The Kinks - Festhalle, Frankfurt, Germany, 11-23-1984

It's always a good day when I get to post some music from the Kinks that's worthy of being posted here. Today is one of those days. :) This is a Kinks concert from 1984.

The Kinks album "Word of Mouth" has a special place in my heart, because I bought that album as a kid in 1984, and went to see the Kinks in concert that year. So I've looked for ages for a good concert from that tour, but none of them sounded good enough for my ears, or had other problems. I finally found one, here.

I had come across a soundboard recording from this very concert. But the problem was this recording only includes the last 45 minutes of the concert. I found it too frustrating to keep a recording of just half of a concert. But the other day, I randomly came across a professionally recorded video of the entire concert. So I converted that to audio, and chopped up the first half into mp3s. Then I used the soundboard recording of the second half. The sound quality is so similar that I don't think you'll notice the transition point.

So that all went well. The sound quality is excellent overall. There was only one minor snag: at the start of the recording, the volume of the voice of one of the backing vocalists was unusually loud. It was really annoying. Luckily, it was just a problem for the first song or two, then adjustments were made. I tried to make further adjustments, going through line by line in those first two songs to bring the backing vocals down to a more reasonable level. But there was only so much I could do, due to different vocals overlapping. Still, it should be close enough for horseshoes now, and the rest of the concert sounds fine.

By the way, I still think "Word of Mouth" is an underrated album in the Kinks' discography. Unfortunately though, only four songs from that album were performed here: "Do It Again," "Word of Mouth," "Living on a Thin Line," and "Good Day." I would have liked to hear more. 

This album is an hour and 26 minutes long.

01 Around the Dial (Kinks)
02 Definite Maybe [Instrumental] (Kinks)
03 State of Confusion (Kinks)
04 Where Have All the Good Times Gone (Kinks)
05 The Hard Way (Kinks)
06 Don't Forget to Dance (Kinks)
07 talk (Kinks)
08 Come Dancing (Kinks)
09 Low Budget (Kinks)
10 talk (Kinks)
11 Do It Again (Kinks)
12 talk (Kinks)
13 Word of Mouth (Kinks)
14 Lola (Kinks)
15 David Watts (Kinks)
16 Dead End Street (Kinks)
17 Living on a Thin Line (Kinks)
18 Good Day (Kinks)
19 talk (Kinks)
20 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
21 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
22 talk (Kinks)
23 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
24 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
25 talk (Kinks)
26 I Gotta Move (Kinks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/9QaDHoJM

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/NcgXgXKTSsZ3Upw/file

The cover photo shows band leader Ray Davies. I took it from a screenshot of a YouTube video of this concert. 

The Kinks - BBC Sessions, Volume 8: Old Grey Whistle Test, Shepherd's Bush Empire, London, Britain, 3-28-1977

I just posted a 1973 BBC concert by the Kinks. Now, I'm posting this 1977 BBC concert they did. These are the key parts of an overhaul of all the Kinks' BBC albums I've posted. All the volume numbers after the 1973 concert went up by one, and the volume numbers after this one went up by two. So, for instance, the last volume had been "Volume 10," but now that one is "Volume 12."

The reason for the change is that I wanted to post everything the Kinks did for the BBC, not just most of it. I had previously skipped this concert because I had already posted a concert they performed the previous month, in San Francisco. Being so close in time, all the songs here were performed in that one, plus that one is much longer, nearly two hours in length. So, if I were to pick just one, I'd pick that one. But this was a major TV appearance in Britain for the band, on the popular "Old Grey Whistle Test" BBC TV show, so it's worthy of inclusion in their BBC album series.

The first song, a medley of "You Really Got Me - All Day and All of the Night," was not actually broadcast as part of the TV show. Instead, it was just a warm-up number to help the band and the crowd get into a good mood. But somehow the recording of that survived, so it's included here.

Everything here is unreleased. The sound quality is excellent.

As mentioned above, I highly recommend you redownload all the other albums in this series. Not only is there a lot of renumbering of the volume numbers in the titles, but I also made changes and improvements to all the album covers. Furthermore, I made some sonic improvements, such as getting rid of crowd noise on live songs that were included on mostly studio session albums.

This album is 46 minutes long. 

