The Kinks - Royal Albert Hall, London, Britain, 7-11-1993

I've posted a lot of live concerts from the Kinks, but none from the 1990s until now. (The Kinks put out their last studio album in 1993, and kept touring until 1993.) This is a great sounding concert that only became available this year (2025).

Most of this was officially released earlier in 2025 as part of an archival release called "The Journey, Part 3." A double disc album, the first concert is a greatest hits of sorts from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the second disc is this concert. If all of the concert had been released there, I wouldn't have posted this. But it turns out only about two-thirds of the concert was included. Furthermore, the song order was moved around. So this is an attempt to present the full concert, in the correct song order.

I ran into a problem though, because this concert has never been bootlegged, meaning I couldn't find the rest of it. My solution was to use another soundboard bootleg from the same year for five of the missing songs (from Saratoga Springs, New York). Then I found two more from a soundboard bootleg from 1994 (from Stuttgart, Germany). 

Between those two sources, I was able to find all of the missing songs except for one, "Waterloo Sunset." This is frustrating, because that's one of the greatest songs of all time, in my opinion. But there are only a couple of soundboard bootlegs from the 1993 or 1994 time frame, and none of them have that song. I could have used an audience bootleg from those years for that one song, but it would have meant a big drop in sound quality. If anyone knows of a live version of that song from that era with worthy sound quality, please let me know.

In order to make this concert flow in a pleasing way, I did some editing of the transitions between songs. For instance, I might have one song ending with a wildly cheering crowd and then the next song starting with no crowd noise. In a case like that, I would patch in more crowd noise from elsewhere in the concert to have the cheering die out before the quiet at the start of the next song began. I fixed a lot of those transitions, even in the songs actually from the Royal Albert Hall source when the song order of those was changed.  

At the time, the Kinks had just released their last studio album, "Phobia." Five of the songs here are from that. Otherwise, the concert consisted of the band's biggest hits, plus a cover of "Twist and Shout" at the end. I would argue this now is the best sounding, best performed concert recording of the band from the 1990s, even though it is stitched together from three different sources.

This album is one hour and 25 minutes long.

01 Intro [Instrumental] (Kinks)
02 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
03 Where Have All the Good Times Gone (Kinks)
04 Low Budget (Kinks)
05 talk (Kinks)
06 Phobia (Kinks)
07 talk (Kinks)
08 Only a Dream (Kinks)
09 talk (Kinks)
10 Scattered (Kinks)
11 Apeman (Kinks)
12 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
13 talk (Kinks)
14 Drift Away (Kinks)
15 I'm Not like Everybody Else (Kinks)
16 Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Kinks)
17 The Informer (Kinks)
18 Death of a Clown (Kinks)
19 Dead End Street (Kinks)
20 Come Dancing (Kinks)
21 Welcome to Sleazy Town (Kinks)
22 Sunny Afternoon (Kinks)
23 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
24 Lola (Kinks)
25 Days (Kinks)
26 talk (Kinks)
27 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
28 talk (Kinks)
29 Twist and Shout (Kinks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/vyqQVkML

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/SRLvvzXPkAgnjO0/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. 

The Kinks - Universal Amphitheatre, Los Angeles, CA, 6-25-1978

With the Kinks being my second favorite rock band (after the Beatles), I'm always looking for worthy music to post from them. In this case, I found a decent bootleg and improved the sound quality to make it worthy.

When it comes to Kinks concerts from 1977, there are several with excellent sound quality. And for 1979, there also are a couple, plus the official live album "One for the Road." But there's no concert with soundboard quality for 1978. 

However, I recently discovered this concert. It's only an audience bootleg. But it was recorded by Mike Millard, who had pretty good recording equipment. A big problem with such audience bootlegs is that there's usually too much crowd noise. That was the case here, with people often making noise all through the songs. But nowadays, there are audio editing tools to do something about that. So I used the MVSEP program to get rid of ALL the crowd noise, except for a little bit at the starts of songs, the usual cheering at the ends of songs. Plus, occasionally some in the middle when there was a particularly big roar from the crowd. But that was pretty rare. The result is this audience boot almost turns into a soundboard quality boot, since it recorded what was on stage pretty well.

In 1978, the Kinks released their studio album "Misfits." So this concert differs from those 1977 concert recordings mentioned above mainly by including six songs from that album: "A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy," "Hay Fever," "Live Life," "Misfits," "Permanent Waves," and "Trust Your Heart." Plus, there were still four songs from the album prior to that one, "Sleepwalker," making the set list pretty different from those of other eras.

This album is an hour and 41 minutes long.

01 You Really Got Me Intro [Instrumental] (Kinks)
02 Life on the Road (Kinks)
03 Sleepwalker (Kinks)
04 Mr. Big Man (Kinks)
05 talk (Kinks)
06 Waterloo Sunset (Kinks)
07 talk (Kinks)
08 Misfits (Kinks)
09 talk (Kinks)
10 Permanent Waves (Kinks)
11 Hay Fever (Kinks)
12 Lola (Kinks)
13 talk (Kinks)
14 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
15 A Well Respected Man (Kinks)
16 Death of a Clown (Kinks)
17 Sunny Afternoon (Kinks)
18 talk (Kinks)
19 Trust Your Heart (Kinks)
20 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
21 Slum Kids (Kinks)
22 talk (Kinks)
23 Alcohol (Kinks)
24 talk (Kinks)
25 A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy (Kinks)
26 talk (Kinks)
27 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
28 talk (Kinks)
29 Live Life (Kinks)
30 talk (Kinks)
31 Juke Box Music (Kinks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/jHmHfNhy

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/jGCABUZtHx1AGvP/file

The cover photo of lead singer Ray Davies is from a concert at the Uptown Theater in Chicago, Illinois, on June 11, 1978.

US Festival '82, Glen Helen Regional Park, San Bernardino, CA, 9-4-1982 - Day 2, Part 4: The Kinks

The fourth act presented here from Day Two of the 1982 US Festival is a set by the Kinks.

Oh boy, there's quite a tangled story with this set. First off, note that this is all unreleased, like nearly all the music from this festival. And it's from an audience bootleg, again, just like nearly all of the festival. However, we're lucky this is one of the better sounding audience boots from it.

Okay, let's get to the story. Keep in mind that while the festival was funded by computer multimillionaire Steve Wozniak, the main organizer was Bill Graham, who was easily the best known and most important concert promoter in the U.S. at the time. Also keep in mind that the festival was really damn hot. On this, the second day, the high temperature was "only" 106 degrees Fahrenheit, a few degrees less than on the first day. The heat and sun had made the crowd lethargic during the first day, but they had gotten more lively after the sun went down. So it was understandable why the Kinks would have wanted to go on later. And one more thing to keep in mind: I just looked it up, and the sun set in this region on that date at about 7:15 P.M.

Okay, now that you know all that, here's an except from a Rolling Stone Magazine article about the concert that came out shortly after it happened:

[T]he Kinks most assuredly did care when they appeared, and by their reckoning, they shouldn't have gone on until after dark. But they were scheduled for 6:20 P.M., before [Tom] Petty, before [Pat] Benatar and before dark - and a couple of weeks' worth of protests [by the band] didn't change that. So they resorted to the next best thing: as the clock reached 6:20, the Kinks were nowhere in sight.

For Bill Graham, that was the cardinal sin: screwing with his smoothly run show. Graham was fuming when the band's manager - sans Kinks - parked his Mercedes backstage. Graham bodily ejected him, ordering a forklift operator to upend the car unless he left. He left.

Finally, twenty minutes after they were supposed to have taken the stage, the Kinks pulled up and strolled to their dressing room. Graham was still seething. "Five minutes!" he screamed at a band assistant as he towered outside. Five minutes later, he pounded on the door, yelling, "NOW!"

The band finally emerged. [Lead singer] Ray Davies walked slowly, loitering by Benatar's door, a big, bemused smile on his face. Graham simply watched; if looks could kill, they'd have had to take Davies home in a paper bag. When the band got to the base of the stage stairs and then stood around with no apparent intention of taking the stage, something snapped in Graham.

In two strides, the promoter was halfway up the stairs, shouting at Davies and a Kinks aide. "All right, that's it!" Graham finally bellowed. He galloped up the rest of the stairs, and it was clear that as soon as he made it to the microphone, the Kinks would be off the bill. Before he got there, Davies and crew were on their way onstage. By then, it was nearly dark. The band played a sloppy, flashy set. The two video screens were not used.

So that's a pretty wild story right there. But the power struggle is even more interesting if you listen to the banter between songs made in this recording. For instance, the Kinks seemed to end their set a few songs early (despite giving the longest performance of the day already), telling the audience that they wanted to keep going but weren't allowed to play any longer. That obliged Graham to go out on stage and ask the audience to cheer louder so the Kinks would agree to keep playing. Then, Davies said snarkily, "I consider this truly a great honor to be asked by the one and only Bill Graham to do an encore for his, the pitiful, the pinnacle... of something."

