Podcasts about mindbenders

(00:00:00) Opening (00:01:38) A PIece of My Mind (00:07:12) Pancho Guero, My Insane FL Nephew (00:26:36) Man Jailed for Murder Goes Viral After Worrying He'd Miss Video Game Release (00:32:33) Chatbots Were Sent to Therapy and THIS What Came Out (00:40:04) ⅓ of College Students Scroll Phones While 'Getting Busy' (00:47:02) FDA Recalls “Horny” Honey—Because It's Loaded with Cialis (00:52:17) Olympic Officials Investigate Penis Injection Doping Claims In Ski Jumping (00:59:31) Booty From A Dead Person? Women Chasing the Perfect Body Are Pumping ‘Ethically Sourced' Cadaver Fat Into Boobs and Butt (01:08:34) A Man Will Be Charged After Sticking a World War One Bomb Up His Butt (01:12:46) Ask Pancho (01:26:34) Insane Game Show (01:43:53) Coming Next Episode (01:52:42) Closing Have you wondered what it would be like if all the AI chatbots got together for a therapy session? Well, someone made it happen at the University of Luxembourg where researchers decided to put ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, & Grok on the couch. My Insane FL Nephew, "Pancho Guero", has the details on just how intrusive screens are getting...in the bedroom. And there's now a "natural" replacement for Botox to use in boobs and butts...and it's fat from a dead stranger. Can things get more stupid. Yes. Yes, they can. And it ends up on this podcast.In this Weekend Episode...[A Piece of My Mind…] America Is In The Grips Of A Dystopian “Bill Maher Disorder”Man Jailed for Murder Goes Viral After Worrying He'd Miss Video GTA 6 ReleaseChatbots Were Sent to Therapy and THIS What Came Out⅓ of College Students Scroll Phones While 'Getting Busy'FDA Recalls “Horny” Honey—Because It's Loaded with CialisOlympic Officials Investigate Penis Injection Doping Claims In Ski JumpingBooty From A Dead Person? Women Chasing the Perfect Body Are Pumping ‘Ethically Sourced' Cadaver Fat Into Boobs and ButtsA Man Will Be Charged After Sticking a World War One Bomb Up His ButtWe have a couple of relationship questions that "Pancho" will answer that might settle the dispute over whether a husband should know his wife's dress size and is a mom over-reacting to her ex's influence over their 6-y/o son wanting to get an earring. There's 5 challening Mindbenders in this week's Insane Game Show that "Pancho" will have to solve--can you solve them, too? Put your sanity to the test with all the stupidity in this week's wild episode!Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/insane-erik-lane-s-stupid-world--6486112/support.Real-time updates and story links are found on the TELEGRAM Channel at: https://t.me/InsaneErikLane  (Theme song courtesy of Randy Stonehill, ”It's A Great Big Stupid World”. Copyright ©1992 Stonehillian Music/Word Music/Twitchin' Vibes Music/ASCAP) Order your copy on the Wonderama CD from Amazon!This episode includes AI-generated content.

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. 5 - Sam the no-handed bandit. 9 - Mindbenders. 11 - The 12 days of Christmas gifts. 17 - Friday funny. 20 - Casey Paul. 100% Attendance for her whole school life. 22 - Fighting a kangaroo. 27 - UFC 323 Broken arm. 30 - 50 Cent v Ja Rule. 34 - Late mail. 37 - Last drinks.

Today on the radio show... 1 - Smoko Chat - unique tech. 9 - Christmas present ideas. 13 - Worst end-of-year thank you gifts. 17 - Are Ninja Slushi's worth the hype? 20 - Today's Not For Radio episode. APPLE SPOTIFY 22 - Must Watch; Gymkhana https://bit.ly/493MDZg 26 - Nickname Ninjas vol. 17. 29 - More petty wins. 33 - Mindbenders - the mind speeds up. 37 - Ozzy Osbourne's final moments. 42 - Tre Flipping El Toro https://shorturl.at/ljuiT 45 - Late mail. 50 - Last drinks.