01 talk by Bob Harris (Kinks)
02 You Really Got Me - All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
03 talk by Bob Harris (Kinks)
04 Sleepwalker (Kinks)
05 Life Goes On (Kinks)
06 talk (Kinks)
07 Stormy Sky (Kinks)
08 talk (Kinks)
09 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
10 talk (Kinks)
11 Muswell Hillbilly (Kinks)
12 talk (Kinks)
13 Full Moon (Kinks)
14 talk (Kinks)
15 Life on the Road (Kinks)
16 talk (Kinks)
17 Juke Box Music (Kinks)
18 talk (Kinks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/cy7T9ke2

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/TGW8Poyvnhe8Lto/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert.

The Kinks - BBC Sessions, Volume 4: In Concert, Shepherd's Bush Empire, London, Britain, 1-24-1973

I'm doing an overhaul of all the BBC albums by the Kinks. For one thing, I redid all the album covers, making improvements. But also, I'm adding two albums I've previously missed, which means lots of renumbering. Here's the first added album. Obviously, the volume numbers of all the albums after this go up by one.

This is an appearance on the BBC TV show "In Concert." That's not to be confused with the many BBC radio shows also called "In Concert." I've posted lots of albums from this show. One thing about it is that it's only half an hour long. So this is a pretty short album.

Previously, I included four of the songs here on "Volume 3" in the Kinks' BBC album series. But I decided I should post the whole show. So I removed those songs from "Volume 3." Instead, I largely replaced them with other songs from the same time, from the German "Beat Club" TV show. So if you're downloading this, you probably will want to redownload "Volume 3" to avoid duplication of the same versions of some songs.

Here's a link to that:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-kinks-at-bbc-alternate-version-1970.html 

For the last song, an instrumental version of "Village Green" was being performed while a BBC announcer described upcoming programs. I used the MVSEP program to remove the announcer's voice. But there was a little bit of sound loss in taking that out. Plus, the song faded out after less than a minute. But I salvaged what I could from it. That's why that one has "[Edit]" in its title.

Curiously, everything here is unreleased, which means the box set of the Kinks's BBC material, "At the BBC," skipped it. But the sound quality is excellent. 

This album is 30 minutes long.

01 Victoria (Kinks)
02 Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues (Kinks)
03 talk (Kinks)
04 Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Kinks)
05 talk (Kinks)
06 Lola (Kinks)
07 Holiday (Kinks)
08 Good Golly, Miss Molly (Kinks)
09 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
10 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
11 Waterloo Sunset (Kinks)
12 talk (Kinks)
13 Village Green Preservation Society (Kinks)
14 Village Green [Instrumental Version] [Edit] (Kinks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/5yHcKdMZ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/c5xcBWB0SXMlYaX/file

The cover image is from the exact concert. 

Various Artists - 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert, Madison Square Garden, New York City, 10-30-2009

I just posted the first day of the two-day long 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert, in 2009. Here's the second day.

This second day concert followed the same format as the one on the first day. Read my write-up for more details about this two-day concert in general. Suffice to say that for this day, four major musical acts were chosen: Aretha Franklin, Jeff Beck, Metallica, and U2. Each of them hosted one fourth of the concert, and each had special guests join them during their sections. 

I was a bit surprised by the choice of Jeff Beck, since his record sales weren't nearly as big as the others. It turns out that section was supposed to be for Eric Clapton, but he got sick at the last minute and had to back out. So Beck was another "guitar hero" to fill a similar role.

I detailed in my write-up for the first day of this concert how I put a longer concert out of material from a DVD, plus the HBO broadcast, plus an audience bootleg. That's the same case here, except I didn't find an audience boot for all the otherwise missing songs. I did find such a boot for some of the Metallica songs, but that didn't even have the entire Metallica set. But it did get me "You Really Got Me," with Ray Davies of the Kinks as the guest. 

The Wikipedia page for this concert lists all the songs that were performed, in their correct order. Here's that page:

25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concerts - Wikipedia 

Based on that, it looks like I'm missing five songs. Here are the songs that I couldn't find:

Drown in My Own Tears - Jeff Beck (or possibly Aretha Franklin, I'm not sure)
Cause We've Ended as Lovers - Jeff Beck
Rough Boy - Jeff Beck & Billy Gibbons
One - Metallica
Stone Cold Crazy - Metallica 

That's too bad, but at least the vast majority is here. If anyone has any of the missing songs, please let me know. The first day concert that I posted is a little over four hours long, whereas this one is two and a half hours long. If you add in the missing songs, this probably totals about three hours, not four. So I think the first day one is a little longer, and better. I'll bet some of that was due to Bruce Springsteen, as his section on the first day was extra long.