I'm guessing at that moment Graham was contemplating just how many years he'd have to serve in prison if he murdered Davies on stage!

In retrospect, I think both Davies and Graham were at fault. Davies showed a complete inability to be diplomatic, in fact showing almost a childlike glee at snubbing authority. Based on this incident, I can easily see why the Kinks were banned by a musician's union from touring in the U.S. from 1965 to 1969. They were the only famous band to get banned like that, at least in that era.

But on the other hand, Graham was known to have an explosive temper, and he didn't cover himself in glory either. For instance, it was a petty move for him to turn off the huge video screens only for the Kinks set.

It's strange he was so insistent on sticking to the time, given that there were only two more acts to follow the Kinks, and each of the big acts in the festival played sets that lasted about an hour each. So if the Kinks went on when they were supposed to, and the following acts played the expected amount of time (which in fact is what they did), Day Two would have ended before 10 P.M. That would have been shockingly early for a massive festival like this, where delays of many hours were the norm. In fact, for many big festivals like Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, the last acts of each evening often didn't finish their sets until after sunrise! And given the extreme heat of this particular festival, I'm sure the crowd would have much preferred to have less of the acts during the day and more of them at night.

In any case, I think it's a safe bet that the Kinks never took part in any concert or festival organized by Bill Graham after this. That alone would have impacted their popularity in the U.S. for the rest of their career, because Graham organized so many concerts, especially big festivals like this. For instance, this probably explains why the Kinks and/or Ray Davies never played at any of the yearly Bridge School Benefits despite being a great fit for the acoustic format of those concerts, since that was still operated by Graham's organization long after Graham died in the 1990s.

One final note. In his 2013 book "Americana," Davies wrote: "...The Kinks kept their side of the bargain at the US Festival; we honored our word and, more than anything else, delivered a knockout show, which was all that mattered at the end of the day." That's not just self-promotion either. I've read praise for the performance elsewhere. Probably, the conflict with Graham got the band all fired up.

Moving on to the music presented here, the Kinks released their studio album "Give the People What They Want" in 1981, and many of the songs played came from that. They would release the album "State of Confusion" in 1983. One song they played here, "Bernadette," would appear on that album. Another one, "Entertainment," was supposed to go on that album, and was even announced as "Here's a song from our next album." But it ultimately wouldn't make the cut. It would finally appear on the 1989 album "UK Jive."

This album is an hour and 25 minutes long.

045 Introduction [Instrumental] (Kinks)
046 Around the Dial (Kinks)
047 The Hard Way (Kinks)
048 Where Have All the Good Times Gone (Kinks)
049 Catch Me Now, I'm Falling (Kinks)
050 talk (Kinks)
051 Destroyer (Kinks)
052 Yo-Yo (Kinks)
053 talk (Kinks)
054 Lola (Kinks)
055 Entertainment (Kinks)
056 talk (Kinks)
057 Low Budget (Kinks)
058 Back to Front (Kinks)
059 talk (Kinks)
060 Art Lover (Kinks)
061 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
062 talk (Kinks)
063 Come On Now (Kinks)
064 A Gallon of Gas (Kinks)
065 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
066 Bernadette (Kinks)
067 talk (Kinks)
068 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
069 talk (Kinks)
070 Pressure (Kinks)
071 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
072 talk (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17500956/VA-1982USFstvlDay0204TKnks_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/yBEFyCuT

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/K455aNnPjdKajmM/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. I used the Krea AI program to improve the detail.

Dave Davies - The Bottom Line, New York City, 11-29-1997

It's been too long since I've posted anything related to the Kinks, my second favorite band (after the Beatles, of course). 

This is a great concert by Dave Davies, lead guitarist for the Kinks and brother of the band's lead singer and main songwriter, Ray Davies. (By the way, their last name is pronounced like it's "Davis.") I've posted some of Dave Davies' stuff already, but I just want to reiterate that he gets overlooked due to his more famous and prolific brother. 

If Ray Davies was both the Lennon and McCartney of the Beatles, then it's a very apt comparison to consider Dave Davies the George Harrison of the group. For one, they're both lead guitarists. But also, Dave would write some songs, typically only one an album, but they'd be at the same standard as the rest, and fit in stylistically.

By the time of this concert, the Kinks had petered out, with this last concert in 1996. Naturally, Dave switched to a solo career. In 2000, he released an album called "Rock Bottom: Live at the Bottom Line." The songs on that were selected from a series of concerts at the Bottom Line in late 1997. This was one of those concerts. However, I ran this album through the copyright violation detector at YouTube, and it only found two similarities ("Wicked Annabella" and one of the talking tracks). So I think this has very little overlap in terms of exact performances, even though most of the songs were the same.

In my opinion, this concert is significantly better than the "Rock Bottom" live album. One big advantage is that it's longer by about 20 minutes. So it has all the songs that one has, plus a few more. In terms of sound quality, it's an excellent soundboard, just as good as the official album. Also, I prefer to hear full concerts, warts and all, instead of live albums culled from a bunch of different concerts, so one can get a better sense of what the live experience was really like.

Note that eleven of the songs here were written or co-written by Dave, but eight were solely written by his brother Ray. I believe the Ray ones are tracks 3, 4, 5, 9, 17, 19, 20, 23, and 30. Plus, tracks 11, 29, and 31 are covers.

This album is an hour and 32 minutes long.

01 talk (Dave Davies)
02 Look through Any Doorway (Dave Davies)
03 Wicked Annabella (Dave Davies)
04 I Need You (Dave Davies)
05 She's Got Everything (Dave Davies)
06 talk (Dave Davies)
07 Creepin' Jean (Dave Davies)
08 Love Me Till the Sun Shines (Dave Davies)
09 Tired of Waiting for You (Dave Davies)
10 talk (Dave Davies)
11 Milk Cow Blues (Dave Davies)
12 talk (Dave Davies)
13 It's Too Late (Dave Davies)
14 talk (Dave Davies)
15 Imagination's Real (Dave Davies)
16 talk (Dave Davies)
17 Party Line (Dave Davies)
18 Love Gets You (Dave Davies)
19 Picture Book (Dave Davies)
20 Too Much on My Mind (Dave Davies)
21 talk (Dave Davies)
22 Death of a Clown (Dave Davies)
23 Get Back in Line (Dave Davies)
24 Strangers (Dave Davies)
25 talk (Dave Davies)
26 Fortis Green (Dave Davies)
27 Living on a Thin Line (Dave Davies)
28 talk (Dave Davies)
29 One Night (Dave Davies)
30 All Day and All of the Night (Dave Davies)
31 Money [That's What I Want] (Dave Davies)
32 David Watts (Dave Davies)
33 You're Lookin' Fine (Dave Davies)
34 Lincoln County (Dave Davies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/mNM5okXX

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/inpeHzV27vS89I5/file

The cover photo shows Dave Davies playing at this very venue, the Bottom Line in New York City, but in 1999 instead of 1997.

The Kinks - BBC Sessions, Volume 8: In Concert, The Palladium, New York City, 12-31-1980

I didn't realize at first that this unreleased Kinks concert was a BBC concert, because it took place in New York City and was broadcast on a US radio station. But it turns out it was also broadcast in Britain by the BBC. I've even heard the version with a British accented DJ introducing the show to prove it.

Perhaps because this was recorded by a US radio station instead of the BBC, the sound quality was a bit lacking. But I decided the main problem was the lead vocals were too low, and that's something I can fix today, thanks to audio editing programs like X-Minus. So I used that to boost the vocals of every single song. It couldn't do anything for the banter between songs, since the program can't differentiate the vocals of lead singer Ray Davies from the cheering crowd, but it helped a lot with the actual songs.

This isn't that different from the official live album "One for the Road." Both are based on 1980 concert recordings supporting the band's "Low Budget" album. But I prefer full concerts like this over those taken from multiple concerts, like the "One for the Road" album does. Also, the set list is somewhat different. The band even played one song destined for their next album of the same name, "Give the People What They Want."

Speaking of that song, the X-Minus program had to do some extra work on that one. There was some talking that sounded as if it wasn't from the concert at all, but somehow recorded on top of it. There even was a female voice saying the line "At the tone the time will be," which is what you get when you call for the current time! I had to patch in some vocals from a different concert, because some of the talking was over the lead vocals, but you shouldn't be able to hear anything strange now.

Oh, the entire musical intro to "David Watts" was patched in from the "One for the Road" version of the song. I found two versions of this concert. The BBC version didn't have the encore, so it was missing that. The other version had so much DJ talking and cheering over the intro that it couldn't be fixed well. But I think it sounds good now.