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. Bad gifts. 5 - Gifts that blew up in your face. 10 - Human flesh sausages. 14 - Ketchup saving life hack. 17 - You know things are tight when… 22 - Get in my belly. Garlic bread. https://bit.ly/44Xdow1 25 - Mindbenders. 28 - Explaining to adults. 32 - Corvid cleaning. 36 - Great advice for terrible people. 39 - Perspective shifts. 42 - Pigeon racing. 46 - Late mail. 48 - Last drinks.

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko Chat. 5 - Must listen. https://shorturl.at/AwYzE 9 - Things kids should know how to do. 14 - Mindbenders. 17 - Great prank. 19 - Scam Interceptors. 22 - Imaginary Girlfriend. 26 - Titanic’s most expensive recovered items. 30 - Monday funny. 33 - Late mail. 37 - Last Drinks.

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko Chat. TOOL review. 5 - More reasons why the English language is poked. 8 - Allan Moffat. 12 - Daily dump. https://bit.ly/4iihfct & https://bit.ly/4pnj6PG 16 - Mindbenders. 19 - Hair splinters. 23 - Introduce yourself with what almost killed you. 27 - Come have a ciggie with me. 30 - The cat who stole a bag of meth. 32 - MIndbenders - The sounds of space. 34 - Late mail. Struck by lightning. 38 - Last drinks.

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. 5 - What sucked as a kid but is awesome as an adult? 9 - Al Brown. 14 - Motorway conversations. 18 - Wild things seen on NZ roads. 23 - Take my money. 26 - Nathan for you. 30 - Thursday giggle 32 - Mindbenders. 36 - Late mail. 40 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Having the insaciable urge to lick something should lead a person to an ice cream cone or a lolipop--not frogs. But some people are just stupid, as you will discover when my Insane FL Nephew Pancho Guero will tell you. A lot of smart beds got stupid when the massive outage occurred at Amazon Web Services (AWS), leaving some night owls sleeping like a taco. Rage can manifest itself rapidly when life isn't moving fast enough for some people. Like those in a check-out line who just saw a great deal on a set of kitchen knives.In this Weekend Episode...[A Piece of My Mind]…Science Explains Why Most Men Can't Remember Anything You Tell ThemRain Is Bringing Out Toxic Toads & AZ Officials Have to Tell People to Stop Licking ThemPennsylvania Cat Survives 100-Mile Journey Clinging To Family VanMan Blames Flipping His Truck On A Chupacabra That ‘Ran Out In Front Of Him'The Big Internet Outage Caused Smart Beds to Get Stuck Upright24 "Rotten Corpses" Ruin Plans For A ‘Safe' Family Halloween PartyA Slow Checkout Line Caused a Woman to Buy a Knife and Stab Another CustomerFL Woman Arrested After Punching, Scratching, and BITING Boyfriend's Genitals During An AltercationPancho is faced with a couple of questionss that required little to no time to come up with an answer for such stupid ideas like whether it's OK for parents to let their 9-y/o girl dress up like a "Naughty Nurse" for Halloween and if it's a good idea to let ChatGPT give advice on breaking up with a boyfriend. You can play along with Pancho in our weekly Insane Game Show to see if you can figure out the 5 Mindbenders for this week!Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/insane-erik-lane-s-stupid-world--6486112/support.Real-time updates and story links are found on the TELEGRAM Channel at: https://t.me/InsaneErikLane  (Theme song courtesy of Randy Stonehill, ”It's A Great Big Stupid World”. Copyright ©1992 Stonehillian Music/Word Music/Twitchin' Vibes Music/ASCAP) Order your copy on the Wonderama CD from Amazon!

