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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo - Jane Street Theater, New York City, 8-25-2000

I just posted a Ray Davies stray tracks album, and that got me thinking about this concert. I gave it another listen today and decided to post it here, because it's a fantastic concert. The sound is very good, the performance is solid, but what I most like about it is that it's kind of a dream concert for serious Kinks fans, because Davies didn't play many of his overplayed hits, and instead played lots of new songs and rarely played obscure gems.

Davies' solo career got off to a good start in 1998 with "Storyteller," a live acoustic album with lots of new songs. By 2000, he had enough songs for a solid new album, but apparently he had trouble getting a record contract. (He alludes to his lack of a record contract in this concert, in comments made before "The Deal".) Davies didn't have a band at the time, but he got together with Yo La Tengo, who are huge Kinks fans, so he could try out his new songs in front of an audience. They only played three shows together, all at Jane Street Theater in New York City. This is the final night.

All total, I count 10 then-unreleased songs, for a total of nearly one hour out of the two hours in this recording. This is the only time I know of when Davies ever played so many unreleased songs in concert, since he usually doesn't play any at all. Most of the songs would find their way onto his next solo album, "Other People's Lives," which strangely wouldn't get released until six years later. But one, "The Deal," wouldn't get released until the "Americana" album in 2017.Two more, "Americana (Hey Big Fat Cowboy)" and "Otis Riffs," still haven't been released. (Note that "Americana (Hey Big Fat Cowboy)" is not to be confused with "Americana," a song on the "Americana" album.)

Yo La Tengo pushed Davies to play some of their favorite obscure Kinks songs as well. Thus, he played great songs he'd rarely or never done in concert before, like "This Is Where I Belong," "No Return," "Animal Farm," "I Go to Sleep," and "Two Sisters." At one point, he joked that playing such songs was the price he had to pay the band in order for them to agree to back him.

Note that this recording is only an audience bootleg, not a soundboard. But sometimes audience recordings sound as good as or even better than a soundboard. This is one of those times. Admittedly, the recording had lots of volume problems, but I managed to fix them. For instance, the clapping at the end of each song was way too loud, so I lowered that. Also, the talking between songs was way too quiet, so I boosted that. The acoustic songs were too quiet compared to the full-band ones, so I boosted those as well. I made a number of other tweaks, including losing some tuning and other dead air between songs while keeping all of Davie's talking. The end result is one that sounds really good, in my opinion.

By the way, the first two songs aren't actually from the same concert, but they are from the same three night series with Yo La Tengo. "Village Green" is from two nights earlier, and "Two Sisters" is from one night earlier. The setlists were almost exactly the same all three nights, but these were the rare cases when different songs were played.

"Low Budget" was the last song played, but the recording got cut off only a minute or two into the song, so I didn't include that.

01 Village Green (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
02 Two Sisters (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
03 To the Bone (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
04 Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
05 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
06 Animal (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
07 My Next Door Neighbour (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
08 Creatures of Little Faith (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
09 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
10 Animal Farm (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
11 No Return (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
12 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
13 Things Are Gonna Change [The Morning After] (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
14 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
15 The Deal (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
16 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
17 Americana [Hey Big Fat Cowboy] (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
18 Empty Room (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
19 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
20 Stand Up Comic (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
21 All Day and All of the Night (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
22 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
23 Celluloid Heroes (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
24 I Go to Sleep (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
25 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
26 My Diary (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
27 I'm Not Like Everybody Else (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
28 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
29 This Strange Effect (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
30 Otis Riffs (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
31 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
32 Vietnam Cowboy (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
33 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
34 This Is Where I Belong (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
35 Where Have All the Good Times Gone (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
36 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
37 Thanksgiving Day (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
38 You Really Got Me (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
39 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
40 I Need You (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
41 Till the End of the Day (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/CTfiK9xV 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Lgis5b0vsN0XtDw/file

I'm happy to say that although the photo used for the cover art isn't from the concert in question, it's close. It's from just two nights earlier, August 23rd, at the same location and with the same band. The first song actually comes from that show. I used the Krea AI program to sharpen the image a bit.

Ray Davies - Sane - Non-Album Tracks (2002-2012)

If you've been following this blog, you may have noticed that the Kinks are one of my favorites bands and I've been posting a lot of stuff from them. Not surprisingly, my interest extends to the solo career of Ray Davies, the band's main singer and songwriter. I'm going to make an effort to post more from his post-Kinks solo career too.

