Muswell Hillbillies
| Muswell Hillbillies | ||||
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| Studio album by The Kinks | ||||
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Publication |
November 24, 1971 |
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| Label (s) | RCA Records | |||
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Format (s) |
CD, LP |
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Title (number) |
13 |
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running time |
44 min 39 s |
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| occupation |
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Ray Davies |
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Muswell Hillbillies is the ninth studio album by British rock group The Kinks . It was recorded between August and October 1971 and published in England on November 24, 1971. All compositions on it are by Ray Davies . It is named after Muswell Hill , London , where the Davies brothers grew up and where they first appeared. The cover photo was taken in the Archway Tavern, a typical English pub, but two miles away from Muswell Hill, the photo on the inside of the fold-out LP case shows the band on a traffic island at the intersection of Castle Yard and Southwood Lane in the Highgate district of London .
In the songs, Ray Davies sings about the stress and frustration that modern city life brings with it. He has often dealt with it before, but for the first time he has filled an entire album with songs on this subject. The musical spectrum ranges from rock (“20th Century Man”) and country (“Muswell Hillbilly”) to blues (“Here Come the People in Gray”) to numbers inspired by vaudeville and variety (“Alcohol”). In general, the music was very US-American and up to date, noisy rock with country borrowings to melancholy lyrics, even if Ray Davies dealt with explicitly British themes with songs like "Oklahoma USA" and "Muswell Hillbilly". Many critics see the album as the end of the golden Kinks era, which began in 1966 with the album Face to Face .
Muswell Hillbillies was the band's first album for RCA Records . It wasn't a huge commercial hit for the Kinks (moderately successful in the States, little noticed in England) and a disappointment for Ray Davies after the success of "Lola" last year. From today's point of view, it is considered one of the best albums of the Kinks and thus shares the fate of many Kinks releases of contemporary disregard and retrospective appreciation (see The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society ).
Track list
- page 1
- 20th Century Man - 5:57
- Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues - 3:32
- Holiday - 2:40
- Skin and Bone - 3:39
- Alcohol - 3:35
- Complicated Life - 4:02
- Page 2
- Here Come the People in Gray - 3:46
- Have a Cuppa Tea - 3:45
- Holloway Jail - 3:29
- Oklahoma USA - 2:38
- Uncle Son - 2:33
- Muswell Hillbilly - 4:58
- Mountain Woman - 3:10
Studio albums: Kinks (1964) | Kinda Kinks (1965) | The Kink Controversy (1965) | Well Respected Kinks (1966) | Face to Face (1966) | Something Else by The Kinks (1967) | The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) | Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969) | Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One (1970) | Percy - Original Soundtrack (1971) | Muswell Hillbillies (1971) | Everybody's in Show-Biz (1972) | Preservation Act 1 (1973) | Preservation Act 2 (1974) | Soap Opera (1975) | Schoolboys in Disgrace (1976) | Sleepwalker (1977) | Misfits (1978) | Low Budget (1979) | Give the People What They Want (1981) | State of Confusion (1983) | Word of Mouth (1984) | Think Visual (1987) | UK Jive (1989) | Phobia (1993) |
Live albums: Live at Kelvin Hall (1967) | One for the Road (1980) | The Road (1988) To the Bone (British version, 1994) | To the Bone (US version) (1996) | BBC Sessions: 1964–1977 (2001)