Today on the radio show. 1 - The Church of Sound 10 commandments. 5 - Milan from Pluto. 10 - Mindbenders. 13 - World's best pitcher/maniac. 17 - Must watch. https://bit.ly/4o7t7Am 20 - Sleep mischief story. 24 - Sleep mischief texts. 27 - UFC/Bud Light commercial. https://shorturl.at/KVAVZ / https://shorturl.at/j7gca 30 - David Spade’s worst flight. 33 - Late mail. 38 - Last drinks. Show notes. Deer Wars podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/2hoY3tNmbReADL79If2egz Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. 5 - Misreading social cues. 9 - Mindbenders. 13 - Milan from Pluto. 18 - Alibaba jet boat. 22 - Explain your job to me as if I were a 5-year-old. 24 - Late mail. 29 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. 5 - AFL Mad Monday battler. 10 - The f1 button presser. 12 - Billy Connolly on grapefruit. 14 - Facebook Marketplace: Refund for a Broken Phone. 18 - Most famous sportsperson you don’t know. 22 - Mindbenders. https://shorturl.at/I7PpI 26 - Victor Matfield’s arm padding. 30 - Late mail. 35 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. 6 - Rogue coffee order. 10 - Rogue customers. 13 - Bathurst Gee up. 16 - Drunk news reporter. 19 - Mindbenders. 21 - Daily dump. 23 - Relationship icks. 26 - Family guy creator misses flight. 31 - Late mail 32 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. Bathurst chat. 5 - Tiegs Bathurst chat/Mark Winterbottom's new book. 11 - Gravity-friendly sports. 16 - Gravity-friendly sports. Pt. 2 19 - Must watch. Black Rabbit. https://bit.ly/4gWmWwl 22 - Explaining to adults. 25 - Denzel Washington impression & others. 29 - Toyota City. 35 - Mindbenders. 39 - Dunc catching the bus. 43 - Late mail. 46 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. Top 10 pubs in NZ. 5 - Great bars in NZ. 9 - Phishing emails. 13 - Aussie trauma. 18 - What have you had in your ear. 23 - Must watch. https://bit.ly/3HF7J5u 25 - Nickname ninjas vol. 10. 27 - Antiques Road Show Gone Wild. 32 - Mindbenders. 36 - The Grab a Bite. 41 - Aussie battlers on the news. 43 - Late mail. 47 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

**It's The Relax With Rendell Show Replay On Trax FM & Rendell Radio. Rendell Featured Soul & Boogie/Rare Groove/80's & 70's Grooves/Easy Listening Cuts From T-Connection, Rhonda Clark, Mindbenders, Merge, Lou Christie, Gene Van Buren, Peoples Choice, Staus IV, Renegade, Michele, Marlena Shaw, Gloria Gaynor, Crystal Waters, Charles Shaw, Barry White, Gerry & The Pacmeakers, Dionne Warwick, Davoid Ruffin, Circuit, Brothers Johnson, Aretha Franklin, Ann Sexton & More. #originalpirates #soulmusic #disco #reggae #raregroove #easylistening #boogiefunk Catch Rendell Every Saturday From 8PM UK Time On www.traxfm.org The Stations: Trax FM & Rendell Radio Listen Live Here Via The Trax FM Player: chat.traxfm.org/player/index.html Mixcloud LIVE :mixcloud.com/live/traxfm Free Trax FM Android App: play.google.com/store/apps/det...mradio.ba.a6bcb The Trax FM Facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092342916738 Trax FM Live On Hear This: hearthis.at/k8bdngt4/live Tunerr: tunerr.co/radio/Trax-FM Radio Garden: Trax FM Link: http://radio.garden/listen/trax-fm/IEnsCj55 OnLine Radio Box: onlineradiobox.com/uk/trax/?cs...cs=uk.traxRadio Radio Deck: radiodeck.com/radio/5a09e2de87...7e3370db06d44dc Radio.Net: traxfmlondon.radio.net Stream Radio : streema.com/radios/Trax_FM..The_Originals Live Online Radio: liveonlineradio.net/english/tr...ax-fm-103-3.htm**

Nueva entrega de la serie mensual donde recordamos singles que alcanzaron su puesto más alto en el Billboard Hot 100 en este mismo mes de hace 60 años.Playlist;(sintonía) HORST HANKOVSKI “A walk in the black forest” (top 12)THE ROLLING STONES “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction” (top 1)THE YARDBIRDS “For your love” (top 6)THEM “Here comes the night” (top 24)THE KINKS “Set me free” (top 23)IAN WHITCOMB and BLUESVILLE “You turn me on (turn on song)” (top 8)WAYNE FONTANA and THE MINDBENDERS “It's just a little bit too late” (top 45)HERMAN’S HERMITS “(What a) Wonderful world” (top 4)TOM JONES “What’s new pussycat?” (top 3)JOHNNY RIVERS “Seventh son” (top 7)THE GUESS WHO “Shakin’ all over” (top 22)ELVIS PRESLEY with THE JORDANAIRES “(Such an) Easy question” (top 11)THE FOUR SEASONS “Girl come running” (top 30)THE MARVELOUS “I do” (top 37)THE MARVELETTES “I’ll keep holding on” (top 34)BILLY STEWART “Sittin’ in the park” (top 24)JACKIE DESHANNON “What the world needs now is love” (top 7)Escuchar audio

