大象传媒

by Bob Stanley

Raydon Street, preserved on the artwork of The Kinks' 1971 release, Muswell Hillbillies

It may not be Memphis, but Muswell Hill still has quite a pedigree

Bob Stanley

The street where the shot their promotional film for Dead End Street, the eighteenth century Little Green Street in Kentish Town, is under threat of demolition. I imagine Ray Davies is well aware of this, as he lives just up the road in Highgate. Indeed he's been there, or in nearby Muswell Hill where he was born, for most of his life. On top of that, he is rather keen on "preservation", a word that has appeared in three different Kinks album titles.

The fate of Little Green Street is in the balance, but another long-vanished Victorian street - Raydon Street - was preserved on a Kinks sleeve, inside the gatefold of Muswell Hillbillies in 1971. That was their first album for RCA after a seven year stay with Pye. The only hit single RCA managed to score was Supersonic Rocket Ship in 1972, which also happened to be very first Kinks record I owned, found at a summer fete in Reigate a couple of years later.

Pye, on the other hand, had overseen three number one singles (You Really Got Me, Tired Of Waiting For You, Sunny Afternoon) and a raft of other Top 10 hits. One of their later singles, and a personal favourite, was Shangri La, an astonishing, multi-part, five minute song about the pros and cons of settling down in suburbia. Released on Pye in 1969, it failed to even make the Top 50, hastening the Kinks exit from the label.

Ray may have been writing about the privet hedges and neat little semi's in nearby Southgate or Friern Barnet, but he surely wasn't writing his own patch of which he has remained very proud. His greatest paean to Muswell Hill was This Is Where I Belong in 1967, the b-side of Mr Pleasant, released seemingly everywhere in Europe except Britain where Mr Pleasant was relegated to the flip of Autumn Almanac. This Is Where I Belong remained unreleased in Britain, remarkably, until the nineties; I'd say it's one of Ray's ten finest songs.

As Autumn Almanac charted at the end of 1967, Fairport Convention would have been rehearsing at a lovely arts and crafts place on Fortis Green in Muswell Hill - the name of the house was Fairport, naturally, and it's still there. In April '67, with Waterloo Sunset on the release schedule, the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream, a highpoint for British psychedelia, had taken place in Muswell Hill's Alexandra Palace as a fund raiser for counter-culture paper the International Times. Also on Fortis Green in late 1967, a group called Turquoise were readying their fine debut single, 53 Summer Street, for Decca. They would release two quite Kinks-ish singles - the second being Woodstock - in 1968 before splitting.

Other notable local lads included Rod Stewart, who was a schoolmate of the Davies brothers and Kinks bassist Pete Quaife. The late Alvin Stardust was born in Muswell Hill, and the first pop superstar of the eighties, Adam Ant, lived there at the height of punk, planning his own career that would, like the Kinks, include three number ones. It may not be Memphis, but Muswell Hill still has quite a pedigree.