One interesting note about this concert is that the collaboration of Metallica with Lou Reed - a very unexpected pairing - eventually led to the recordings of the album "Lulu," a joint Metallica and Lou Reed release, in 2011. 

A couple of performers who appeared in the first day concert also appeared in this one. Jeff Beck played a song on the first day, and had his own section here. Sting sang duets on both days. And Bruce Springsteen had his own section on the first day, and sang two songs with U2 here. Jerry Lee Lewis also opened both days with a song.

The sound quality is generally excellent. The quality is actually higher here than on the first day, because I only have one song sourced from an audience boot this time ("You Really Got Me," as mentioned above). I ran into many of the same problems with the first day, such as having to smooth over the transitions between songs by adding extra cheering noises. Read my write-up about the other concert for more details on all that. 

This album is two hours and 33 minutes long.

01 talk (Tom Hanks)
02 Great Balls of Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis)
03 Baby, I Love You (Aretha Franklin)
04 Don't Play That Song [You Lied] (Aretha Franklin)
05 Make Them Hear You (Aretha Franklin)
06 talk (Aretha Franklin)
07 Chain of Fools (Aretha Franklin & Annie Lennox)
08 Theme from New York, New York (Aretha Franklin)
09 Think (Aretha Franklin & Lenny Kravitz)
10 [I Never Loved a Man] The Way I Love You (Aretha Franklin)
11 Respect (Aretha Franklin)
12 People Get Ready (Sting & Jeff Beck)
13 Freeway Jam [Instrumental] (Jeff Beck)
14 talk (Jeff Beck)
15 Let Me Love You Baby (Buddy Guy & Jeff Beck)
16 Big Block [Instrumental] (Jeff Beck)
17 Rice Pudding [Instrumental] (Billy Gibbons & Jeff Beck)
18 Foxy Lady (Billy Gibbons & Jeff Beck)
19 A Day in the Life [Instrumental Version] (Jeff Beck)
20 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Metallica)
21 talk (Metallica)
22 Turn the Page (Metallica)
23 talk (Metallica)
24 Sweet Jane (Lou Reed & Metallica)
25 talk (Metallica)
26 White Light-White Heat (Lou Reed & Metallica)
27 talk (Metallica)
28 Iron Man (Ozzy Osbourne & Metallica)
29 Paranoid (Ozzy Osbourne & Metallica)
30 talk (Metallica)
31 You Really Got Me (Ray Davies & Metallica)
32 All Day and All of the Night (Ray Davies & Metallica)
33 Enter Sandman (Metallica)
34 Vertigo (U2)
35 Magnificent (U2)
36 talk (U2)
37 Because the Night (U2, Bruce Springsteen & Patti Smith)
38 I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (U2 & Bruce Springsteen)
39 Mysterious Ways (U2)
40 Where Is the Love - One (U2 & the Black Eyed Peas)
41 talk (U2)
42 Gimme Shelter (U2, Mick Jagger, Fergie & will.i.am)
43 talk (U2)
44 Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of (U2 & Mick Jagger)
45 Beautiful Day (U2)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/UZjACSG5

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/mtktsXHvZPk8rgE/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. From left to right: Bono, The Edge, Fergie, and Mick Jagger.

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. 

Ray Davies - BBC Sessions, Volume 4: Proms in the Park, Hyde Park, London, Britain, 9-9-2017

This is the fourth, and probably last album of Ray Davies performing for the BBC. I rarely if ever do this, but I feel the need to put a performance warning on this. At the time of this concert, Davies was about 75 years old, and unfortunately, age was seriously effecting his voice. So behave. It's definitely not terrible by any means, but you can tell things are not what they used to be.

In fact, I think he realized his vocal troubles, because this was his last concert. Prior to this, he hadn't given any concerts since 2015, and only a few then. After this, according to setlist.fm, he only played one song in public in 2018, and that's it. Given that it's now 2025 as I write this, the voice and body only gets more worn out with time. So, if nothing else, this concert has historic importance as Davies' last concert. (If that turns out to be true, I think it's fitting that the last song he played was "Days.")