Today on the radio show. 1 - Dropping your husband off at the pub. 2 - Mindbenders. 5 - Play dumb games, win dumb prizes. https://shorturl.at/SGwZy 7 - Play dumb games, win dumb prizes. Pt 2. 10 - Toyota’s water engines. 14 - How many of these have you done? https://shorturl.at/YRYrx 18 - Must watch. https://bit.ly/3TO2brE 22 - Late mail. 25 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. Nice things make Dunc mad. 5 - What nice things make you mad? 9 - Mindbenders. 13 - 100 men vs 1 Silverback Gorilla. 17 - Good egg / Bad egg. 20 - Must watch. The Pit. https://bit.ly/4cQTllM 24 - You little beauty song. 26 - Introduce yourself with what almost killed you. 31 - The weird kid at school. 35 - Weird kids. 39 - Red Bull rule. 42 - Naming a gym. 44 - Early Dunc on the radio. 47 - Space junk. 50 - Late mail. 54 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. Adam Sandler Facebook group 5 - Aussie Twins speaking in unison. 8 - Get in my belly. https://shorturl.at/mSyCV 13 - Mindbenders 15 - Aussie smuggles Plutonium into the country. 19 - Smuggling through customs. 24 - How old are you and what can’t you do? 28 - Must listen - Mark Hoppus’ Memoir. https://adbl.co/42IpCXu 31 - Christopher Lee - Mad dog 35 - Toyota City with Robots. 37 - Late mail. 41 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive Westie Lee’s 5C recipe 5 C stands for ‘Creamy Cajun Chicken Corn Chowder’. For 4-6 people. 3/4 medium potatoes diced. 1 medium onion diced. 2 or 3 chicken breasts 2 tins of creamed corn 500g of Streaky bacon cut into size of your choice 1 cup of chicken stock or 2 oxo chicken stock cubes (to be dissolved in a cup of boiling water) Fresh cream Cajun seasoning Put diced potatoes in the bottom of the slow cooker. Add diced onion and then cover with cold water so the potatoes are only just covered. Add bacon (raw) and give a dusting of Cajun seasoning. Put chicken breasts on top of the bacon and dust them with Cajun seasoning. Add creamed corn on top of the chicken, and then add the cup of chicken stock and salt and pepper to taste. Whack it on high for 3.5 hours then take out the chicken breasts and shred and put the shreded chicken back in and give it a good fucking stir. Leave for another hour, then add 250 ml of fresh cream. Stir through and serve Goes good with some bread of your choosing. For 2/3 people or a smaller slow cooker, just halve the portions/ingredients. Bone apple teeth.

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. 3 - Show boss Tiegs in Taupo. 6 - Friday Funny. 10 - Mindbenders. 14 - Korn Docco. 18 - Not For Radio. 21 - Must watch. https://shorturl.at/tidgG 24 - Peter Burling. 28 - Late mail. 31 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Acudimos a nuestra cita mensual con el Billboard de hace 60 años. Selección de singles que alcanzaron su puesto más alto en listas de pop estadounidense en abril de 1965.(Foto del podcast; Freddie and The Dreamers)Playlist;(sintonía) MONGO SANTAMARIA “El Pussy Cat” (top 97)FREDDIE and THE DREAMERS “I’m telling you now” (top 1)WAYNE FONTANA and THE MINDBENDERS “Game of love” (top 1)THE KINKS “Tired of waiting for you” (top 6)THE ANIMALS “Don’t let me be misunderstood” (top 15)THE SEARCHERS “Bumble bee” (top 21)THE WHO “I can’t explain” (top 93)JR. WALKER and THE ALL STARS “Shotgun” (top 4)MARTHA and THE VANDELLAS “Nowhere to run” (top 8)BRENDA HOLLOWAY “When I’m gone” (top 25)CANNIBAL and THE HEADHUNTERS “Land of 1000 dances” (top 30)SHIRLEY ELLIS “The Clapping Song (Clap Pat Clap Slap)” (top 8)THE IKETTES “Peaches n’ cream” (top 36)OTIS REDDING “Mr Pitiful” (top 41)JAN and DEAN “(Here they come) From all over the world” (top 56)THEE BEACH BOYS “Do you wanna dance’” (top 12)CHUCK BERRY “Dear dad” (top 95)THE UNIQUES feat JOE STAMPLEY “Not too long ago” (top 66)THE MOODY BLUES “Go now” (top 10)BILLY VAUGHN and HIS ORCHESTRA “Mexican pearls” (top 94)FRANK SINATRA “Anytime at all” (top 46)Escuchar audio