This album is an hour and 32 minutes long.

01 You Really Got Me [Instrumental] (Kinks)
02 The Hard Way (Kinks)
03 talk (Kinks)
04 Where Have All the Good Times Gone - Tired of Waiting for You (Kinks)
05 talk (Kinks)
06 Catch Me Now, I'm Falling (Kinks)
07 talk (Kinks)
08 Bird Dog (Kinks)
09 talk (Kinks)
10 N. Y. C. Blues (Kinks)
11 talk (Kinks)
12 Lola (Kinks)
13 Dead End Street (Kinks)
14 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
15 Low Budget (Kinks)
16 talk (Kinks)
17 Imagination's Real (Kinks)
18 Nothin' More to Lose (Kinks)
19 talk (Kinks)
20 I'm Not like Everybody Else (Kinks)
21 Come On Now (Kinks)
22 talk (Kinks)
23 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
24 talk (Kinks)
25 Give the People What They Want (Kinks)
26 A Gallon of Gas (Kinks)
27 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
28 talk (Kinks)
29 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
30 talk (Kinks)
31 David Watts (Kinks)
32 Pressure (Kinks)
33 [Wish I Could Fly Like] Superman (Kinks)

https://www.imagenetz.de/dNjuY

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/EWiMGS9d

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/8xlmNMp5HMCVaMY/file

The cover photo of lead singer Ray Davies comes from 1980, but I don't know any more than that.

The Kinks - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 11-27-29-1969

I've had this concert bootleg for a long time, and I came close to posting it here a year or two ago, but I decided against it due to sound quality issues. Good, but not top notch. However, thanks to the sound editing programs Spleeter and X-Minus, I was able to improve this somewhat. Note that "somewhat" is just that, somewhat; it hasn't been totally transformed into sounding like a pristine soundboard. But, it's better than ever before.

The Kinks are my second favorite musical act (behind only the Beatles), and my favorite time period for them is the late 1960s. Although they toured in 1967 and 1968, those concerts seem to have fallen into a memory hole, with no official releases or bootlegs. This 1969 recording is the one decent sounding live show from them. Some say this is a soundboard. I highly doubt that, but even if it is, it sounds like a good audience recording. 

One problem with it is that the sound quality varies. If you look at the title of this post, you'll see the date I list is "11-27-29-1969." That means it was recorded on multiple nights, on November 27th, 28th, and/or 29th. The second half of this sounds a bit rougher. Starting from "Love Me Till the Sun Shines" until the end, I used X-Minus to boost the vocals somewhat. I also enlisted the help of my musical associate MZ, who improved the equalization, especially by reducing the overly loud bass.

I made a number of other changes here and there. One problem the show had is that the taper obviously turned the tape off and on at times. Happily, some of the between song banter was captured. But sometimes, the start of a song was missed. That was the case with the start of "Victoria," for instance. I replaced that missing material by patching in some music from a bootleg of a Boston 1969 concert. (More on that concert later.) In more cases, there wasn't any applause after a song, or there wasn't much, due to the tape getting turned off. Again, I generally used the audience reactions to other songs from that Boston show to fill in the missing pieces.

I believe the version of "Brainwashed" here was the first part of a medley then went to "Milk Cow Blues," "See My Friends," "Tired of Waiting for You," and then back to "Brainwashed." However, there almost certainly is a missing chunk of most of "Milk Cow Blues." I didn't have any good material to fill in that, so it still has that flaw.

I did manage to fix other problems though. For "Big Sky," the chords were badly flubbed the first time the chorus came around. So I patched that up using a bit of the next chorus. For "Love Me Till the Sun Shines," "You're Looking Fine," and "Victoria," there were skips of a second or two. I patched those up as well.

One thing to consider is that the Kinks weren't popular at the time, especially in the US where this concert took place. They hadn't had a hit in the US since 1966, which was eons in those days, and they hadn't been able to tour the US since 1965, due to a union dispute. For many, they were considered washed-up and badly out of step with music trends, much like the Herman's Hermits or the Searchers around the same time. In retrospect, the band's two most recent albums, "The Village Green Preservation Society" and "Arthur," are considered some of the best albums of all time. But very few people bought them. The band's fortunes would change drastically one year later with the big hit "Lola," but that hadn't happened yet.

As a result of all that, the Kinks were probably an opening act facing a largely indifferent audience. You can see this in some of lead singer Ray Davies' comments between songs. For instance, before playing "You Really Got Me," he suggests that one song the audience might actually know already. And although they did play three songs from the latest album "Arthur" ("Mr. Churchill Says," "Brainwashed," and "Victoria"), it seems the reaction wasn't that good, because he commented that he didn't think the audience was ready for them. The band's lack of popularity probably also explains some song choices, like a cover of the chestnut "Louie, Louie." 

I mentioned a Boston concert up above. That took place a month earlier, on October 25, 1969. The bootleg I have for that largely contains the same songs, but with slightly inferior sound quality. However, it varies too, and some sound as good as this one. The band played two great rarities for that show, "Don't You Fret" and "Fancy," and luckily those were cases where the sound was pretty decent, so I've added those as quasi-bonus tracks at the end. "Fancy" in particular is very interesting, and considerably longer than the 1966 album version.

The Fillmore portion of this concert is 57 minutes long. If you add in the two extra songs from Boston, the total is an hour and five minutes. It's true isn't not all from one concert, and in fact we don't even know for sure which songs are from which dates, but this is the best of the best of the known 1969 recordings (unless you count BBC material, which I consider different).

Of course, many of these songs would be played in later years with better sound quality. But if you're a big Kinks fan like me, you'll be amazed to hear live versions of songs like "Big Sky," "Mr. Churchill Says," and "Fancy."

01 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
02 Mindless Child of Motherhood (Kinks)
03 talk (Kinks)
04 Last of the Steam Powered Trains (Kinks)
05 You're Looking Fine [Edit] (Kinks)
06 talk (Kinks)
07 Mr. Churchill Says (Kinks)
08 Big Sky [Edit] (Kinks)
09 talk (Kinks)
10 You Really Got Me - All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
11 Love Me Till the Sun Shines [Edit] (Kinks)
12 Brainwashed (Kinks)
13 Milk Cow Blues - See My Friends - Tired of Waiting for You - Brainwashed [Edit] (Kinks)
14 talk (Kinks)
15 Louie, Louie (Kinks)
16 talk (Kinks)
17 Victoria [Edit] (Kinks)
18 A Well Respected Man - Death of a Clown - Dandy (Kinks)
19 Don't You Fret (Kinks)
20 talk (Kinks)
21 Fancy (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700799/TKNKS1969_FillmorWestSnFrncscoCA__11-27-29-1969_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I used a poster of the exact series of shows featured here. I did that partially because finding a good color concert photo of the Kinks in 1969 is next to impossible. But also, it's fitting because this concert is some mix of recordings from three shows, November 27th to 29th, and the poster is from the whole stand of November 27th to 30th. That's one day different, but it's pretty darn close.

Since it was a rectangular concert poster, I had to crop out a big chunk of it at the bottom. I made other changes too. The Kinks were co-headliners with Taj Mahal, and Sha Na Na was on the bill too. So I removed those names from the top of the picture. Also, the middle photo originally looked just like this, with the green coloring, except Taj Mahal was pictured there too. So I found the photo used for that and redid it with just the Kinks in there.

The Kinks - BBC Sessions, Volume 10: 1993-1994

Here's the last in my long series of albums of Kinks performing for the BBC. (Keep in mind that I recently renumbered and added to the series prior to this, which is why I suddenly went from having four albums in the series to eight.) This is the end of the road, because the Kinks put out their last studio album in 1993, "Phobia," then ceased to exist around 1996.

For whatever reason, it seems the Kinks didn't make many promotional appearances for all of the 1980s and into the early 1990s. But that changed with the release of "Phobia." They did their first BBC studio sessions since the 1970s, and other similar appearances. Nine out of the 15 songs here (including the bonus track) are BBC performances that were included on the "At the BBC" box set. The rest are all officially unreleased. But they sound very good because of how they come from good recordings of TV and radio appearances.

The previous album in this series, "Volume 7," has four songs from Phobia on it. This has four more, plus two other new songs, "House of Blues" and "To the Bone." The other eight songs are all versions of older classic Kinks hits.

I have one bonus track, but for once it's not a bonus track due to sound quality issues. Instead, the problem is that the "At the BBC" box set included two very similar versions of "Til the End of the Day," since the song was played at two BBC sessions. One of them is plenty for me. So I've included the second one as a bonus track since it's from the box set and maybe some people don't mind two versions of the same song.