However, Davies must have realized his voice was weakening, because he smartly compensated for that by being backed with female vocalists, and also a full choir on some songs. That certainly helps.

2017 was a significant year, because Davies put out the studio album "Americana," his first new studio album in about ten years. He would put out another in 2018 ("Our Country - Americana, Part 2"). Only two songs were performed from the new album, "Message from the Road" and "A Place in Your Heart." That's quite significant, because it seems those are the only two times he ever sang them in public.

The sound quality is excellent, despite the fact that it's unreleased. Davies' voice was low in the mix. Perhaps that was intentional, due to the problems mentioned above. But I still felt the urge to fix the mix, so I boosted him somewhat, using the UVR5 audio editing program.

This album is 38 minutes long.

01 You Really Got Me Intro [Instrumental] (Ray Davies)
02 Victoria (Ray Davies)
03 talk (Ray Davies)
04 Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Ray Davies)
05 talk (Ray Davies)
06 Dead End Street (Ray Davies)
07 talk (Ray Davies)
08 You Really Got Me (Ray Davies)
09 talk (Ray Davies)
10 Message from the Road (Ray Davies)
11 A Place in Your Heart (Ray Davies)
12 talk (Ray Davies)
13 Sunny Afternoon (Ray Davies)
14 talk (Ray Davies)
15 All Day and All of the Night (Ray Davies)
16 talk (Ray Davies)
17 Waterloo Sunset (Ray Davies)
18 talk (Ray Davies)
19 Days (Ray Davies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/FsudfwQc

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/0K2XlwX6FlJKDqZ/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.

Ray Davies - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: Electric Proms, The Roundhouse, London, Britain, 10-28-2007

Here's a great full-length Ray Davies BBC concert from 2007. I hope I don't need to remind anyone that Davies is the main singer and songwriter for the Kinks. (And, by the way, his last name is pronounced like "Davis.")

I'm reorganizing what I have for Davies' solo career and the BBC. I had previously posted two BBC concerts he did, but I didn't mention that in the album titles. So those are getting renamed at the same time I'm posting this. Here are the links to those, with new cover art, mp3 tags, and such:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/09/ray-davies-sold-on-song-bbc-studios.html

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2020/12/ray-davies-glastonbury-festival-worthy.html

I also just found a fourth one, from 2017, and I plan on posting that soon.

Getting to this concert, Davies put out a solo studio album earlier in the month, "Working Man's Cafe." He'd just put out another one the year before ("Other People's Lives"), so he was on a creative hot streak after not releasing any solo albums for ages. However, only five of the songs here were from those new albums. 

Faced with this high-profile concert, and its BBC broadcast, he mostly stuck to performing Kinks classics. However, he mixed things up a bit by having Johnny Borrell share the singing of "Sunny Afternoon." Borrell is the lead singer of Razorlight, and they had a really big hit album in Britain in 2006, including a Number One song, "America." He also had the Crouch End Festival Chorus help out for four songs late in the set, giving those songs a different flavor than usual. He seemed to like that a lot, because he went on to do more with chorus groups over the next couple of years, including putting out a studio album in that style ("The Kinks Choral Collection").

This concert is an hour and 45 minutes long.

01 I'm Not like Everybody Else (Ray Davies)
02 Where Have All the Good Times Gone (Ray Davies)
03 talk (Ray Davies)
04 Till the End of the Day (Ray Davies)
05 talk (Ray Davies)
06 A Well Respected Man (Ray Davies)
07 talk (Ray Davies)
08 The Tourist (Ray Davies)
09 talk (Ray Davies)
10 Sunny Afternoon (Ray Davies & Johnny Borrell)
11 talk (Ray Davies)
12 Working Man's Cafe (Ray Davies)
13 talk (Ray Davies)
14 Morphine Song (Ray Davies)
15 talk (Ray Davies)
16 One More Time (Ray Davies)
17 talk (Ray Davies)
18 Come Dancing (Ray Davies)
19 talk (Ray Davies)
20 20th Century Man (Ray Davies)
21 talk (Ray Davies)
22 Celluloid Heroes (Ray Davies)
23 talk (Ray Davies)
24 Tired of Waiting for You (Ray Davies)
25 talk (Ray Davies)
26 All Day and All of the Night (Ray Davies)
27 talk (Ray Davies)
28 Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Ray Davies with the Crouch End Festival Chorus)
29 talk (Ray Davies)
30 Days (Ray Davies with the Crouch End Festival Chorus)
31 talk (Ray Davies)
32 Waterloo Sunset (Ray Davies with the Crouch End Festival Chorus)
33 talk (Ray Davies)
34 Shangri-La (Ray Davies with the Crouch End Festival Chorus)
35 talk (Ray Davies)
36 Lola (Ray Davies)
37 talk (Ray Davies)
38 Imaginary Man (Ray Davies)
39 You Really Got Me [Blues Version] (Ray Davies)
40 You Really Got Me (Ray Davies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ENmjEfSJ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/Vbe7c1Wtf4EBgb9/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert.