Unfortunately, he hasn't released as much material as one would expect. For instance, he went from 1998 to 2006 without releasing an album, apparently because he couldn't get a record deal on terms that he was happy with. This is a collection of stray tracks, but there aren't that many tracks, relatively speaking. He almost never plays unreleased songs in concert, and bootlegs of solo studio recordings haven't leaked. I had to stretch out over an entire decade to find enough songs to make up an album.

But, happily, what's lacking in quantity is made up for with quality. All these songs are solid. In fact, I'd say this is just as good a listen as his albums from around the same time. For instance, I'd consider "Thanksgiving Day" to be one of his very best solo songs, but it only was released as a bonus track for one of his albums.

I've kind of cheated a bit in that two of the songs here - "Vietnam Cowboys" and "The Voodoo Walk" - appear on one of those albums. But these are demo versions that were released as bonus tracks. I figure they're different enough to merit inclusion.

The last four songs are officially unreleased. One, "Sane," is a studio recording that somehow got released on the Internet, but never actually appeared on record. The other three are rare examples of unreleased songs that got played in concert. In his introduction to "Depressed I Am Not," he mentioned that song was one of many songs he wrote for Frank Sinatra (!) that remain unreleased. I suspect he has a large number of unreleased songs in the vaults. I hope he'll share more with us someday.

01 Yours Sincerely, Confused N10 (Ray Davies with Jools Holland)
02 Thanksgiving Day (Ray Davies)
03 Angola [Wrong Side of the Law] (Ray Davies)
04 I, The Victim (Ray Davies)
05 Vietnam Cowboys [Demo] (Ray Davies)
06 The Voodoo Walk [Demo] (Ray Davies)
07 Postcard from London (Ray Davies & Chrissie Hynde)
08 Depressed I Am Not (Ray Davies & the Leisure Society)
09 Be Happy (Ray Davies & The Leisure Society)
10 Sane (Ray Davies)
11 A Better Thing (Ray Davies)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15111097/RayDvs_2002-2012_Sane_atse.zip.html

The covert art photo is of Davies in 2006.

Ray Davies - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: Sold on Song, BBC Studios, London, Britain, 4-1-2006

I love Ray Davies of the Kinks, and I love acoustic music, so it's kind of a mystery to me why I haven't posted this concert already. If you like the Kinks at all, you should listen to this.

In 2005 and 2006, the BBC had a series much like VH1's "Storytellers." Famous musicians were invited to tell stories about their songs as well as playing them, usually in an acoustic format. I've already posted Paul McCartney's appearance on the show (I actually combined it with another similarly formatted show he did one day apart). You can get that here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/07/paul-mccartney-chaos-and-creation-at.html

Anyway, Davies decided to go the full acoustic route, playing with just his acoustic guitar plus another acoustic guitarist. He talked a lot between songs, telling interesting stories with a focus on the songwriting process. But best of all, he played an interesting set of songs, mixing songs from the 1960s and early 1970s with songs from his 2006 solo album "Other People's Lives." Happily, he avoided overplayed hits like "You Really Got Me" and "Lola."

The concert is 56 minutes long, with about ten minutes of those talking. I put the talking on separate tracks.

One really great thing about this is the sound quality. Although he played in front of a small audience and there is clapping, the BBC professionally recorded the show for TV and it sounds fantastic. (Davies played live as an acoustic duo for about ten years, but unfortunately virtually none of the bootlegs of him were recorded with soundboard quality.)

I've added a bonus track of sorts. When he played the song "All She Wrote," he stopped twice in mid-song to make some interesting comments about the song's lyrics. While interesting, those comments broke up the flow of the song. So the bonus track is the exact same performance of the song, but I edited out the talking parts.

UPDATE: On February 11, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. The music is exactly the same, but i changed the name of the album to "BBC Sessions, Volume 1" after finding a 2007 BBC concert I'd missed, plus realizing a 2010 Glastonbury Festival concert he did was another BBC concert.

