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The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached

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Of all the great British bands to emerge from the 1960s, none had a stronger sense of place than the Kinks. Often described as the archetypal English band, they were above all a quintessentially working-class band with a deep attachment to London.Mark Doyle examines the relationship between the Kinks and their city, from their early songs of teenage rebellion to their album-length works of social criticism. He finds fascinating and sometimes surprising connections with figures as diverse as Edmund Burke, John Clare and Charles Dickens. More than just a book about the Kinks, this is a book about a social class undergoing a series of profound changes, and about a group of young men who found a way to describe, lament and occasionally even celebrate those changes through song.

249 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 3, 2020

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Mark Doyle

25 books6 followers
Mark Doyle is Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
Profile Image for Kimley.
201 reviews239 followers
May 18, 2020
Tosh and I discuss this on our Book Musik Podcast.

The Kinks are one of the iconic British Invasion bands whose music has only gotten better with time. They were quintessentially British and proud of their working-class roots which came across in their music. Doyle explores the time and place that nurtured The Kinks’ creative impulse specifically examining their North London neighborhood, the British class structure and the social upheaval of the postwar era. There’s a lot of conflict and tension surrounding this band and “Semi-Detached” is the perfect way to kick this off.
Profile Image for Stefan Szczelkun.
Author 24 books44 followers
September 6, 2023
The thing that struck me about three quarters of the way through this book was: “Has it really taken this long!?” I am about the same age as Dave Davies and although I enjoyed most of The Kinks singles in my youth I didn’t really listen in depth to their albums - until I read this book. This 50 year lag can only be a measure of the classism that diluted the mediation of the GB publics' insight into the Kinks greatest work. Oral discourse on the subject was absent or muted and my own brain turned away from his immense ambition for working class culture towards a more counter-culture and avant garde radicalism. Nor was I alone in my lack of appreciation of the high points of Kinksian achievement, none of the albums charted in this period and it’s only by standing the test of time that they have come to be so highly rated now.

Mark Doyle starts off by saying “the Kinks relationship to working-class England is the central concern of this book” p.14. So far so good. I’m excited! This book is mainly focused on those four albums that happened on the back of the early chart hits.

The Village Green Preservation Society, 1968. The pros and cons of suburban existence. To some it was Ray Davies' Sgt Peppers.
Arthur, or, the decline and fall of the British Empire, 1969.
Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, 1970 “Songs of defiance and alienation (with a) biting, sometimes vicious humour.” p.167
Muswell Hillbillies, 1971 “The most complete statement of Ray Davies artistic vision” p.206.

Doyle has a lot of clarity about the Kinks as working class artists and situates them on a par with Charles Dickens. Ray Davies lyrics are also compared, favourably, with William Hogarth (p.81); L.S. Lowry (p.105); Dylan Thomas (p.111); and even middle class writers like John Betjeman (p.122). Apparently John Clare’s poems also have a ‘Kinksian’ ring to them! p.127.

I also come from the London Suburbs and have recently made a book about my teenage stamping ground of Shepperton, which considers a form of working class vernacular in the area (Plotlands of Shepperton). But my family was the opposite of the Davies all the way over in Fortis Green, with their front room sing-songs, they were embedded in an uncowed working class culture, with roots in Nineteenth century free ’n’ easies. He came late to my experience of suburban alienation!

Doyles analysis is emphatic in its working class sympathies but towards the end of the book his starts using concepts probably brought in for strategic academic reasons (it felt to me). The main one that got on my nerves was the use of the concept ‘anti-rationalism’. For this he wheels out dubious ideas of an essentialist English character and tries to tie Ray into the mindset espoused by Edmund Burke (1729 - 1792), who is most famous for his conservative critique of the French Revolution. At one low point Doyle even calls him the ‘spiritual godfather’ of the Kinks! p.197. And although I haven't read Burke and I'm only going on his reputation, I held my face in my hands. Luckily he relieved me of my contempt a few pages later by concluding that on reflection Ray Davies is more in the mould of an ‘Orwellian socialist’. Doyle’s on safe ground here as the early influence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eight Four is well documented. Doyle is better when letting me know more about the music - what its about and what inspired it.
Get Back in the Line articulates the idea of that, even a quarter century after the war, for many working-class people it didn't much matter if the elites who control their lives wore blue ties or red ties on election night. What message was that ‘they’ still held all the power.” p.178

Class oppression leaves the oppressed group with greater access to their emotions and human empathy than the oppressor group. This is a fundamental principle of all oppression. So to conflate that human advantage with a term like ‘anti-rationalism’ is to my mind plain confusing. But i can see it allows academic digressions that maybe sticking to a simpler term like anti-authoritarian would not. And while I’m on about oppression I’d say that working class culture needs its critics who can take the time to listen to such music in depth and kick off a discussion about it. What would it have been like if we’d have a hundred Mark Doyle’s writing in the Daily Mirror way back then?