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.

Ray Davies - Westbury Music Fair, Westbury, NY, 10-20-1997

The posting of this album is another side effect of posting a flood of "VH-1 Storytellers" albums. Ray Davies of the Kinks was the performer for the very first Storytellers episode in 1996, and the show was basically modeled after his solo concerts at the time, which mixed songs with lots of banter, including readings from his autobiography, "X-Ray."

Hearing the Davies episode made me want to hear a full-length concert by him from this time period. In 1998, he released the album "Storyteller." It was basically a live album of these solo concerts he was doing at the time. (It had one new studio track at the end.) He did acoustic concerts from 1995 to 1999, backed only by a second guitar player. "Storyteller" is a great album, but it's only 70 minutes long (not including that studio track). I wanted a full, long concert.

Unfortunately, all of the bootlegs of his solo concerts from the late 1990s are audience boots, with poor to middling sound... with one exception. That exception is this concert from Westbury, New York, which is a true soundboard. Not only is the sound quality great, but it seems Davies performed an extra long concert with some rarely performed songs. For instance, according to the setlist.fm website, he only performed "My Diary" three times in his entire music career, and this was the only solo acoustic version.

That said, there were some issues with this recording. For example, the volume of the banter between song was way lower than the songs. There also was hiss, especially with the banter. I managed to fix the volume imbalances and get rid of most of the hiss. I also fixed other problems, like occasional dropouts. This sounds noticeably better than the bootleg version floating around the Internet, in my opinion. Basically, it sounds just as good as his "Storytellers" album, only it's twice as long, with lots more songs and more banter. I think this is a "must have" for any Kinks/ Ray Davies fan, especially since it's the only known soundboard recording from this time period.

This concert is two hours and 16 minutes long.

01 talk (Ray Davies)
02 Lola (Ray Davies)
03 talk (Ray Davies)
04 A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy (Ray Davies)
05 Shangri-La (Ray Davies)
06 talk (Ray Davies)
07 My Diary (Ray Davies)
08 Animal Farm (Ray Davies)
09 Dead End Street (Ray Davies)
10 Celluloid Heroes (Ray Davies)
11 talk (Ray Davies)
12 Victoria (Ray Davies)
13 talk (Ray Davies)
14 20th Century Man (Ray Davies)
15 talk (Ray Davies)
16 London Song (Ray Davies)
17 talk (Ray Davies)
18 That Old Black Magic (Ray Davies)
19 talk (Ray Davies)
20 That Old Black Magic [Reprise] (Ray Davies)
21 Tired of Waiting for You (Ray Davies)
22 talk (Ray Davies)
23 Set Me Free (Ray Davies)
24 talk (Ray Davies)
25 See My Friends (Ray Davies)
26 Autumn Almanac (Ray Davies)
27 talk (Ray Davies)
28 X-Ray (Ray Davies)
29 Minnie the Moocher (Ray Davies)
30 talk (Ray Davies)
31 Art School Babe (Ray Davies)
32 talk (Ray Davies)
33 A Well Respected Man (Ray Davies)
34 talk (Ray Davies)
35 The Ballad of Julie Finkle (Ray Davies)
36 talk (Ray Davies)
37 Back in the Front Room (Ray Davies)
38 talk (Ray Davies)
39 You Really Got Me (Ray Davies)
40 talk (Ray Davies)
41 Waterloo Sunset (Ray Davies)
42 talk (Ray Davies)
43 You Really Got Me [Reprise] (Ray Davies)
44 Come Dancing (Ray Davies)

https://www.imagenetz.de/dnrTi

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/bTVrWFtN

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/nneKIumMHs33gMj/file

The cover photo was taken a concert in Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, England, in March 1997.