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. Parents are annoyed at Bluey. 5 - Undertaker Deep Dive. 9 - Mindbenders. 13 - This week in science. 17 - Baboons take over a hotel’s swimming pool. 21 - I was minding my own business when............ 24 - The piss lasso. 27 - Sibling rivalry. 33 - Self-help Singh. 34 - Where have you got your bits stuck? 38 - Liquid Death keg. 41 - Late mail. 43 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. 4 - The gingernut dessert. 6 - The gingernut dessert debate. 9 - Diddling competition. 14 - Will it riff? https://www.instagram.com/p/DG9VUOQKQqT/ 17 - Must Watch. https://bit.ly/4iyDme1 20 - What’s more dangerous? Sharks or New Yorkers? 24 - Yeah nah, I Just got on with it. 28 - Mindbenders. 31 - Naming a chicken business. 34 - F1 Drivers test. 38 - Late mail. 41 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Great New Sound for 1965! New, improved Full Dimensional Stereo. Beatles, Tom Jones, The Animals and the Mindbenders! Support this podcast at the $6/month level on patreon to get extra content! Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr . If you are looking for Beatles summer fun, join our friends at the Magical Mystery Camp!

More fun in Feb 1965! Will the Righteous Brothers topple Cilla? Animals, Ivy (League) and Brenda too! What a bunch of (Wayne Fontana and the) Mindbenders! Support this podcast at the $6/month level on patreon to get extra content! Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr . If you are looking for Beatles summer fun, join our friends at the Magical Mystery Camp!