What is clear is that Ray had a coherent vision of describing what he was going on around him. He put working class experience into song and they were good songs embellished by the musical passion of his brother and the other group members. And he linked those stories together in ways that were an ambitious representation of working class conditions and aspirations in London. This overall vision was not equalled by any other songwriter of the period. I had only responded to the singles and never given time to the four LPs that get discussed in this book. I am indebted to Boyle in that he has allowed me to finally appreciate just what a strong, articulate part of working class culture the Kinks were.

Doyle describes the songs on ‘Village Green’ as “slippery and evanescent”. p.116 Ray is good at describing the ambiguity of our feelings and deferring pre-judgement. In that he reminded me of my recent reading of Proust. (see also see the part about memory and its instability p.115) Doyle is at his best when he describes ‘Village Green’ as “an unusually well-camouflaged piece of pop-art.” p.116. The subversion of working class youths fronting a ‘Preservation Society’, which was the ‘province of the upper crust’, was an outrageous intervention. p.125. The upper class who yearned to keep the working classes out of their precious romanticised English countryside.

The only thing is that this discussion ends before Ray has completed what became the three part ‘Preservation’ cycle in the years to come. (Preservation Act.1 in 1973 and Act2 in 1974 which was a double album.) We are left with the question hanging as to whether this long dedication to the theme paid off.

The most moving single part of the Davies family experience that Ray immortalised in song was the eviction of his Gran. The Davies family went through the forcible relocation of their maternal grandma Kate Willmore in a slum clearance scheme. As movingly described by Doyle this was a trauma for the whole Davies clan as Grandma was typically the spiritual head of the family and ninety years old living in a ‘really nice old house’, from which she was evicted and moved into a ‘sterile modern flat’. This gave rise to the song ‘Here Come the People in Grey’ on the Muswell Hillbilies album. p.189
https://youtu.be/nHpi_zhcpRE
In the end academia yet again allows strong material but only with weak conclusions.

PS This review was written as a follow up research on my previous blog review on Prog Rock.
For a fuller review and embedded music See:
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com
Profile Image for Trevor Seigler.
997 reviews12 followers
January 7, 2022
The Kinks might be one of the most idiosyncratic bands in rock history: a group who almost conquered America alongside the Beatles, Stones, and Who, but who were forced away from American stages at the height of their popularity and retreated to an insular, English-focused run of singles and albums which garnered little attention at the time but which have cemented their status as one of the all-time great collectives. Their leader and main songwriter, Ray Davies, should be in the running for poet laureate of Great Britain, in my humble opinion. The music of the Kinks is located precisely in their own little corner of London, as put forward by Mark Doyle, and you can't really understand the Kinks unless you understand why that's important.

"The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached" is, first things first, not a biography. Plenty of those already exist of the band and its lead singer, including "God Save the Kinks" (which I highly recommend). This is more of a sociological study, encompassing everything from the council block towers to Edmund Burke in its survey of forces and ideas that shaped the Kinks and what they in turn reacted to and embraced or scorned in their music. It's a heady, enticing look not just at history but at intellectual history. Doyle isn't interested in rehashing all the stories about the Kinks' live shows or how they came together; he's more interested in looking for the hidden meanings behind some of the group's best-loved songs and how Davies' songwriting defies easy categorization along the left/right spectrum in terms of politics.

The book is a grand tour, in a sense, of the small world that Ray and his brother Dave inhabited even as they climbed to the top of the charts and shook off the dust of their small London neighborhood. Reared in a musical family, the brothers Davies took off in the early Sixties as yet another British band inspired by American sounds. Their most important early single, "You Really Got Me," would serve as an inspiration to heavy metal and punk rock in equal turns. But when Ray began to aim for a deeper examination of the English psyche, with portraits of everyday people going about their everyday lives and the hopes, dreams, and desires that those entailed, the Kinks really came into their own and distinguished themselves as perhaps the most literate of the English groups working at that time. Their ban from America hurt them in the short run, but ultimately the songs that they recorded during their "exile" from the world's largest record market went on to become acclaimed classics espousing a particularly English sensibility. Doyle argues persuasively that many of Ray's best efforts, considered more reactionary at the time, may indeed be more open-minded and progressive than the similarly themed "preservation efforts" of older peers. Ray and the band were solidly working-class, with a healthy skepticism that the "swinging Sixties" really meant open societies free of class differences (they didn't, of course, especially in a class-conscious society like Britain). The Kinks may have sounded nostalgic for the days of Empire, but the reality is that they knew such reverence for the past was folly. The Kinks weren't the village green preservation society, at least not in the same way as John Betjeman was. Ray Davies in many ways was continuing in the tradition of Charles Dickens, using exaggerated characters in his songs to capture the essential truth about life in England circa 1967. And he was a master at it.

