Song of the Summer #3: The Kinks’ ‘Lavender Hill’
It had to be done. The last instalment of Song of the Summer is on my favourite band of all time, The Kinks. Formed in Muswell Hill in 1963, the band was led by genius songwriter Ray Davies, with his brother Dave Davies on lead guitar, Pete Quaife on bass, and Mick Avory on drums. The song I’ll be writing about is their psychedelic outtake ‘Lavender Hill’, written and recorded during the peak of the season of psychedelia in the late sixties, when they were on the cusp of breaking up.
A song that was considered to be their next single after the release of their great album Something Else (I’ll definitely be writing about that LP in September!), that was eventually discarded for the brilliant ‘Autumn Almanac’ (which I’ll be writing about also during the next season!), ‘Lavender Hill’ has Ray at his most poetic, other than his effort ‘Village Green’.
The influences on the track are beautiful, as Ray portrays an English heaven akin to what Rupert Brooke seems to describe in his poem ‘The Soldier’, where he could live on “sugar and milk” and have the sun “saturate him with life”. You can tell the group, despite their reluctance to follow the trends of the day, were inspired by artists such as Jimi Hendrix, as Dave employs the wah-wah guitar sound that makes the song as psychedelic as The Kinks ever got.
The track has an elegiac and religious quality to it that I really like. Ray’s references to “Sunday afternoon[s]” and “old ladies shining their shoes” and the aforementioned yearning to live in paradise (“sugar and milk” is akin to milk and honey), gives the song a weird, ethereal essence that can’t be replicated.
‘Lavender Hill’ is a Kinks song that must be celebrated because it was a great band’s honest attempt at writing a psychedelic number, despite it not being their calling. I wholeheartedly recommend the song, as it’ll saturate you with love.