Ray Davies - VH-1 Storytellers, VH-1 Storytellers Studio, New York City, 2-10-1996

I'm working on a couple of big music projects for this blog (as I write this in September 2024). I just finished posting 28 albums comprising the 1983 US Festival. I'm happy to say that I've now found most of the 1982 US Festival, and I plan on posting that soon as well.

But also, I'm on a new kick of collecting episodes of the TV series "VH-1 Storytellers." I've posted a few of these already, but I want to post more because this seems to be something else that has slipped into a collective memory hole, much like the US Festivals. A handful of artists have released their Storytellers episodes on audio and/or video, such as Ringo Starr, David Bowie, Billy Idol, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson (as a duet), Meat Loaf, and Culture Club, so those remain well known. But from 1996 to 2015, a remarkable number of major musical acts performed full episodes for the VH-1 Storytellers show, yet most of the music seems to have been forgotten on bootlegs, other than those for a few really big names. I found a website that tracks missing TV episodes, and it turns out many episodes have entirely disappeared, with no audio or video to be found in the public domain. Others remain very obscure. So I plan to post as many good ones I can find on this blog.

It's fitting to start this new effort of mine with this Ray Davies episode, because it was the very first episode, and for good reason. Davies, the lead singer and main songwriter of the Kinks, was starting his solo career as the Kinks were breaking up. He wrote an autobiography titled "X-Ray," which was released in 1994. In 1995, he began touring in an acoustic format (only backed with an additional guitarist), alternating between reading excerpts from his book and playing songs. He called this tour "Storyteller." The people behind this TV show were so taken by his concerts in this format that they basically stole it for the show, even down to the nearly identical title. In his banter during the concert featured here, Davies even half-jokingly said of VH-1, "Out of this, they'll get a series and they'll copyright it, and they'll tell me to piss off" - which is basically what happened.

Three things make this series special, in my opinion. One is that while most acts didn't follow Davies in going fully acoustic, some did, and most at least stripped their sound back, resulting in different versions than what you'd normally find from their concerts. The second is that the episodes were almost always filmed in small clubs of a couple hundred people, resulting in a more intimate atmosphere, and better sound quality, than was typically the case, especially for the big name artists. And third, and really the whole point that was built into the title, was that the artists were told to tell stories relating to the songs. On the downside, these albums are pretty short, typically about 45 minutes, to make up an hour-long TV show with commercials. But a few of the bootlegs have managed to capture the full concerts which usually lasted much longer.

Now, getting to this album, I assumed this wouldn't be so interesting to me, because Davies released a live album in 1998 called "Storyteller" based on these same acoustic tours. I figured it would be basically the same, only shorter, since the Storyteller album is about 75 minutes long, and this is 45 minutes long. But it turns out that Davies has such a deep well of classic songs to draw from that there's almost no overlap. Only two songs - "London Song" and "You Really Got Me" - are performed on both! So if you have that album and like it, this makes for an ideal companion piece.

The sound quality here is generally excellent. However, I made a lot of edits to make it sound better. I was able to find two different videos of the episode, but no audio bootlegs. There were lots of little flaws in the main video I converted to mp3s. For instance, during each of the commercial breaks in the TV show, the show would stop and instead bits of songs from earlier or later in the show were played for a few seconds as teasers. I got rid of all that and stitched things together to make this sound seamless. It was lucky I found two videos to draw from, because sometimes there were missing bits in one that I could find in the other.

I did a more extreme edit for the song "Lola." Unfortunately, the show had a bad habit of starting each episode in the middle of a song, and that was the case here, with "Lola." The episode started with only about the last minute of the song. But then, even more annoyingly, the episode ended with more of the song, about the first minute, before fading out. Had it just been the first snippet, I would have let it slide. But with two snippets, I was tempted to put them together. So I moved the part at the end to the very beginning. However, that left me with a missing chunk of the middle of the song. I went looking for a bootleg of a similar acoustic performance from the same year, and found one. So this version is made up of three different parts stitched together. That's why it has "[Edit]" in the name. But in fact I could have put that in the name of many songs here, mostly due to editing the applause at the endings.

