The Kinks
Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part 1 BMG
The brothers Davies bundle up rarities and live takes for Lola’s 50th birthday.
By 1970, The Kinks’ star was on the descent, as the world moved on to new faces and sounds. On Lola Versus Powerman, a disillusioned Ray Davies doesn’t just bite the hand that feeds, he leaves it to marinate overnight before giving it a good roasting. A timecapsule vision of a Soho London that has all but disappeared, he takes aim at publishers and the press, money men and management, and anyone he sees as attempting to strangle his creative freedom, painting a vivid, if bitter, picture of the music industry of the day.
The real hero of the piece, of course, is Lola herself, the glorious, fearless drag queen regarded with awe by Davies’s wet-behind-the-ears provincial narrator. Way ahead of its time, Lola celebrates and defends the spectrum of sexuality before Lou Reed had even taken his first walk on the wild side.
Musically, the album is a mixed bag, from the knees-up, elbows-out and to the country twang of , the stark, embittered rock of to the breezy , none of it gelling particularly, more rubbing up against each other with a deliberate antagonism. Meanwhile, there are moments that have aged spectacularly badly. While , the album’s other hit single is on the face of it just a story of a man yearning for a simpler life, it becomes straight-up racist when Davies insists on singing those lyrics in a cod-Caribbean accent. It’s very much not okay. And there are six versions of it here.