01 The Informer (Kinks)
02 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
03 Days (Kinks)
04 Dead End Street (Ray Davies)
05 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
06 Waterloo Sunset [Acoustic] (Kinks)
07 I'm Not like Everybody Else (Kinks)
08 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
09 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
10 Phobia (Kinks)
11 Over the Edge (Kinks)
12 Wall of Fire (Kinks)
13 To the Bone (Ray Davies)
14 House of the Blues (Kinks)

Till the End of the Day (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16162302/TKNKS1993-1994_BBSessonsVlum10_atse.zip.html

Good color photos of the Kinks from 1993 or 1994 are surprisingly hard to find. I ended up using a photo of just brothers Ray and Dave Davies, even though there still were others in the band at the time.

The Kinks - BBC Sessions, Volume 9: 1981-1993

A year or two ago as I write this, I posted four albums of the Kinks performing for the BBC. Those albums went from the start of their career to 1978. I searched around and thought that was all there was, except for some 1993, the year of their last studio album "Phobia." However, since then, I've found enough material to make two more volumes in this series. Here's one of 'em.

Before I continue, I have to explain a bit about naming and numbering. When I posted those four previous BBC volumes, I called them "At the BBC," in line with the official Kinks BBC box set. But that's confusing, and I've tended to call my other BBC albums for other bands "BBC Sessions," so I've renamed everything in this series to that new name. Secondly, as I said, originally there were four albums chronologically before this one, but now there are six. That's because it occurred to me that two of the Kinks concerts I'd posted were performed for BBC radio, so those should be part of this series. Thus, I've renamed the 1974 Hippodrome concert and the 1977 Christmas concert. That makes this one Volume 7.

Oh, by the way, while I was doing all that renaming and renumbering, I decided to improve the cover art for each one too. Previously, all but the first one had black and white photos of the band. I decided I could do better, and I replaced all of them with color photos (including the first one, because I found a better photo). So you might want to check those out. The music in each album is the same, though I've updated the mp3 tags to reflect the new album titles, and adjust the volume balance between songs as well.

With that out of the way, let me finally get to the music here. In fact, the Kinks didn't perform for the BBC for all of the 1980s. But I was able to fill in that gap with some other TV or radio performances. For instance, they played on the US TV show "Saturday Night Live" in 1981 and again in 1984. Even so, the 1980s fly by fairly quickly with only seven songs here. The last five songs are from 1993, and mostly do come from BBC performances. There are lots more songs from the 1990s though, enough for me to justify another volume in this series after this one. I plan on posting that soon.

In terms of sound quality, all of the songs here are officially unreleased. But because they're from TV or radio shows, they generally sound very good, though some sound better than others.

01 Destroyer (Kinks)
02 Art Lover (Kinks)
03 Do It Again (Kinks)
04 Word of Mouth (Kinks)
05 Lost and Found (Kinks)
06 Think Visual (Kinks)
07 How Do I Get Close (Ray Davies)
08 Scattered (Kinks)
09 Hatred [A Duet] (Kinks)
10 Only a Dream (Kinks)
11 Somebody Stole My Car (Kinks)
12 Drift Away (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700787/TKNKS1981-1993_BBSessonsVolum9_atse.zip.html

I'm not sure what year the cover art photo was taken. But judging by the band members and their clothes and hair, I'm sure it's from the 1980s.

The Kinks - Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, OH, 9-5-1985

It's been too long since I've posted anything by the Kinks, considering they're my second favorite band of all time (behind only the Beatles). I'm very delighted to post this concert, because I think it's one of their best bootleg concert recordings in terms of sound quality, yet it seems to be very little known, even by big Kinks fans. There were a few serious sound problems with it, but I've managed to fix them, so now I hope it'll get more of the attention it deserves.

In 1984, the Kinks released the studio album "Word of Mouth." It didn't sell that well, but it's always been a personal favorite of mine, helped by the fact that one of my first concert experiences was seeing the Kinks play live that year. So I have long wanted a concert recording from that time period. Unfortunately, all the bootlegs I heard didn't have the sound quality that met my listening standards. Just a few days ago, I came across this soundboard bootleg. I'm puzzled why it hasn't gotten more notice, since it's one of their best sounding concert recordings of the 1980s, if not of s their entire career.

Note that "Word of Mouth" came out in 1984, but this concert is from the latter half of 1985. The Kinks didn't release an album in 1985, but lead singer Ray Davies released his first "solo album," "Return to Waterloo." I put that title in quote marks, because in fact it was a Kinks album in all but name, featuring all of the Kinks on every song, except for his brother, lead guitarist Dave Davies. So I guess this tour was to help promote "Return to Waterloo," though the only song played from it was the title track. I suspect the lack of Dave Davies' involvement on the album limited what they played in concert from it. As a result, it seems the Kinks weren't strongly promoting any album in particular, and played songs from their last three albums in roughly equal measure, plus lots of songs from earlier in their long career.

That said, there is one great "Word of Mouth" song that wasn't played at this concert that really should have been. "Living on a Thin Line" is one of Dave Davies' best songs. I checked setlist.fm, and it was the band's fourth most played song in 1985, behind only "Lola," "Do It Again," and "Come Dancing." So I was bummed this was one of the rare nights it wasn't played. 

However, I got lucky. As I mentioned above, there aren't any other excellent live recordings from this time period. But I found a partial exception. The Kinks played a concert in Frankfurt, Germany, in December 1984 that was broadcast on the radio there. Most of it is available in middling quality, but I found a handful of songs in much better quality. Most of them were the usual suspects like "You Really Got Me," but one of them was "Living on a Thin Line." Another was another nice "Word of Mouth" song, "Good Day." So I took those two songs and stuck them into the middle this concert.

As I mentioned above, the recording had a few serious sound problems. The first was an accidental side effect of it being such a great soundboard, because while the band on stage was recorded very well, not much could be heard from the audience. Sometimes, it almost sounded like they were playing an empty arena. So I systemically boosted the volume for the audience applause at the end of each song. Luckily, there as enough of the audience on the recording to allow me to make those bits sound like normal audience reactions.

But more difficult was the fact that there was some audience participation in the middle of a couple of the songs. For "State of Confusion," "Lola," and "Lola (Reprise)" in particular, there were a few bits where Ray Davies let the audience take over singing the lead vocals. I had to very carefully amplify the volume of the audience so there wouldn't be nearly silent gaps. "Lola" was especially tricky, because there were parts where the drumming kept going over the audience vocals. Luckily, there was another section in that song with just the audience vocals and no drumming, so I patched that in and mixed it with the drumming. Hopefully, the end result is it sounds just like the audience had been recorded at a more typical level for concert albums.

Another major sound problem is that sections of three songs were missing. The very end of "Destroyer" was cut off, as well as the start of the next song, "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman." Unfortunately, since this bootleg is so superior to the others from the time period, I had trouble finding appropriate missing bits to patch in. For "Destroyer," I ended up using a section from a soundboard recording from 1988. But I managed to repeat a couple of vocal lines near the end of the song from earlier in the song, so the 1988 part only makes up the last 15 seconds or so. You'll probably notice the edit, since I couldn't find a close match, but at least it's better than an abrupt halt to the song.

For the start of "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman," I had an even more difficult time. During this tour, the band started that song with an instrumental snippet of the "Batman" theme song. The few other bootlegs with this sounded crappy, and they didn't match the key and tempo and so forth. Since it was just a short instrumental snippet, I instead decided to have the music fade in while the applause from the previous song faded out. Not much is missing, maybe 30 seconds.

A similar problem was that the second half of the last song, "Low Budget," also was missing. Again, I didn't have anything else from around that time period to fit it with. So once again I resorted to using part of a song from a 1988 soundboard. The section lasts about a minute, and goes from the start of the last verse to the end of the song. Also again, the edit is noticeable and far from ideal, but I figure it's better than nothing.

There's one more significant edit I made that wasn't the result of a sound flaw per se, but more of a personal choice. I was quite surprised to hear that "Guilty," a song written and sung by Dave Davies, began with Ray Davies saying, "And then we heard the chimes of midnight." This was followed by the clanging of bells, a loud explosion, and then about two minutes of indecipherable talking and war sounds, over a synth backing. I can only presume that while that was going on, some sort of anti-war video was played for the audience. (I'd never considered "Guilty" to be an anti-war song, more of a song railing against bad government leaders, but it does contain the line "Deaf to the cries of the innocent strangers you buried.") Anyway, this probably worked well if you were there and you saw it, but after the bells and the explosion, the rest was a frustrating listening experience, since on this recording one can't hear what was being said, or who was saying it, or why. So I edited most of that part out.

One more minor note. There's a song here called "Ohio Motorway." I don't know if you can call it a song. It's less than a minute long, and more like a snippet. I have absolutely no idea what this is called, if it had a name at all. I titled it "Ohio Motorway" to distinguish it from the famous CSNY song "Ohio."