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. Cyclone Alfred. 5:20 - Mindbenders. 9 - Lee’s son is the fastest in his school. 13:40 - Weird flexes. 17:18 - There’s no one else like me. 22:05 - Celebrity Batman impressions. 26:25 - Poorly explain your job. 30:52 - Larry David being Larry David. 34:04 - Dunc’s mate Kev’s new phone. 37:45 - Nice day out with a kid. 42:44 - Late mail. 47 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. Spark that chat. 6:16 - Brain food. 9:30 - Dumbest things you did as a kid. 13:40 - Take my money. https://doez.nz/ 17:40 - Mindbenders. 22:27 - Wholesome stuff that's quite grim 26:46 - Daily dump. https://shorturl.at/0i3aq 31:10 - Not all heroes wear capes 34:25 - Prison chat. 37:18 - Autonymous cars and planes. 39:54 - Cryogenic freezing. 42:29 - Japanese drinking etiquette. 46:40 - Late mail. 50 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. 5 - Helping not helping. 8 - 21 Days mild. 12:38 - public PSA stitch-up. 14:45 - Stitched up Publicly. 19:03 - I love cats. Dating video. 21:47 - Mindbenders. The tide. 25:10 - No screens for 2 months. 29:30 - What’d you quit cold turkey? 33:33 - Cheese or petrol station? 36:51 - Car thieves get busted…… 40:19 - Oscars chat / Movies you should watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNlrGhBpYjc&pp=ygUVdGhlIHN1YnN0YW5jZSB0cmFpbGVy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t915aZmyEBg&pp=ygUPY29uY2xhdmV0cmFpbGVy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdRXPAHIEW4&pp=ygURYnJ1dGFsaXN0IHRyYWlsZXI%3D 43:56 - Late mail. 47:17 - Last drinks. https://www.instagram.com/p/DGsi3hySlgB/ Farting into inflatable suits. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. Pensioner partier. 4:10 - Party Pensioners. 8:10 - Friday Funny 10 - Some people have too much money. 14 - Mindbenders. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGFxyZ3pb3F/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== 17:30 - Deep Dive Josep Parker's new opponent. 21:08 - The glitter conspiracy. 23:41 - Cholesterol hands. 28:13 - You ate THIS and WHAT happened? 32:28 - Claire’s hubby’s broken dick. 36:19 - Shitty start to the day. 39:45 - Shaq is the man! 43:07 - Late mail. 45:26 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. 4:45 - Late bloomers. 8:26 - We listen and we don’t judge. Fishing stitch up. 12:17 - Must watch. https://shorturl.at/s2XlD 15:22 - Never buy another man's wife flowers. 19:23 - Mindbenders. 23:18 - The brothers that rode across the USA. 27:21 - Noel Gallagher’s drinking buddies. 29:47 - Self Help Singh. 33:03 - Fly fishing vest. 34:55 - New contender for best laugh. 37:54 - What’s my age again? 42:14 - Late mail. 45:20 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat. Jay's twins are now at intermediate. 5:33 - Izzy’s UFC fight night this weekend. 8:33 - Mindbenders. 11:12 - I’m Beached as bro. 15:58 - Trump pays federal employees 8 months' salary who want to quit. 17:39 - I made my neighbour fall off his roof. 22:03 - Neghbourly rivalry. 27:10 - Red Bull Trolley Grand Prix. 32 - Band T-shirts. 34:25 - Must watch. Landman. https://bit.ly/3WEzRdk 39:41 - Superhero names based on your fear. 42:55 - Trump’s diary obligations remixed. 45:10 - Jamie Oliver’s first year as the naked chef. 49:35 - Late mail. 52:12 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko Chat. Summer catch-up. 5:30 - What have we missed in your life over the summer? 8:22 - Jay signed a man boob. 9:39 - Why English pubs are named the way they are. 11:48 - A dog act from an ex-boyfriend. 16:03 - Our first ‘no-repeat workday’ winner for 2025. 17:27 - The lady who remembers everything. 21:36 - What would your shit superpower be? 25:22 - Kumeu classic car and hot rod show. 29:02 - Introduce yourself with what almost killed you. 32:02 - Mad dog ferry operator at the sail GP. 37 - When did you just ‘get the bloody job done’? 41 - Red Bull kite surfer jumps a plane. https://bit.ly/4jg2Pdj 42:44 -Mindbenders. 46:37 - New Dutch Barn commercial. 49:33 - Late mail. 52:56 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1:20 - Smoko chat - Dun’s sunburn. 6:10 - Psycho sunburn. 9:36 - The Snort files. 13:40 - Last generation without social media. 17:04 - Mindbenders. The man who warped time. 20:43 - Replay - Guess that toothole. 24:17 - Massive lotto win. 28:16 - Explaining to adults. 32:39 - Queenstown airport. 35:52 - 10 Life lessons from Self Help Singh. 37:40 - Replay - Embarrassing parents. 41:02 - Storm sparks fishing rod. 43:40 - Late mail. 46:49 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat - Scamming the scammers. 5:17 - Taking the power back. 8:29 - Slipknot - Last Christmas. 10:41 - Metaphors with Brad the boss. 15:14 - Mindbenders. 18:52 - Sacking Stevie. 22:30 - We listen, we don’t judge. 25:51 - Credit where it’s due. 30:07 - Boozy marathon. 33:02 - Holding your breath while surfing. 37:17 - Late mail. 38:55 - Last drinks. SHOW LINKS. https://www.instagram.com/theronnieandalshow/ 80km run on the piss. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCyLH_MTbwR/?igsh=QkFPeWJQNnZrVg%3D%3D We listen - We don’t judge. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Reciban un cordial saludo. Desde Cali (Colombia), les habla Sergio Luis López, compartiéndoles un nuevo episodio de "Así la escuché yo..." En 1988 se presentó en las salas de cines la película “Buster” protagonizada por el músico británico Phil Collins, cuya banda sonora incluyó una canción vocalizada por el propio Phil Collins titulada “A groovy kind of love” (Un tipo lindo de amor). Así la escuché yo… Este tema musical es en realidad una nueva versión de la canción escrita por las compositoras estadounidenses Carole Bayer Sager y Toni Wine, la cual fue grabada 23 años antes que la versión de Phil Collins en el álbum "One bye one" de 1965 por las también estadounidenses Dianne and Annita, quienes la publicaron con el título “A groovey kind of love”. Una versión de “A groovy kind of love” que fue muy popular en 1966 es la que interpretó el grupo británico The Mindbenders. Como dato curioso, hay que decir que esta canción está basada en la melodía compuesta por el músico italiano Muzio Clementi, nacido en 1752 y fallecido en 1832, quien es reconocido como el primer músico que escribió obras exclusivas para piano; Clementi publicó su melodía en 1797 bajo el título “Sonatina en SOL Mayor, Opus 36 N° 5”. ¿Y tú, conocías el origen italiano de esta canción? Autor: Música: Muzio Clementi (italiano) - Letra adaptada al inglés: Carole Bayer Sager & Toni Wine (estadounidenses) A groovy kind of love - Phil Collins (1988) "Buster" Movie Soundtrack álbum (1988) Phil Collins (nombre real Philip David Charles Collins, británico) A groovy kind of love - The Mindbenders (1966) “The Mindbenders” álbum (1966) The Mindbenders (banda británica) A groovey kind of love - Dianne and Annita (1965) "One bye one" mini-álbum (1965) Dianne and Annita (nombres reales Diane Hall and Annita Ray, estadounidenses) Basada en “Sonatina in G major, Op. 36 N° 5” - Muzio Clementi (1797) Muzio Clementi (nombre real Muzio Filippo Vincenzo Francesco Saverio Clementi, italiano)   Sonatina in G major, Op. 36 N° 5 - David Garrett (2013) “David Garret in Concert” álbum (2013) David Garret (nombre real David Christian Bongartz Garrett, alemán) ___________________ “Así la escuché yo…” Temporada: 8 Episodio: 80 Sergio Productions Cali – Colombia Sergio Luis López Mora