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Lola [Edit] (Ray Davies)
02 talk (Ray Davies)
03 Sunny Afternoon (Ray Davies)
04 talk (Ray Davies)
05 Come Dancing (Ray Davies)
06 talk (Ray Davies)
07 London Song (Ray Davies)
08 talk (Ray Davies)
09 Celluloid Heroes (Ray Davies)
10 talk (Ray Davies)
11 Dead End Street (Ray Davies)
12 talk (Ray Davies)
13 A Well Respected Man (Ray Davies)
14 talk (Ray Davies)
15 Harry Rag (Ray Davies)
16 talk (Ray Davies)
17 A Well Respected Man [Reprise] (Ray Davies)
18 talk (Ray Davies)
19 To the Bone (Ray Davies)
20 talk (Ray Davies)
21 You Really Got Me (Ray Davies)
22 talk (Ray Davies)
23 Days (Ray Davies)
24 Waterloo Sunset (Ray Davies)
25 talk (Ray Davies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/PrVmUzoD

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/F0TiArVAdimCwnd/file

I couldn't find any good photos of Ray Davies from this exact concert. I considered getting a screenshot from the video of it on YouTube, but that was low-res and blurry. So instead I'm using a photo of him on the "White Room" TV show from 1995.

The Kinks - BBC Sessions, Volume 10: 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.

UPDATE: On October 22, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. The music is exactly the same. But I renumbered the volume number in the title (from 8 to 10), and changed the artwork to match that.  

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://pixeldrain.com/u/BsGMPze1

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/xF7AH1UoAhPCIbR/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 12: 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.

UPDATE: On October 22, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. The music is exactly the same. But I renumbered the volume number in the title (from 10 to 12), and changed the artwork to match that.   

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://pixeldrain.com/u/LQvyofCP

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/iYoSWfK56bzyHms/file 

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 11: 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.

UPDATE: On October 22, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. The music is exactly the same. But I renumbered the volume number in the title (from 9 to 11), and changed the artwork to match that.   

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://pixeldrain.com/u/96rgV58b 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/K3AWh1oEJJUuhCU/file

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 - Never Say Yes (Song Edit) (1965)

Today happens to be my birthday, and I'm a huge Kinks fan. They're my second favorite band behind only the Beatles. So I was very psyched today when a musical friend of mine, MZ, sent me a Kinks song from 1965 that apparently has never been bootlegged before and I'd never even heard of! It must have been played on a radio show recently, because a DJ talked over the start and end of the song. Luckily, the talking was only over some instrumental bits that were repeated elsewhere in the song, so I was able to edit the talking out. The song quality is excellent, and it's a wonderful lost gem of a song. If you're a Kinks fan, you need to hear this!

I was able to dig up some information about this demo. Incredibly, it was meant for Elvis Presley to sing in one of his many movies, but that never came to be. I found a mention of it in a book called "The Kinks: All Day and All of the Night, Day by Day Concerts, Recordings, and Broadcasts, 1961-1996," by Doug Hinman. Here's the relevant excerpt, after the book mentioned that Ray Davies recorded a demo of the song "All Night Stand" in December 1965:

"It's possible but unconfirmed that Ray recorded a second demo, "Never Say Yes." Elvis Presley's UK publisher had asked him to submit one or two songs for the next Presley film "Spinout," which was first intended to be titled "Never Say Yes."  Ray submitted "Never Say Yes" and possibly one other. Although the song(s) were never used, film producer Joe Pasternak apparently did express an interest in it/them."

So we can definitely confirm that factoid now, since the recording exists. ;) Although it's just a demo, it's a full band demo. I assume the Kinks were the backing band, since Davies wasn't known to play with other bands at the time.

I've also updated my stray tracks album for the time period, "Kwyet Kinks," and I've included the song in that as well. Here's the link to the album with the song in it:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-kinks-kwyet-kinks-1965.html

Ray Davies - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm, Pilton, Britain, 6-27-2010

In 2009, Ray Davies, the lead singer and main songwriter for the Kinks, released an album called "The Kinks Choral Collection." As you can guess from the title, he did Kinks songs with a full-sized choir. 

This concert is from a year after the release of that studio album, but he kept going with the choir concept. As you can see from the album cover, he played the massive Glastonbury Festival with a full-sized choir. (The cover only shows a part of the choir.)