Sorry for the rather long-winded explanation, but this concert needed some changes to bring it to its full potential. Now, with the two Frankfurt songs and missing sections added, it's an hour and 44 minutes long. If you're a Kinks fan and want just one concert of theirs from the 1980s, I recommend this one.

01 You Really Got Me Intro [Instrumental] (Kinks)
02 Do It Again (Kinks)
03 State of Confusion [Edit] (Kinks)
04 talk (Kinks)
05 Better Things (Kinks)
06 talk (Kinks)
07 The Hard Way (Kinks)
08 Don't Forget to Dance (Kinks)
09 talk (Kinks)
10 Come Dancing (Kinks)
11 Return to Waterloo (Kinks)
12 Catch Me Now, I'm Falling (Kinks)
13 Missing Persons (Kinks)
14 Destroyer [Edit] (Kinks)
15 [Wish I Could Fly Like] Superman [Edit] (Kinks)
16 Brother (Kinks)
17 Guilty [Edit] (Kinks)
18 A Gallon of Gas (Kinks)
19 Ohio Motorway (Kinks)
20 talk (Kinks)
21 Living on a Thin Line (Kinks)
22 Good Day (Kinks)
23 Lola [Edit] (Kinks)
24 talk (Kinks)
25 Lola [Reprise] [Edit] (Kinks)
26 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
27 I Gotta Move (Kinks)
28 Low Budget [Edit] (Kinks)

https://www.imagenetz.de/dJ5K5

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/yQkSjvpY

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/6EnOSkPI0IAnShm/file

The cover art photo of lead singer Ray Davies comes from a Kinks concert in Chicago in December 1984. I would have liked to use a photo showing the entire band, but I could only find a few good ones to choose from, and this was the best of the bunch.

The Kinks - Rockpalast, Grugahalle, Germany, 4-4-1982

It's been a while since I've posted any Kinks related material (my second favorite group, after the Beatles). So here's some more.

There are lots of Kinks concert bootlegs out there, but few and far between that have excellent sound quality. Here's one of those rare stellar sounding ones. It sounds so good because it was professionally recorded for the German TV show "Rockpalast."

In 1980, the Kinks released the live album "One for the Road." This comes two years later, and one album later, the 1981 "Give the People What They Want" studio album. So there's some overlap between the songs on "One for the Road" and here, but the Kinks have such a deep catalog of popular songs that there are lots of differences as well. Seven of the songs played come from the "Give the People What They Want" album, and one song, "Bernadette," came from their soon-to-come 1983 album, "State of Confusion."

The bootleg I took this from was so well recorded that I only had to make a couple of tweaks. The song "Celluloid Heroes" essentially had no applause at the end. So I took applause noise from other songs and patched it in there. And "Back to Front" had several seconds of silence in the middle of it. Luckily, it was during a guitar riff instrumental section, so I was able to patch that up with more of that riff from elsewhere in the song. I also put any significant between song banter on their own tracks, but there was very little talking for this concert.

01 Introduction (Kinks)
02 Around the Dial (Kinks)
03 The Hard Way (Kinks)
04 Where Have All the Good Times Gone (Kinks)
05 Catch Me Now, I'm Falling (Kinks)
06 Come On Now (Kinks)
07 talk (Kinks)
08 Destroyer (Kinks)
09 Yo-Yo (Kinks)
10 Lola (Kinks)
11 Dead End Street (Kinks)
12 Add It Up (Kinks)
13 Low Budget (Kinks)
14 talk (Kinks)
15 Art Lover (Kinks)
16 Back to Front - Get Back (Kinks)
17 A Gallon of Gas (Kinks)
18 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
19 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
20 Bernadette (Kinks)
21 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
22 Give the People What the Want (Kinks)
23 Pressure (Kinks)
24 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
25 talk (Kinks)
26 Stop Your Sobbing (Kinks)
27 David Watts (Kinks)

https://www.imagenetz.de/etTob

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ysu7mU65

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/1J07kQuj5G7K3Wk/file

The cover art photo comes from the exact concert in question, as you can see from the Rockpalast sign in the background. I found a neon Rockpalast sign for the text at the bottom, and then added more text around it using a similar font.

The Kinks - BBC Sessions, Volume 7: Christmas Concert - Rainbow Theatre, London, Britain, 12-24-1977

I'm continuing to post a series of what I consider are the best Kinks concert recordings. The emphasis there is on "recordings," because the Kinks were usually very good in concert, but only rarely were entire concerts recorded at the very highest sound quality.

It so happens that 1977 saw two such concerts, one right at the beginning of the year, and the other right at the end. I've already posted one, which you can find here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-kinks-winterland-san-francisco-ca-2.html

It so happens that the two 1977 concerts have fairly different setlists, so I think it's worth it to post both of them. This second concert was performed on Christmas Eve, so it's widely known as the "Christmas Concert." It was recorded for the TV show "Old Grey Whistle Test," and shown on BBC TV at the time. (The Kinks played some other songs for that same show in March 1977, and I've included those on one of my "At the BBC" collections.) Thus, I've included this in my BBC Sessions album series.

This is widely considered one of the best Kinks concert recordings. I've even seen it on a blogger's list of the best bootlegs of all time. The only downside is that it's a mere hour long, instead of the usual hour and-a-half to two-hour-long concert the Kinks did in those years. I'm guessing that's because the Old Grey Whistle Test had an hour-long format. I don't know if the Kinks played more songs that didn't make the show, but if they did, I can't find any trace of them anywhere.

Probably due to the time limitation, the Kinks put on a very tight concert, with relatively little talking between songs. In fact, several songs quickly follow each other, or even could be considered parts of medleys. I've separated what little talking there is onto separate tracks.

This album is one hour long.

01 Juke Box Music (Kinks)
02 Sleepwalker (Kinks)
03 Life on the Road (Kinks)
04 talk (Kinks)
05 A Well Respected Man (Kinks)
06 Death of a Clown (Kinks)
07 Sunny Afternoon (Kinks)
08 Waterloo Sunset (Kinks)
09 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
10 talk (Kinks)
11 Slum Kids (Kinks)
12 talk (Kinks)
13 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
14 talk (Kinks)
15 Get Back in the Line (Kinks)
16 talk (Kinks)
17 The Hard Way (Kinks)
18 Lola (Kinks)
19 Alcohol (Kinks)
20 Skin and Bone - Them Bones (Kinks)
21 Father Christmas (Kinks)
22 You Really Got Me (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700790/TKNKS1977d_BBSessonsVolum7RainbwThetre__12-24-1977_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I used an actual screenshot from the concert in question, since it was shown on TV. The best image I could find shows just the head of Ray Davies, instead of the whole band. When I updated the album in February 2021, I stripped the black background behind Davies and replaced that with the same sort of background that I used in all the other BBC Sessions albums.

The Kinks - Winterland, San Francisco, CA, 2-19-1977

Here's a really great concert from the Kinks, in great sound. If you like the band, you should check this out.

In 1977, the Kinks made some major changes. They switched record companies. Their new record company wanted them to drop all the concept albums and return to more straight ahead rock and roll, so they did. They also changed bass players, and dropped the brass and back-up singers in their concerts for a more streamlined sound. The result of all this was the album "Sleepwalker." It marked the beginning of a new surge in popularity for the band, which peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This concert takes place just one week after "Sleepwalker" was released. The concert was recorded for radio and apparently broadcast live over some or all of the US. As a result, the sound is excellent. It's basically exactly like an official album from the era, with soundboard quality, but also the right amount of audience noise.

This is a popular bootleg, but strangely, most versions lack the very first song and the last two. The first song is mostly just a repetition of the "You Really Got Me" riff to get the crowd excited. But the last two - "Life on the Road" and "Victoria" are very worthy additions. These extra songs come from a different source that isn't quite as good, but that's quibbling. It's still excellent soundboard quality.

The song list is a great summary of the Kinks' career to that point, with songs from most of the years of the band's existence, for nearly two hours of music. There's a slight emphasis on "Sleepwalker," with six songs from that album. There's a fair amount of talking between songs. As I usually do, I've put all the talking on separate tracks.