01 Intro (Ray Davies)
02 Dead End Street (Ray Davies)
03 talk (Ray Davies)
04 20th Century Man (Ray Davies)
05 talk (Ray Davies)
06 The Village Green Preservation Society (Ray Davies)
07 Picture Book (Ray Davies)
08 Big Sky (Ray Davies)
09 Do You Remember Walter (Ray Davies)
10 talk (Ray Davies)
11 Sunny Afternoon (Ray Davies)
12 talk (Ray Davies)
13 I Go to Sleep (Ray Davies)
14 talk (Ray Davies)
15 All She Wrote (Ray Davies)
16 talk (Ray Davies)
17 Other Peoples' Lives (Ray Davies)
18 Muswell Hillbilly (Ray Davies)
19 talk (Ray Davies)
20 Oklahoma U.S.A. (Ray Davies)
21 talk (Ray Davies)
22 The Getaway [Lonesome Train] (Ray Davies)
23 After the Fall (Ray Davies)
24 Harry Rag (Ray Davies)
25 Outro (Ray Davies)

All She Wrote [Dialogue Free Version] (Ray Davies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/85AyPt7H

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/RxYjtzsxNI169z8/file

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good photos of Davies at the actual "Sold On Song" performance. However, this is his playing an acoustic guitar from the same year.

Ray Davies - 80 Days Demos (1988)

Before I continue posting more Kinks material, I feel the need to post this. This is a well-known bootleg, and I haven't changed anything to it, but I want to help make it better known.

Sadly, in the late 1980s, the Kinks' new albums were not nearly as good as they used to be. Perhaps one reason for that was that main songwriter Ray Davies was losing interest in typical albums full of unrelated songs in favor of this project, which was music for a play put on in 1988 in La Jolla, California called "80 Days."

Unfortunately, while the play was well received, it didn't catch on enough to make it to Broadway, and no soundtrack of its songs has ever been released. Luckily, we have these recordings, of Davies demoing the songs for the play's performers to learn the songs. Even though these are demos, they're fleshed out and sound as good as fully realized studio productions, in my opinion. There's a curious lack of guitars in favor of piano and synthesizers, but the production is tasteful and not ruined by the excesses of 1980s production techniques.

I recently posted "Return to Waterloo" here, which technically is a 1985 Ray Davies solo album but really is a de facto Kinks album, since the Kinks play all the instruments. By contrast, this is Ray Davies' de facto first solo album, since it appears to be done without any Kinks help. It's a real shame he didn't officially release it in any form, because I think the songs are excellent. 

It's hard to figure out the plot of the play from listening to the songs, since it's a complicated story and one doesn't get to hear the dialogue of the rest of the play. Here's a link that can help you if you want to know more:

https://www.kindakinks.net/misc/40yearskinks/teil6_e.html

01 Let It Be Written (Ray Davies)
02 Our World [Empire Song] (Ray Davies)
03 Well Bred Englishman (Ray Davies)
04 Against the Tide (Ray Davies)
05 Ladies of the Night (Ray Davies)
06 On the Map (Ray Davies)
07 It Could Have Been Him - Mongolia - No Surprises (Ray Davies)
08 Welcome to India (Ray Davies)
09 Just Passing Through (Ray Davies)
10 Who Do You Think You Are (Ray Davies)
11 80 Days (Ray Davies)
12 Members of the Club (Ray Davies)
13 Conspiracy (Ray Davies)
14 Tell Him, Tell Her (Ray Davies)
15 Be Rational (Ray Davies)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15288959/RayDvs_1988_80DysDemos_atse.zip.html

For the cover, I used the artwork designed for the play, but I removed the text "A new musical" - which ceased being true after 1988 - and replaced that with Ray Davie's name.

Ray Davies & the Kinks - Return to Waterloo - Alternate Version (1985)

Before I continue with my series of Kinks stray tracks albums, I have to post this, since I consider it a "must have" for any serious Kinks fan.

This is kind of a Kinks album and kind of a Ray Davies solo album, which is why I put both in the title. In short, it was supposed to be a Kinks soundtrack album to go with a short film written and directed by Ray. Unfortunately, his brother and band member Dave Davies refused to take part for some reason, even though Ray definitely wanted him to. It's all the other Kinks except for Dave, and since he's the lead guitarist there's almost no lead guitar since Ray didn't pick someone else to take his place. I consider it a Kinks album in every way but a technicality of not having Dave's permission to call it that.

In any case, Kinks albums from the 1980s get a lot of criticism for being subpar, but I think this album is really good! I consider it the best Kinks album of the decade... except for one thing: it's rather short. It wasn't very long to begin with, and it includes three songs from the Kinks album that came out just one year earlier, "Word of Mouth." I removed those three songs, since I dislike having duplicates like that in my music collection. That makes the album even shorter!