One thing that's really great about this concert is the sound quality. I'm a big Kinks fan, and I've taken a close look at the Ray Davies solo concert bootlegs out there. Very few are soundboards or have soundboard level quality, but this one does, because it was professionally recorded and filmed for a webcast by the BBC.

The other thing that makes this stand out, of course, is the use of the choir. He only used a choir for that 2009 album and the subsequent tour. They do add something if you're looking for different takes on the usual big Kinks songs. 

This concert recording is 57 minutes long. I believe I'm missing two songs played near the start of the concert, "I Need You" and "I'm Not like Everybody Else." If you have those, please let me know so I can add them in.

UPDATE: On February 11, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. The music is the same, but I changed the name of the album to "BBC Sessions, Volume 3" after finding a BBC concert from 2007 that I'd missed.

01 Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Ray Davies)
02 talk (Ray Davies)
03 Till the End of the Day (Ray Davies)
04 After the Fall (Ray Davies)
05 talk (Ray Davies)
06 Sunny Afternoon (Ray Davies)
07 Instrumental (Ray Davies)
08 talk (Ray Davies)
09 You Really Got Me (Ray Davies)
10 talk (Ray Davies)
11 Shangri-La (Ray Davies)
12 talk (Ray Davies)
13 Victoria (Ray Davies)
14 talk (Ray Davies)
15 See My Friends (Ray Davies)
16 talk (Ray Davies)
17 Working Man's Cafe (Ray Davies)
18 talk (Ray Davies)
19 Johnny Thunder (Ray Davies)
20 talk (Ray Davies)
21 Lola (Ray Davies)
22 talk (Ray Davies)
23 Waterloo Sunset (Ray Davies)
24 Days (Ray Davies)
25 All Day and All of the Night (Ray Davies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/rPQmgbcv

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/wvBC9jOg10jNsWT/file

I took a screenshot from a YouTube video of the exact concert in question. It was rather low-res, so in February 2025, I improved it somewhat thanks to the Krea AI program.

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.

Ray Davies - Austin City Limits, ALC Studios, Austin, TX, 7-24-2006

It feels like a long time since I've posted anything Kinks-related. Too long. So here's something by Ray Davies, lead singer and chief songwriter of my second favorite band in the world (after the Beatles).

In 2006, Davies released "Other People's Lives," his first studio album since the Kinks broke up in 1996. (That was a surprisingly long time, but apparently he held out for a good record deal.) He did some promotion in the wake of the release of the album, and that included an appearance on the TV show "Austin City Limits."

Unfortunately when it comes to Davies' solo career, there are lots of bootlegs, but most of them have middle to poor sound quality. This Austin City Limits show is a welcome exception. The good news is that it was professionally recorded for the TV show, and sounds great. The bad news is that only the songs that made it to the hour-long show have been bootlegged, for 46 minutes of music. He played another handful of songs that aren't included here.

It so happens that I have some other live appearances he did on TV shows around that time. So I've added four of those as sort of bonus tracks at the end. They actually are from 2005 to 2008, but I figure that's close enough for horseshoes. With those four extra songs included, this album stretches to an hour and two minutes long.

One problem with the Austin City Limits recording is that the audience applause at the end of songs was often quickly faded out. It didn't sound natural to me. So, using the few songs where there was a more extended audience reaction, I did some audio editing to extend the applause for the other songs.

01 I'm Not Like Everybody Else (Ray Davies)
02 Where Have All the Good Times Gone (Ray Davies)
03 talk (Ray Davies)
04 After the Fall (Ray Davies)
05 Next Door Neighbour (Ray Davies)
06 talk (Ray Davies)
07 Over My Head (Ray Davies)
08 talk (Ray Davies)
09 Run Away from Time (Ray Davies)
10 talk (Ray Davies)
11 20th Century Man (Ray Davies)
12 talk (Ray Davies)
13 The Tourist (Ray Davies)
14 A Long Way from Home (Ray Davies)
15 talk (Ray Davies)
16 The Getaway [Lonesome Train] (Ray Davies)
17 talk (Ray Davies)
18 All Day and All of the Night (Ray Davies)
19 Thanksgiving Day (Ray Davies)
20 In a Moment (Ray Davies)
21 Working Man's Cafe (Ray Davies)
22 Morphine Song (Ray Davies)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15289093/RayDvs_2006c_AustnCtyLimitsALCStdiosAustinTX__7-24-2006_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo comes from the Austin City Limits concert.

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.