Today on the radio show. 1 - Smoko chat - Changing careers. 4:44 - What made you want to change careers? 8:16 - What made Lee's heart go out of rhythm? 10:48 - The groom saves the wedding. 15:10 - When did you save the day? 18:31 - Jay's mate Charmaine. 22:37 - Laughable injuries  26:17 - Mindbenders. 30:56 - Dana White is a cool boss. 32:55 - Honest review of school play. 35:18 - Late mail. 40:27 - Last Drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. 1:30 - Smoko chat. Vasectomy to get out of work. 5:45 - What lie has got you off work? 9:28 - This week in science. Fungi-powered robots. 13:26 - Drawing dicks in Superbad. 16:03 - One up-manship. 19:35 - Teenage rebellion. 24:18 - Mini putt builders - What are you making? 28:09 - Kids are dicks. 32 - Mindbenders. Ruthless caterpillar. 35:42 - What are you making/creating out there? 38:08 - Tiegs needs a new car. 41:29 - Greatest car you've owned. 45:28 - Labrador spec yarns. 49:37 - Late mail.  52:38 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdrive

Today on the radio show. .50 - Smoko chat. 5:10 - Superglued chaps eye shut. 9:06 - Olympics and sport chat. 11:58 - Nearly died. 16:38 - Aussie finds grenade. 20:26 - Mindbenders 24 - Mad Dog Club entry. 29:32 - Self help singh's new advertisement. 31:46 - Poor Samuel L Jackson. 34:44 - This week in science with Tiegs. 38 - Late mail. 42:52 - Last drinks. Get in touch with us: https://linktr.ee/therockdriveSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"Thrown like a star in my vast sleepI opened my eyes to take a peekTo find that I was by the sea gazing with tranquility'Twas then when the Hurdy Gurdy ManCame singing songs of loveThen when the Hurdy Gurdy ManCame singing songs of love"Please allow me to be your Hurdy Gurdy Man with 2 Hours of tunes you won't hear anywhere else on the Sunday edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing. Joining us are William Ackerman, Miles Davis, Linda Ronstadt, Ben Sidran,, George Benson, Humble Pie, Jack Bruce, Garland Jeffreys, Gabor Szabo, Peter Frampton, Eric Clapton, The Doors, Mindbenders, Maria Muldaur, Cream, Leslie West, Jethro Tull, Oliver Nelson, Baker Gurvitz Army, Big Brother & The Holding Company, The Vogues, Genesis and Donovan...