Luckily, it turns out there's one song that was featured in the "Return to Waterloo" film but never made it onto the album for some reason, "Ladder of Success." A good chunk of the vocals are not Ray's, but he gets more involved in the second half of the song. (I don't know who is singing exactly, but in the film version, actors generally sing most of the songs.) Additionally, an alternate version of the title song "Return to Waterloo" has been released on an archival Kinks collection, so I've put that at the end.

Thanks to those two extra songs, the album ends up being just barely over 30 minutes long. That's still pretty short, but in this case I'll take quality over quantity. With the exception of the short introductory instrumental, all the songs are really strong. This album needs to be heard and appreciated by more Kinks fans! Yes, it has typical 1980s production, with a big drum sound and synthesizers, but in this case I think that fits the songs reasonably well. At the very least, if you like early 1980s Kinks albums, you should like this.

By the way, I've added a bonus track, which is an alternate version of the song "Voices in the Dark." Unlike the alternate version of "Return to Waterloo," I don't see much difference here, except for how the song begins. So I wasn't going to include it, but I felt obliged to take it on for those who might be completists.

01 Intro [Instrumental] (Ray Davies)
02 Return to Waterloo (Ray Davies)
03 Lonely Hearts (Ray Davies)
04 Not Far Away (Ray Davies)
05 Expectations (Ray Davies)
06 Voices in the Dark (Ray Davies)
07 Ladder of Success (Ray Davies)
08 Return to Waterloo [Alternate Version] (Ray Davies)

Voices in the Dark [Alternate Version] (Ray Davies)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700789/TKNKS1985a_RetrntoWatrloo_atse.zip.html

I used the cover of the official album with no changes.

Ray Davies - Acoustic, KFWD-FM Studios, Fort Worth, TX, 4-1977

Since I'm a huge Kinks fan, I figured it's appropriate to resume with something Kinks-related. This is a very short album, only 20 minutes long, but I think it's quite good.

The core of this album is a solo acoustic appearance Kinks leader Ray Davies at a radio station in Texas (KFWD-FM 102 in Fort Worth). This is unusual and interesting because Davies' solo career didn't begin as an occasional part time thing around 1985 and then more seriously after the Kinks broke up in 1996. As far as I know, this was the first solo performance by Davies, even if it was only a short one in a radio studio.

Furthermore, it was highly unusual for Davies to perform acoustically during this time period. But for whatever reason, it seems he was the only one in the group ready to make an appearance at the radio station to promote the Kinks' new album (Sleepwalker).
 t
I think the highlight is the acoustic version of the Sleepwalker song "Life on the Road." After that, Davies largely played songs from the 1971 album Muswell Hillbilles, maybe because that album had a country music focus that was fitting for Texas. Unfortunately, most of the songs were done in incomplete versions of about one minute each. But these short versions are still fascinating since they are practically the only acoustic versions done by Davies in the 1970s.

There are a few extra songs at the end that fit, as they were acoustic versions done in 1977 or 1978. One song, "A Rock and Roll Fantasy," was done by the Kinks in a hotel room, though really it's mostly just Ray Davies and his brother Dave Davies singing and playing together.

Then there are two songs ("Lola" and "Waterloo Sunset") done by Ray Davies on acoustic guitar and Gordon John Edwards on piano. I don't know where or when the performance is from exactly, but it must be from some point in 1978, because Edwards was only a member of the Kinks for part of that year.

I've added one bonus track. It's another version of "Lola," done at the same time as the hotel room version of "A Rock and Roll Fantasy." (You can find video footage of both performances on YouTube.) I only added it as a bonus track because I don't like to have two versions of the same song on an album, and I think the other version here (with Ray Davies and Gordon John Edwards) is much better since it's a full run through of the song whereas this version is more of a snippet.

01 Life on the Road (Ray Davies)
02 A Well Respected Man (Ray Davies)
03 Here Come the People in Grey (Ray Davies)
04 20th Century Man (Ray Davies)
05 Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues (Ray Davies)
06 Oklahoma U.S.A. (Ray Davies)
07 A Rock and Roll Fantasy (Kinks)
08 Lola (Ray Davies & Gordon John Edwards)
09 Waterloo Sunset (Ray Davies & Gordon John Edwards)

Lola (Kinks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/2n63nGL1

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/dCmsVjC6ZDZS8wd/file

For the cover photo, I grabbed a screenshot from a YouTube video of the performance of "Lola" by Davies and Edwards. In February 2025, I upgraded the image with the use of Krea AI, reducing the blurriness somewhat.