ‘60s heyday. … How could an album of Ray Davies tunes about Victorian England and the decline and fall of the British Empire fail? It couldn’t, and these demos are proof; discovering them is a little like unearthing an ‘80s version of Arthur.” High praise. The show’s collaborators call Davies’ contributions “brilliant” and “fantastic.”

A recent MOJO mag, by the way, had a big feature on Van Dyke Parks, but barely mentioned HIS musical theater project, the Joel Chandler Harris adaptation Jump.