01 You Really Got Me [Introduction] (Kinks)
02 talk (Kinks)
03 One of the Survivors (Kinks)
04 Sleepwalker (Kinks)
05 Rush Hour Blues (Kinks)
06 You Make It All Worthwhile - Ordinary People - Everybody's a Star [Starmaker] (Kinks)
07 talk (Kinks)
08 Day-O [The Banana Boat Song] (Kinks)
09 A Well Respected Man (Kinks)
10 Sunny Afternoon (Kinks)
11 talk (Kinks)
12 Waterloo Sunset (Kinks)
13 talk (Kinks)
14 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
15 talk (Kinks)
16 Schooldays (Kinks)
17 Schooldays [Instrumental] (Kinks)
18 talk (Kinks)
19 Education (Kinks)
20 talk (Kinks)
21 Brother (Kinks)
22 talk (Kinks)
23 Stormy Skies (Kinks)
24 talk (Kinks)
25 Life Goes On (Kinks)
26 Full Moon (Kinks)
27 talk (Kinks)
28 Lola (Kinks)
29 talk (Kinks)
30 Alcohol (Kinks)
31 talk (Kinks)
32 You Really Got Me - All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
33 talk (Kinks)
34 Life on the Road (Kinks)
35 talk (Kinks)
36 Victoria (Kinks)

https://www.imagenetz.de/h3Hbd

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/QxqwpbyW

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/aTHDaPVXWCtz4jh/file

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any photos of the band from the concert in question. But I got pretty close. I used a photo of Ray and Dave Davies on stage in concert one month later, at the Rainbow Theatre in London, on March 24, 1977. Ray is the one in the orange light.

The Kinks - BBC Sessions, Volume 6: Soap Opera Live - New Victoria Theatre, London, Britain, 6-14-1975

Us Kinks fans are lucky this concert exists. You see, in the early to mid-1970s, Ray Davies, leader of the Kinks, was really into concept albums. He recorded four of them in a row. When touring, he presented them in full, essentially putting on musicals more than typical rock concerts. But out of all his concept albums, only this one was recorded with excellent soundboard quality. That's because one show was recorded for a BBC TV show. This is the audio to that show.

The Kinks played all of their 1975 "Soap Opera" album, and not much else. (There's one medley of three early hits worked into the concept, and one song from the album, "Holiday Romance," wasn't played  since it didn't fit into the story that well.) In order not to alienate audience members who wanted to hear the old songs, the Kinks would play one set of older songs and then finish by playing the "Soap Opera" album. Unfortunately, the BBC only televised the "Soap Opera" part, so that's all there is here.

The "Soap Opera" album is 38 minutes long, and this concert is 57 minutes long. The extra length is mainly due to the dialogue that takes place between songs. Pretty much all the talking takes place between Ray Davies' character and an actress (June Ritchie) playing his wife. I think the dialogue is entertaining and to the point. More importantly, the "Soap Opera" concept doesn't make much sense on the album. But presented this way, it makes a coherent, intelligent story. Once you hear this, you'll be able to appreciate the album much better.

Only three of the songs from this show have been officially released, as bonus tracks to a later version of the "Soap Opera" album. The sound quality of those are the same as the rest of the songs here.

UPDATE: On November 29, 2022, I updated the mp3 download file. I didn't change the music. But I realized that since this is a BBC recording, I should add it to the series of Kinks BBC albums I've made. Thus, I changed the title, cover art, and mp3 tags. All BBC albums after this one are renumbered.

01 Everybody's a Star [Starmaker] (Kinks)
02 talk (Kinks)
03 Ordinary People (Kinks)
04 talk (Kinks)
05 Rush Hour Blues (Kinks)
06 talk (Kinks)
07 Nine to Five (Kinks)
08 When Work Is Over (Kinks)
09 Have Another Drink (Kinks)
10 talk (Kinks)
11 Underneath the Neon Sign (Kinks)
12 talk (Kinks)
13 You Make It All Worthwhile (Kinks)
14 Ordinary People [Reprise] (Kinks)
15 talk (Kinks)
16 A Well Respected Man - Dedicated Follower of Fashion - Sunny Afternoon (Kinks)
17 talk (Kinks)
18 Ducks on the Wall (Kinks)
19 talk (Kinks)
20 [A] Face in the Crowd (Kinks)
21 talk (Kinks)
22 You Can't Stop the Music (Kinks)
23 Everybody's a Star [Starmaker] [Reprise] (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16135390/TKNKS1975b_BBSessonsVlum6NwVctraThtreLndnBrtin__6-14-1975_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo doesn't come from this exact show, although you can find YouTube videos of the whole thing. But it does come from the same tour, so they would have been wearing the same outfits. I believe this photo depicts the moment Ray Davies' character is helped into a business suit when he takes on his "Norman" persona.

The Kinks - BBC Sessions, Volume 4: In Concert, Hippodrome Theatre, London, Britain, 7-14-1974

Excellent sounding Kinks concert recordings are few and far between. So I'm going to continue to post more of their shows, at least from the years they were really great.

This concert was played over the radio in Britain as part of the BBC's "In Concert" series. Since it was the BBC, most of this concert has been officially released as part of a box set of the Kinks' BBC recordings. I've made my own series of albums for the Kinks at the BBC, I've add this to that series, but I've given it its own volume, since I figure it should be listened to on its own.

I'm glad to say I've made what I consider two important improvements over the officially released recordings of this show. First off, those recordings sound fantastic, except for one thing: the volume of Ray Davies' talking between songs was way too low. So I've moved all those bits to separate tracks, and increased the volume for them.

Secondly, and more importantly, I've found three songs that didn't get officially released. My theory on this is that the "In Concert" BBC program was an hour long, so if a band played more than an hour, those extra songs didn't get played on the radio, and generally got forgotten. The officially released songs make up an hour's show. I'm not sure how it happened, but I found three more songs on a bootleg that clearly come from the same show: "Alcohol," "Waterloo Sunset," and "Slum Kids." I know for sure they're from the same show, because all the other songs on that bootleg are from that show (though in jumbled up order), the sound quality is the same, and some of the between song banter for these three songs are EXACTLY the same as on the official recording, down to every last vocal inflection.

The only problem I've had is where these three extra songs go in the song order. It's quite possible that the songs chosen by the BBC to be played on the radio aren't in the exact same order as what was actually played in concert that day. It's also possible that there are still other songs that were played and didn't make it on that bootleg with the three extra songs either. One clue supporting this is that at one point, Davies tells the audience that he's going to play a couple of hits from the band's early days, and then only plays one, "Dedicated Follower of Fashion." The only setlists I've found merely include the songs that were played for the "In Concert" program, so they don't help. In fact, I think even the widely accepted date of the concert is off, because at one point, Davies says that the album "Preservation Act 2" is being released "tomorrow." But that album was released on May 7, 1974, and this concert supposedly took place on July 14, 1974. I suspect the concert was recorded on May 6th, then the BBC took some time to edit the tapes and played them on the radio on July 14th. But I can't be sure. If anyone can get to the bottom of this mystery, that would be nice. There must be some news articles from the time, though they would be very tough to track down.

Anyway, the bottom line is, I can made some educated guesses on where the three extra songs went in the setlist, based on overlapping between song chatter. But just to be on the safe side, I've put those three at the end of the concert. It works well to have the concert end with an all-time classic like "Waterloo Sunset" anyway.

I'm especially happy to have found the pristine version of "Slum Kids" that is one of the three extra songs. Apparently, the Kinks never recorded that song in the studio. The version that has been included as a bonus track for "Preservation Act 2" as well as for the box set "Picture Book" actually dates to 1979, if you examine the liner notes for the box set closely. So it's nice to have a version that actually dates from 1974, the year it should have been recorded and released.

Regarding the music, I'm not a big fan of the "Preservation Act 2" album. But it does have some good songs that are up to the typical Kinks high standards, and this concert features most of them (especially if you include "Slum Kids"). Many of the other songs are from early 1970s albums, which is a nice change from the setlists up through 1972, which were dominated by overplayed 1960s hits.

I have a serious gripe with the way the Kinks played snippets of hoary old "music hall" songs in the early 1970s. The "In Concert" show featured one of these, "Mr. Wonderful." I've kept it off, and I'm not even including it as a bonus track, sorry. In this case, less is more. Thankfully, 1974 was the last year the Kinks played that type of song in concert. In 1972 and 1973 especially, they actually played bits of "My Way," "Hava Nagilah," "Mammy," "Baby Face," and more of that ilk. I don't know what the heck they were thinking.

By the way, there are very few Kinks bootlegs from 1973. But that isn't a big loss, since the setlists were virtually the same as 1972, with almost no songs played from the album they released that year, "Preservation Act 1." But there's an excellent concert from 1975, so I'll be posting that too.

