I played and burned a copy of my old Kinks Celluloid Heroes compilation album today. It’s been quite an oversight for me leaving it this long to do it, being the huge Kinks fan that I am. The album is a collection of some of their singles from their RCA years of the Seventies, and many of the songs are different from and often superior to the album versions. I particularly like the single versions of Muswell Hillbilly, Here Comes Yet Another Day and Sitting In the Midday Sun. The single version of MH is more sprightly than the album version, and Dave’s tasty guitar licks are more on display, whereas they’re buried in the mix on the album version. The drums on SITMS are better balanced on the single version, and Dave’s nice harmony vocals near the end are more to the fore in the mix. HCYAD is a surprising and superior live version that’s not even on the live disc that came with the Everybody’s In Showbiz album. The live version of Skin and Bone, which is on that album, is here, and I much prefer this edited version. The EIS version has a tedious extended bit where Ray tries to get the crowd to join in and fails, and that’s what’s edited out. Much better. Alternatively, the live version here of Alcohol completely omits the dramatic opening monologue/first verse (just starts with ‘It’s very sad’, the chorus intro), so I prefer the EIS version. So too the album version of Starmaker is better than the shortened and sped up single version here. Yeah, I’m a bit of a nut about the Kinks. You should see what I did with their Picture Book boxed set…
I listened to my Kinks Celluloid Heroes compilation that I digitised last night. Boy those are some good songs. The live tracks, which are mostly from Everybody’s In Showbiz, are the aural equivalent of being happily drunk. It’s appropriate that one of them is called Alcohol. This was the first of two compilation albums put out of the Kinks’ RCA years. Released in 1976, CH didn’t include material from the last RCA album, Schoolboys In Disgrace, which was released later that year. It also didn’t have anything from Preservation Act Two. The second album was called Second Time Around and came out in 1980. I remember seeing it in the shops, but I didn’t buy it because I didn’t like the song selection. Two of the tracks, A Face In the Crowd and Celluloid Heroes, were included on the first album, so I don’t know why they were there. The live version of Lola is the short minute and a half snippet from Everybody’s In Showbiz, so that’s a bit of a waste. For some reason two of the weakest songs from the studio version of that album are there, Hot Potatoes and Motorway. The Hard Way and No More Looking Back from Schoolboys In Disgrace are welcome but it’s not enough. I think about what they could have put on there. The single b-side version of Scrapheap City with the Ray vocal, the single version of Mirror of Love, Supersonic Rocket Ship – I mean, c’mon! It was a shitty compilation and they should have done better. See, I told you I was a nut about the Kinks.