The Cascades: I Bet You Won't Stay

The Cascades were a clean-cut American vocal group who had an international hit in 1962 with Rhythm of the Rain and were later influenced by the Beach Boys.

I Bet You Won't Stay is a Ray Davies song that, as far as I can tell, The Kinks never recorded. It turned up on the B-side of an unsuccessful Cascades single in 1965.

It's easy to imagine Davies singing this himself. The poster on Bluesky who alerted me to the song described it as a "fantastic link between See My Friends and Tired of Waiting". It's the best Kinks single that never was.

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.

If Enid Blyton was the Beatles then Malcolm Saville was the Kinks

Now here's a title for a blog post: The Famous Five vs The Lone Pine Club. It's on the blog Unpopular Culture.

I shall resist the temptation to quote it in its entirety, and give you just a taste:

Enid Blyton is perhaps like The Beatles. Certainly she was massively globally successful and subsequently went through dips of critical and popular appeal, before becoming established again as a recognisable global brand whose enormous material success insists on being endlessly reproduced and extended. 

I rather enjoy drawing this parallel partly because I know many Beatles devotees will prickle at the thought of any similarities in artistic merit between the two and partly because Lennon himself poked fun at the Famous Five in his ridiculous ‘In His Own Write’ book. 

In hindsight I wonder if The Comic Strip were as much inspired by Lennon’s parody as anything. Certainly there is a similar smug assumed ‘cleverness’ that irritates me more in my fifties than it did in my late teens or early twenties. Others continue to find it charming, of course, and that is their prerogative.

In this imagined realm of children’s authors as 1960s pop groups then, if Blyton might be The Beatles, who would Malcolm Saville be? Certainly not The Stones and definitely not The Who. The Kinks perhaps? 

Certainly I see Saville as doing something similar to The Kinks in terms of attempting to capture a world (specifically an England) that is dissolving even as they record it. There is too a shared sense of knowingness that what is being lost is in itself partially illusory. They both, at their best, mourn a mediated Englishness.

There's much else about the two authors in the post, which reminds me a little of an article I wrote for the Guardian website years ago.

The writer of Unpopular Culture like Saville's Rye books bests, whereas I'm a Stiperstones man. And he has written at least two other posts on Saville.

There's one on Jane's Country Year, which was Saville's favourite among his own books and shows the influence of Richard Jefferies' Bevis.

And a recent one on, amongst other things, one of the last of Saville's Lone Pine stories, Rye Royal.

Wish I had been the first to find the real David Watts

Oakham's Big Pop Flop

say the headlines. And:

Organisers blame fantastic rumours of a rowdy and dangerous evening for failure

This is the Stamford Mercury for Friday 26 August 1966, reporting events the previous weekend:

The much publicised big beat show on Saturday night Oakham proved to be very much off-beat. With The Kinks as the star attraction, supported by three other well-known "pop" groups, the promoters hoped for a crowd of between five and six thousand on the agriculturkl show ground, but only just over 2,000 turned up.

"It was a financial failure and we're bitterly disappointed. We had hoped to raise a considerable sum for Langham village charities, Mr Tony Ruddle, one of the organisers, told the Mercury.

Special trains were put on, including one calling at Market Harborough, but they not enough to override the bad advance publicity, at least as the organisers told it.

Now, to anyone who knows their pop history, the conjunction of the Kinks and Rutland will ring a loud bell. Here's Ray Davies talking about the genesis of the song David Watts:

As Ray Davies confirmed in The Kinks: The Official Biography by Savage, "David Watts is a real person. He was a concert promoter in Rutland." He goes on to relate how the real Watts was gay and demonstrated an obvious romantic interest in his brother Dave Davies. In this light, lines such as "he is so gay and fancy free" and "all the girls in the neighbourhood try to go out with David Watts... but can't succeed" provide a second level of interpretation based on this ironic in-joke.

The band members were invited back to Watts' home for a drink one night after a concert. Ray Davies recalled to Q magazine in a 2016 interview: "My brother, Dave, was in a flamboyant mood and I could see that David Watts had a crush on him. So I tried to persuade Dave to marry David Watts because he was connected with Rutland brewery. See, that's how stupid my brain was."