01 Victoria (Kinks)
02 Here Comes Yet Another Day (Kinks)
03 talk (Kinks)
04 Money Talks (Kinks)
05 talk (Kinks)
06 Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Kinks)
07 talk (Kinks)
08 Mirror of Love (Kinks)
09 talk (Kinks)
10 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
11 talk (Kinks)
12 You Really Got Me - All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
13 talk (Kinks)
14 Daylight (Kinks)
15 talk (Kinks)
16 Here Comes Flash (Kinks)
17 talk (Kinks)
18 Demolition (Kinks)
19 talk (Kinks)
20 He's Evil (Kinks)
21 talk (Kinks)
22 Lola (Kinks)
23 talk (Kinks)
24 Skin and Bone - Dry Bones (Kinks)
25 Alcohol (Kinks)
26 talk (Kinks)
27 Slum Kids (Kinks)
28 Waterloo Sunset (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16127788/TKNKS1974_BBSessonsVolum4InCncrtHippdrmeTheatrLondnBrtain__7-14-1974_atse.zip.html

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good color photos of the band in concert in 1974. But I did find one featuring singer Ray Davies, with keyboardist John Gosling in the background. So that'll have to do, unless someone else can come up with something better. When I updated the album in February 2021, I kept the same cover photo as before, but I removed the black background behind Ray Davies and replaced that with the same kind of background as all the other albums in the BBC Sessions series.

The Kinks - Live 1972

There are frustratingly few live recordings of the Kinks before the late 1970s with truly excellent sound quality. One year that is an exception is 1972.

That year, the Kinks put out the double album "Everybody's in Show-Biz," with one album of new studio songs and the other album of live songs recorded at Carnegie Hall in New York City in March 1972. Many years later, a deluxe version of the album was released with even more songs from Carnegie Hall.

This album gathers up all those songs and puts them in the order they were originally played, as much as possible. Most of the songs were from March 3, so the first ten songs here are from that. Some of deluxe version bonus tracks were taken from a March 2 Carnegie Hall show, so the next four songs are from that.

But on top of that, I've found two other concerts from 1972 in excellent sound, so I've added in all the songs from those that aren't repeats from the other concerts here. There are just two songs from a concert in Charlottesville, Virginia in November 1972, but one of them is a medley of four different songs. This album ends with six more songs from a concert at the Felt Forum in New York City, also in November 1972. The Charlottesville and Felt Forum songs are from bootleg, but they are soundboard recordings that sound just as good as the officially released songs.

Note that I've deliberately NOT included some songs, just because they annoy me! Around this time in the early 1970s, Ray Davies had a habit of singing snippets of really cheesy and annoying old songs like "Baby Face" and "The Banana Boat Song." I'm not sure what the point was, but I don't see anything musically redeeming in these whatsoever. So I didn't include those two, plus "Mr. Wonderful." I think this is a case where "less is more," and the album is stronger by not having these songs.

I also didn't include "You're Looking Fine," even though it was on the original "Everybody's in Show-Biz" album, because I've included "You're Looking Fine" as part of a medley from the Charlottesville concert that is superior, in my opinion. I don't like having multiple versions of the same song on one album, as a general rule.

By the way, one curious aspect of the Kinks in concert in 1972 is that they released the "Everybody's in Show-Biz" album in August 1972, and yet they hardly ever played the songs from the studio portion of that album in concert, other than "Here Comes Yet Another Day" and "Celluloid Heroes." Even "Supersonic Rocket Ship," which was a minor hit, apparently was never played in concert at the time. I would have included more such songs if at all possible.

The "Everybody's in Show-Biz" double album has always been a strange beast in my opinion, with the studio album and live album parts being different. Personally, I keep the studio album as is and listen to this instead of the live album.

01 Top of the Pops (Kinks)
02 Get Back in Line (Kinks)
03 Muswell Hillbilly (Kinks)
04 Sunny Afternoon (Kinks)
05 Brainwashed (Kinks)
06 Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues (Kinks)
07 Holiday (Kinks)
08 Complicated Life (Kinks)
09 Skin and Bone (Kinks)
10 Alcohol (Kinks)
11 Have a Cuppa Tea (Kinks)
12 Long Tall Shorty (Kinks)
13 She's Bought a Hat like Princess Marina (Kinks)
14 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
15 Good Molly, Miss Molly (Kinks)
16 You're Looking Fine - Shakin' All Over - Little Queenie - Be-Bop-A-Lula - You're Looking Fine (Kinks)
17 Here Comes Yet Another Day (Kinks)
18 Picture Book - People Take Pictures Of Each Other - David Watts (Kinks)
19 Harry Rag (Kinks)
20 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
21 Lola (Kinks)
22 Victoria (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700794/TKNKS1972_Liv1972_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I found a photo of the band in concert at the Hollywood Palladium on March 9, 1972. It doesn't show every member of the band, and it's hard to see anyone's face clearly, but I felt it captures the vibe of a Kinks concert better than the other photos I could have used.

The Kinks - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, November 13, 1970

There's always more Kinks worth posting in my world, since I consider them the second greatest band of all time, behind only the Beatles.

Like most Kinks fans, I consider their best years to be the late 1960s, roughly from "Face to Face" in 1966 to "Muswell Hillbillies" in 1971. Unfortunately, there's very little in the way of good live recordings from that time, unless you could their performances for the BBC. For one thing, they simply didn't tour much until about 1970. That's especially true in the US, since they were banned for most of the time (apparently mainly due to pissing off a musician's union).

This bootleg concert is just about the only exception of a good, listenable show from those years, in terms of a full concert. There is a popular 1969 bootleg that claims to be a soundboard (from the Fillmore West in November 1969), but it most definitely is an audience recording, and only a middling one at that. This, on the other hand, actually is a soundboard. True, it's not a stellar soundboard. As concert recordings go, I'd rate it about an eight on a one-to-ten scale. But it is from the Kinks' golden era, so I'm willing to lower my standards a little bit.

One of the songs, "Sunny Afternoon," was missing the first minute. So I patched in that minute by using a version of the song from the live portion of the 1972 "Everybody's in Show-Biz" album, using one of the bonus tracks. I matched up the key and tempo, so hopefully you won't notice unless you carefully listen for it.

I also added four songs to the end from another concert in November 1970. The recording of this concert, in Woodland Hills, California, is an audience bootleg, but it's an unusually good one for the era. I took all the songs from that which sounded good and which weren't played at the Fillmore West concert.

By 1972, the Kinks in concert changed a lot. Front man Ray Davies took a much more theatrical and campy approach, playing odd covers like "Baby Face" or "The Banana Boat Song" and often being drunk or at least feigning it. But in this 1970 concert, the Kinks are still focused on the music. It might not have made for as entertaining a show in person, but it's a better listen at home.

01 Mr. Wonderful (Kinks)
02 talk (Kinks)
03 Till The End of the Day (Kinks)
04 Last of the Steam Powered Trains (Kinks)
05 talk (Kinks)
06 Big Sky (Kinks)
07 Brainwashed (Kinks)
08 talk (Kinks)
09 Strangers (Kinks)
10 talk (Kinks)
11 A Long Way from Home (Kinks)
12 Harry Rag (Kinks)
13 Act Nice and Gentle (Kinks)
14 Sunny Afternoon [Edit] (Kinks)
15 Waterloo Sunset (Kinks)
16 talk (Kinks)
17 Lola (Kinks)
18 Top of the Pops (Kinks)
19 See My Friends (Kinks)
20 talk (Kinks)
21 You're Looking Fine (Kinks)
22 talk (Kinks)
23 Arthur (Kinks)
24 Victoria (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700800/TKNKS1970_FillmorWestSnFancscoCA__11-13-1970_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used a photo that comes from some unspecified time in the early 1970s. It only shows three of the Kinks, but I think it gives off a better feeling of what it must have looked to be at this particular concert than other photos I considered.

The Kinks - Live in '65 - Selected Live Tracks (1965)

Unlike most major rock acts that were famous in the 1960s, the Kinks don't have a good live album from the 1960s. One could technically point to the 1967 live album "Live at Kelvin Hall," but I strongly dislike that album due to the fact that after it was recorded a loop of a screaming audience was overdubbed on top of all the songs, ruining the album for me.

Luckily, there are lots of recordings of the Kinks playing at the BBC in the 1960s. I've already posted a series of albums of their BBC recordings. But all but a couple of those songs were played in a studio, with no audience. Thus, I've put together this album, to try to capture the excitement of the Kinks playing in front of an audience, but one that doesn't drown them out.

The Kinks were a very popular live act from 1964 to 1966, and that's the era I'm focusing on here. Unfortunately, there's no single well recorded concert from that time period (at least that I know of). But there are some decent recordings of a few songs here and there. Funnily enough, all of them happen to be from 1965. Adding them all together, it makes for a nice 42 minute long album.

There are virtually no known bootlegs of Kinks concerts from this time period. But what does survive are TV appearances, and we can extract that audio from those. That's the case for all but two of the songs here ("Come On Now" and "Beautiful Delilah"). For the rest, you can find videos of all the other performances on YouTube. None of these performances have been officially released on album as far as I know.

I have to admit the sound quality isn't fantastic, generally speaking. But we're lucky to have any live recordings from the Kinks from their early years, and the sound was good enough for the TV shows of the time. It definitely captures more of the live energy than the BBC performances do.

