THE KINKS VS. THE PEOPLE IN GREY
“MY GRAN USED to live in Islington in this really nice old house, and they moved her to a block of flats, and she hasn’t got a bath now,” the rock star told the reporter. “She’s got a shower because there isn’t room for a bath. And like she’s 90 years old, she can’t even get out of the chair let alone stand in the shower. They haven’t taken that into consideration. And they knew she was going to move in because it’s a new block and they took her around and showed her where she was gonna live and she didn’t have any choice…. The government people think they are taking them into a wonderful new world but it’s just destroying people.”
It was 1971. The Kinks had just released a new album, and the man who wrote and sang its songs was sitting down with Circus magazine to promote it. But explaining the L.P. apparently entailed talking about architecture. “It’s just very disturbing,” Ray Davies expounded, starting to sound like the Jane Jacobs of classic rock. “They’re knocking down all the places in Holloway and Islington and moving all the people off to housing projects in new towns. They say the houses they’re tearing down are old and decayed, but they’re not really.”
This wasn’t your ordinary rock-interview fare. But , which turns 50 on November 24, wasn’t an ordinary rock record. A concept album about the evils of urban renewal programs, it barely even gestured toward the’s charts.
