BEWARE THE PEOPLE IN GREY

(RCA, November 1971)

With their contract with Pye soon to expire, Davies channelled his next batch of songs into a soundtrack LP for the flop Brit comedy film, Percy – about a penis transplant – thus consigning two of his finest-ever ballads, the Blakean God’s Children and haunting The Way Love Used To Be, to the cut-out bins. But God’s Children, together with Lola’s Got To Be Free, steered the singer towards the theme of The Kinks’ next album: that the progress made in the 20th century was illusory, that Man had become enslaved to bureaucracy, and that age-old communities in big cities, like Holloway and Islington in north London, were being wantonly destroyed by post-war town planners. In summer 1971, Ken Glancy in RCA’s New York office offered the group a six-album deal – around the same time David Bowie also signed to the label – so it was ironic that the first LP The Kinks delivered to their new American bosses was, according to Davies, “inspired by London more than any other [album] we had recorded”. But although the indelibly English subject matter of Have A Cuppa Tea and references to civil servants and Holloway Jail may have seemed parochial to mainstream US audiences, the music on the record certainly wasn’t. Opening track 20th Century Man was a corn-fed rockin’ boogie, Here Come The People In Grey a Southern funk song, while Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues sounded as if it came straight from a funeral parade in New Orleans, with The Kinks’ by-now trusty brass section, the Mike Cotton Sound, at their woozy finest. Curiously, the wonderful Lavender Lane, the song that best summed up Muswell Hillbillies’ leitmotif of Cockney communities under the wrecking ball, was left in the vaults until 2013’s deluxe reissue. Not that the world knew, or cared, in 1971.