If we're talking about the Kinks meeting a Rutland pop promoter, it must surely have been at the failed Oakham event.

So I searched the local papers for the name David Watts and came up with nothing - the organisers mentioned were all members of the Ruddle family. (Ruddle's beers had a vogue in the Eighties, so much so that they became easier to find in London than Rutland. Then the Ruddle family sold out to Watney's and their brewery at Langham was closed and demolished.)

There was one tantalising glimpse of a David Watts though. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, the dart players of Oakham competed for the David Watts Trophy. 

And then I found an online obituary for a Major David Watts.

David Watts, who died on 16 September 1990, joined the 3rd Hussars at Sarafand in Palestine in 1946, having recovered from being severely wounded while serving with the 1st Royal Tank Regiment in Normandy.

He was one of those men of whom it is true to say that he was devoted to his Regiment.

Although he carried out two appointments on the staff with competence and flair, he was first and foremost a Regimental soldier with the 3rd Hussars, The Queen’s Own Hussars and very happy and successful as Training Major with the Warwickshire and Worcestershire Yeomanry.

And so on until you reach:

After retiring, he lived in Rutland and worked in the brewing industry for a short time before going back to Devonshire where his family have lived for many years.

I don't know how much truth there is in Ray Davies's recollections, but this Major must be our man.

For a few days I felt very pleased with myself, then I discovered that a Kinks Facebook page had got there three years before me. I knew how Captain Scott felt when he reached the South Pole only to find Amundsen's Norwegian flag flying.

I am just going outside and may be some time, so I'll leave you with the Kinks.

The Joy of Six 1121

"Talented Tory politicians are no longer gossiped about as potentially the next Prime Minister, but as the next Leader of the Opposition. Others are standing down early rather than go through the motions of waiting for voters to kick them out." Asa Bennett says the real battle for the future of the Conservative Party will begin when they have lost the next election.

Michael Walzer talks to Dissent about his new book The Struggle for a Decent Politics: "A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies. That’s a liberal. But those liberal qualities don’t imply any social or economic doctrine."

Joanna Blythman says we must take a stand against the farmed salmon industry.

"In the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, some experts worried that children confined at home would be vulnerable to abuse ... But the evidence suggests that in some parts of the United States, including New York City, those dire predictions were wrong: while the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc across the country, the epidemic of child abuse never arrived." An accidental experiment during Covid lockdown suggests too many children are removed to foster care, reports Tracy Tullis.

"Ray looks worried even when he is promising to love you all day (and all of the night). Dave looks like he’s won the pools even when he’s singing about an alcoholic clown expiring alone." Gareth Roberts celebrates 60 years of The Kinks.

Curious British Telly remembers Not With a Bang, a postapocalyptic sitcom from 1990.

The Jam: The Butterfly Collector

With its changes in pace, this Jam B-side (it's on the flip side of Strange Town) pays homage to Ray Davies in the shape of the Kinks' song Shangri-La.

What's it about? Theories implicate Julie Burchill, a notorious groupie of the New Wave era and John Fowles's 1963 novel The Collector.*

And All Music is sure it knows:

If "Strange Town" took a cynical look at England's capital city, that single's flipside, "Butterfly Collector", was a bitter expose of the London club scene or, more accurately, one particularly egregious (if unnamed) club owner. Using and abusing bands to further her own aims and fame, composer Paul Weller pins her to the wall and leaves her to squirm beneath his sharp-as-tacks lyrics. For weeks afterwards, incidentally, clubland echoed with rumours as to the song’s subject’s identity. Weller, however, never let on.

As vicious as his attack may be, however, the song is infused less with anger than with melancholy, fed by Weller's evocative acoustic guitar work and his almost lamenting vocal delivery. His anger still bleeds through, but the very restraint of the band's backing, and Weller's own suppressed delivery makes this song all the more devastating. One of The Jam's most haunting numbers, the song's atmosphere was enhanced by Vic Coppersmith-Heaven's excellent production.

* This is one of those sentences where an Oxford comma is not helpful.