Ray Davies new album ‘Working Man’s Café’ with ‘Morphine Song’ reviewed in Rolling Stone by Christian Hoard. Drop-charges Louisiana officials inspired ‘No One Listens’ song. I loved the Beach Boys ‘In My Room’ and ‘Wind Chimes’. Royal Naval Hospital, Stonehouse, good for another mention.
12h47-UTC Sunday 02 March 2008-CE
Ray Davies is 63 and still working hard, according to Christian Hoard in Rolling Stone #1046: “Kinks leader can still craft ace character sketches. But the protest tunes sag.” This was the sub-header of his review of the new Ray Davies album ‘Working Man’s Café’ on Ammal/New West.
I never liked albums, except the Beach Boys one that I bought from a remaindered basket with ‘In My Room’ and ‘Wind Chimes’ on it. Those two were instant favourites from the first word with me.
So ‘Working Man’s Café’ from Ray Davies may be why I heard the master of social commentary during the 1960s, on National Public Radio again. And the mugging that I learned of, on npr, was in 2004, says Christian. After that, Ray did solo album ‘Other people’s Lives’.
“On this follow-up, ‘No One Listens’ finds Davies railing at the Louisiana officials who dropped charges against the man who allegedly shot him.”
For the rest of the review Christian does that thing that bemuses me, where critics come up with words and phrases to discuss the music. It is like being back in English Literature, O-Level, in 1957, but far more interesting.
“[Davies’] talent for character sketches shows up on ‘Morphine Song’ about a hospital ward full of figures both funny and sad.”
Exactly! The farm boy from Cornwall with the one joke: speaking of the operating surgery as “butchers”; the life-long smoker drowning in spit having to be pumped out every ten minutes; the hippie with a left foot and a right stump from a motor cycle accident asking for more pain killer… Royal Naval, Stonehouse, when I was having a superfluous minimal mammary gland removed from my right tit about 1968.
FIN 13h17