One interesting thing to note is how many of the songs are sung mainly by Dave Davies, instead of the band's main singer and songwriter, his brother Ray Davies. Also, about half of the songs are covers.

By chance, virtually none of the songs I found were duplicates. One exception was that "You Really Got Me" was played at the first show here, an NME Poll Winners concert. (The songs are in chronological order of the days they were performed.) But it wasn't a very good version, and it's an overplayed song to begin with, so I left that off. But you can find that on YouTube as well.

01 Tired of Waiting for You (Kinks)
02 I Gotta Move (Kinks)
03 Bye Bye Johnny (Kinks)
04 Louie, Louie (Kinks)
05 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
06 Got Love If You Want It (Kinks)
07 Long Tall Shorty (Kinks)
08 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
09 Hide and Seek (Kinks)
10 Come On Now (Kinks)
11 Beautiful Delilah (Kinks)
12 A Well Respected Man (Kinks)
13 Milk Cow Blues (Kinks)
14 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
15 I'm a Lover Not a Fighter (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15256415/TKnks_1965_Lvein65_atse.zip.html

I made the cover from a photo I found on the Internet. When I first posted this I didn't know when or where it was from exactly. But I have since been told that ti's from a January1965 appearance on the British TV show 'Thank Your Lucky Stars' where the Kinks performed "Tired of Waiting for You." So I'm glad (and lucky) it's from 1965.

The Kinks - To the Bone (Studio) (1994-1996)

This post immediately follows a post of the other Kinks' "To the Bone" album. Check out that post for a detailed explanation about why I've done what I've done.

But the short version is that for both the British and US versions of the album (which are very different), there is a seemingly random mixture of live tracks from concerts and semi-acoustic tracks played in front of a small studio audience. The other post has all the live stuff grouped together. This one has all the (mostly) studio stuff.

Virtually everything on this album was recorded in one day in 1994. But, for the US version of the album, the Kinks tacked on two new songs, recorded in a studio in early 1996. These songs are excellent, especially "To the Bone," which is one of my favorite Kinks songs of all time (though that admittedly is a pretty long list since they're such a great band). So naturally I've stuck those two songs at the end here as well.

To be honest, the songs here aren't really that acoustic, generally speaking. They're done with the full band, including a drummer with a full drum kit. The main difference is that acoustic guitars are used instead of electric ones. Some of the songs are also rearranged in creative ways.

01 Apeman (Kinks)
02 Tired of Waiting for You (Kinks)
03 See My Friends (Kinks)
04 Death of a Clown (Kinks)
05 Muswell Hillbilly (Kinks)
06 Better Things (Kinks)
07 Don't Forget to Dance (Kinks)
08 Picture Book (Kinks)
09 The Village Green Preservation Society (Kinks)
10 Do You Remember Walter (Kinks)
11 Set Me Free (Kinks)
12 Dead End Street (Kinks)
13 A Gallon of Gas (Kinks)
14 Waterloo Sunset (Kinks)
15 Animal (Kinks)
16 To the Bone (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700791/TKNKS1996_TotheBneStdio_atse.zip.html

The US and British versions of "To the Bone" have completely different covers. I used the British cover for the live album, so I'm using the US one here.

The Kinks - To the Bone (Live) (1993-1994)

The Kinks are great! At this point, I've posted 11 stray tracks albums by them, plus another four BBC albums, plus several more by Ray or Dave Davies. But I'm not done with them, not by a long shot!

Next on my list is fixing their 1990s (albums) "To the Bone." It's hard to even say what year it came out in, because a single album version was released in Britain in 1994 and a double album version was released in the US in 1996. They were based on the same set of performances. But even though the British version was half as long as the US one, it contained two songs not on the US version ("Waterloo Sunset" and "Autumn Almanac").

So partly, I wanted to gather all the tracks from both versions in one place. But more important is that "To the Bone" really is two albums in one, and I wanted to separate the two. Basically, in 1994, the Kinks recorded a bunch of songs in a semi-acoustic style in front of a very small studio audience. It was the Kinks' attempt to ride the popular wave of "Unplugged" albums in the early 1990s. But for whatever reason they decided to mix in these recordings with some professionally recorded concerts from 1993 and 1994. Then they mixed the live and (mostly) studio tracks in no apparent order on both versions of the "To the Bone" albums.

What I've done is to simply make an album out of all the true concert tracks, and then another album out of all the in-the-studio semi-acoustic tracks. I think that makes a heck of a lot more sense, from a listening point of view. So here's the first of two albums, the live one.

The Kinks only released four live albums, including this one. Their previous one, "Live: The Road," from 1987, wasn't that good. So this serves as the last Kinks live album. They were in much better form in 1993 and 1994 than in 1987.

The vast majority of this album comes from two concerts, one in late 1993 and one in early 1994. So I've clustered the tracks from each show together, with the 1993 one naturally coming first. There's one more song taken from another 1993 concert. I stuck that at the very end, since the song in question is "You Really Got Me," and that's a great show closer.

I also stuck in one extra unreleased song, an acoustic version of "Scattered" that comes from a Swedish TV show in 1994. I put it here because I think it's a really nice performance, with just Ray and Dave Davies, and I didn't have any other good place to put it. (I'm planning on posting another album of performances from the BBC and other TV or radio appearances from this era, but that already has a different version of the same song on it.)

In case you're curious, this makes for a 57 minute long album. I'll follow this with the studio "To the Bone" album, which is around the same length.

01 Do It Again [Acoustic] (Kinks)
02 Do It Again (Kinks)
03 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
04 I'm Not like Everyone Else (Kinks)
05 Days (Kinks)
06 Scattered [Acoustic] (Kinks)
07 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
08 Sunny Afternoon [Acoustic] (Kinks)
09 Dedicated Follower of Fashion [Acoustic] (Kinks)
10 Autumn Almanac [Acoustic] (Kinks)
11 Lola (Kinks)
12 Come Dancing (Kinks)
13 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
14 Give the People What They Want (Kinks)
15 State of Confusion (Kinks)
16 You Really Got Me (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700795/TKNKS1996_TotheBneLve_atse.zip.html

The British and US versions of "To the Bone" have totally different album covers. So it made sense to me to use one cover for each of the two albums I've made with the rearranged song orders. Since the British version came out in 1994, and all the songs here are from 1994 or earlier, I've used the British one here without making any changes to it.

The Kinks - Did Ya - Non-Album Tracks (1986-1992)

The last years of the Kinks, the late 1980s and early 1990s, were not a good time for their music. Their albums were critically and commercially unsuccessful, and were a mere shadow of their great earlier works. But, in my opinion, that was due more to poor song selection and production choices. Ray and Dave Davies could still write very good songs, though admittedly they weren't at their peak in this era.

This is yet another stray tracks album. Even though these are supposedly the "leftovers," I'd argue that the songs here make up a stronger album than some Kinks albums at the time, such as "Think Visual" or "UK Jive." Replacing some of the weaker tracks on those albums with some of the stronger ones here could have resulted in much better albums.

Three of the songs (tracks 9, 10, and 11) come from a 1991 EP called "Did Ya." Two songs, tracks 4 and 5, come from the live album "Live: The Road," although one of them, "The Road," is actually a studio track. "Quiet Life" is from a movie soundtrack. Three more comes come from a Dave Davies archival album, "Fragile," and the last song comes from a different Dave Davies archival album. "Bright Lights" was a bonus track, and "The Million Pound Semidetached" comes from yet another archival album, "Waterloo Sunset."

One song here, "How Do I Get Close," actually comes from the studio album "UK Jive." But this is an unreleased version performed on a TV show that is an improvement on the album version, in my opinion.

Note that two songs here, "Did Ya" and "Look through Any Doorway," also appear on my revised version of the Kinks' last album, "Phobia." This is a different version of "Look through Any Doorway," so I suppose the duplication is okay. I think "Did Ya" better fits here, since it was released in 1991, two years before "Phobia," but it's included as an official "Phobia" bonus track, so I guess it can go there too.

The is the last of my Kinks stray tracks albums. But it isn't the last of Kinks stuff that I plan on posting, since they're one of my very favorite musical groups.

This album is 48 minutes long.

01 Quiet Life (Ray Davies)
02 Give Something Back (Dave Davies)
03 No More Mysteries (Dave Davies)
04 It [I Want It] (Kinks)
05 The Road (Kinks)
06 The Million Pound Semidetached (Kinks)
07 Bright Lights (Kinks)
08 Look through Any Doorway [Open Up Your Heart] [Demo] (Dave Davies)
09 Days [1991 EP Version] (Kinks)
10 New World (Kinks)
11 Did Ya (Kinks)
12 I've Got Your Number [Demo] (Dave Davies)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15485577/TKnks_1985-1992_DdYa_atse.zip.html

The cover is the exact cover of the 1991 "Did Ya" EP.