The Kinks: Autumn Almanac

Time to get his posted before autumn turns to winter. Autumn Almanac is a non-album single from 1967 that made no. 3 in the UK singles chart.

Ray Davies once explained its genesis:

The words were inspired by Charlie, my dad’s old drinking mate, who cleaned up my garden for me, sweeping up the leaves. I wrote it in early autumn, yeah, as the leaves were turning colour.

And Andy Partridge of XTC has commented:

It’s a miniature movie, basically, that unravels itself as you are listening to it, and it has all these little movements or scenes. And they all seem to take place in the kind of mythical cozy London that the Ealing studios always had in their films, like The Lavender Hill Mob. The song just keeps turning and changing; you see a new facet every few seconds. But there’s nothing unsettling about the fact that there are so many parts.

Thanks to PowerPop for these quotes.

The character sketches you get in British songs of the later Sixties hark back to the traditions of music hall, and those songs, in turn, influenced the Britpop bands of the mid Nineties.

So maybe it was appropriate that Britpop took place during the premiership of John Major, the son of two music hall artists, and not that of Tony "Young Country" Blair.