"Songs of the Semi-Detached" is a fantastic social history of the most English of rock bands and the world that they inhabited and sung about. It's a fun read as well, and a great addition to the library of any Kinks fan or devotee of sociological works about rock and roll and history.
Profile Image for Rodrigo Lorenzi.
6 reviews
July 6, 2021
Being a huge Kinks fan, I was very excited about the book. It's much more a anthropology/history book with some links to Ray Davies. It's interesting but it became a little boring to me.
Profile Image for James.
504 reviews19 followers
October 31, 2023
Excellent. I haven't read another rock book like this. There is a loose biographical structure, but The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-detached eschews the standard Monday-Tuesday minutiae of the Kinks' early recording and performing career and instead focuses on a historical/sociological account of the suburban, London milieu from which they arose. Doyle is a history professor at Middle Tennessee State University and, while this very readable title is written for a popular audience, it hews to the trust-inducing conventions of academic discourse, with end notes and an extensive bibliography.

I didn't really listen to the Kinks until I was an adult. "Lola" was a fixture on classic rock radio when I was growing up, and I knew they had created the monster "You Really Got Me" riff that I loved from the first Van Halen record, but, unlike British invasion contemporaries such as the Beatles and the Stones and the Who (heck, even the Yardbirds after a fashion), they were not part of the 70s Southern California rock and roll firmament. The Kinks were a band I read about before I heard them, and, as they are generally revered by a certain type of scary, self-satisfied, intellectual hipster, I found their sorta quirky music a bit intimidating for a long time.

I've been doing a lot of catch-up listening and reading in conjunction with Andrew Hickey's superb podcast, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. If I understood him correctly, B‎ill McKibben claimed in a recent New Yorker article about the podcast that, if completed, it will be the longest single-author written work in human history (!!!). It is exhaustive, and the two Kinks episodes so far have been superb. I was fascinated a few years ago by writer/artistic director/producer Polly Platt, who some think was the real genius behind Peter Bogdanovich's oeuvre. I don't know enough to have an informed opinion on that controversy, but, as a fan, I can say that the movies he made when he was married to her are head and shoulders above the rest of his work. Similarly, Hickey thinks Ray Davies is the primary author of his songbook, but that the songwriting "fell off a cliff" after Davies divorced from Rasa, his wife during the creative golden age that is examined in this book. Rasa is barely mentioned in this book that is very much about the idea of "home" in Ray Davies' songwriting; her children with Ray aren't even named.

The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-detached is structured roughly chronologically, album by album, but the real focus is neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house, hence the splendid pun in the title. One of the cliches of discourse about the Kinks is their essential "Englishness." Doyle is very interested in the way that Davies drew artistic inspiration from the community in which he was raised. The 'village' of the The Village Green Preservation Society is the London suburb of Fortis Green, where the Davies brothers and their bandmates grew up. As the band became successful, Davies purchased a series of increasingly better houses, first a larger house in a better suburb and then a manor in the country. Neither suited him. He was bored and cut off from the places and people that had inspired his best work, so he moved back to the city to make Arthur and Lola, which, in Doyle's opinion, are the last of the truly great records. He lives there still and, according to a Guardian story from the teens, remains friends with people from his childhood.
Profile Image for Drahcir10001.
56 reviews11 followers
May 1, 2022
A wonderful companion, especially to that exceptional run of albums ‘Village Green’, Arthur, Lola and Muswell Hillbillies, recorded 1968-1971.

The more you listen to Ray Davies and The Kinks the more you realise how extraordinary and rare their gift. Such exceptional and consistent quality even among those ‘unreleased’ and rare tracks belatedly available on bootlegs and YouTube.

Thank you Mark for your years of research and hard work. Your book is a hugely enjoyable read and visual pleasure for any Kinks fan.
29 reviews
October 20, 2025
Much of this is really gold standard and convincingly posits Ray Davies as a Dickens figure for post-war working class north London. But just as Davies’ own vantage point gets more confused and reactionary at the expense of the Romantic - and there are interesting early echoes of pre-Thatcher discontent in Muswell Hillbillies that I will return to - some of Doyle’s reading of 1960s and 70s mass house building veered towards a fustiness that’s harder to swallow from the vantage point of the books 2020 publication.
Profile Image for Mark.
33 reviews
April 12, 2021
Highly recommended book for all Kinks fans. A serious and academic (but thoroughly readable) look at the Kinks' songs within the context of British social history, political philosophy, and literary traditions. Written by Mark Doyle, professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University.
51 reviews
July 15, 2025
A very insightful and no doubt astute look at the Kinks and in particular, the songs. Doyle writes for the not-so-casual Kinks fan, bringing up interesting perspectives from past band members that may either surprise or confirm your view of Ray Davies. It turns out Ray was very much like the homebody in "Autumn Almanac", choosing not to live on an estate but only a very short distance from where he grew up. Did their four-year ban from America affect Ray's writing? Perhaps serve to enhance his Anglophiliac tendencies? Would there have been a "Dedicated Follower of Fashion", "Dead End Street", "Autumn Almanac" or "Waterloo Sunset"? An "Arthur" or "Mussel Hillbilly"? Well, consider how his writing changed when he finally had access. Songs like "Low Budget" and "Gallon of Gas" were definitely more in step with the American times of the late 70s. Not for the casual fan but if you are a devotee of the Kinks or enjoy an analysis of songwriting, definitely worth your time and money.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews

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