The final episode of our favorite mindbending films features a trip through 90's sci-fi with Dark City and 12 Monkeys, alongside the neverending maze of confusion that is Memento. Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CREEP-O-RAMA⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Artwork: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@bargainbinblasphemy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Theme: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@imfigure⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Audio: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@stranjlove

We're back with part two of our favorite mind bending films. This week we've got Derick's pick of Dogtooth, Jacob's Ladder, & Moon. Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CREEP-O-RAMA⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Artwork: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@bargainbinblasphemy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Theme: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@imfigure⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Audio: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@stranjlove

"A winter's day in a deep and dark December,  I am aloneGazing from my window to the streets belowOn a freshly fallen, silent shroud of snowI am a rock, I am an islandAnd a rock feels no painAnd an island never cries"Here in SoCal it doesn't feel like Winter and I'm not an Island or a Rock so we can all enjoy the music together. Joining us are Graham Parker, Lonnie Mack, Linda Ronstadt, Sandy Denny, Dave Mason, Dire Straits, Seals & Crofts, Frank Sinatra, Booker T & The MG's, Steve Miller Band, Elvis Presley, John Coltrane, Jackson Browne w Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Billy Stewart, Billie Holiday, George Benson, The Four Tops, Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders, Chuck Berry, The McCoys, Joe Jackson, Herbie Mann, The Supremes, Everly Bothers and Simon & Garfunkel...

Ever wonder why J Lo's film career took a sharp turn in the 90s? What about the practicality of throat sacs? Or if purgatory might be a fun cruise ship or a boat ride from hell? This week we're starting a three part series on our favorite mind bending films, beginning with The Cell, Vivarium, and Triangle. Strap in. Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠CREEP-O-RAMA⁠⁠⁠⁠ Artwork: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@bargainbinblasphemy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Theme: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@imfigure⁠⁠⁠⁠ Audio: ⁠⁠⁠⁠@stranjlove

GGACP celebrates the birthday (November 5th) of pop singer, radio host and British Invasion icon Peter Noone with this ENCORE of an episode from 2020. In this episode, Peter joins the boys for a loose and laugh-filled conversation about rock and roll excess, the birth of the Beatles, entertaining the Queen Mum and rubbing shoulders with Bob Dylan, Keith Moon and Elvis Presley (among others). Also, Alice Cooper climbs the charts, Keith Richards lays down the law, Imelda Marcos requests a tune and Herman's Hermits perform "If I Were a Rich Man." PLUS: "The Pirates of Penzance"! Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders! Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars! The genius of Mickie Most! And Gilbert "sings" "I'm Into Something Good"! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

JT (James Taylor) is our Featured Artist for our 2nd episode of Season 9! Frankie gives us a great "Guilty Pleasure," which is actually a #1 Disco hit from 1974; Tim's is one of the early "Power Ballads" from the Mindbenders. This week, we debut a brand-new topic--"Little Known Recording Artist...BIG contribution". These can be top session musicians who played on hundreds of hits over the years, back up singers, producers, songwriters, etc. Thanks for your downloads--Enjoy!

Mottey's Garage 411 Garage Rootsthings to come / sweetgina / garage beat 66 long beach  william the wild one / willie the wild one / back from the grave 2 / William "Billy" Barrysir winston& the commons / we're gonna love / back from the grave 2   one way streets / jack the ripper / back from grave 1 . vince maloney sect /no good without you / ugly things vol 1 the electric company / scarey business / 60's punk ep #4 / the outcasts / im in pittsburg and its raining  kenny and the kasuals / journey to tyme / nuggets 1 .the alarm clocks / no reason to complain / back from the grave 1 /the chancellors / on tour / back from the grave vol 8 precious few / train kept a rollin / sixties archive vol 5 /the avengers / be a cave man / boulders vol 1 rocky & the riddlers / flash and cash / back from the grave 4 /the keggs / to find out / back from the grave 5 /mindbenders / roadrunner / wyld beast and weirdos cd2  Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders.five / there's time / ugly tgings vol 2 the electras / action woman / open up your door vol 1  the aztex / i said move / back from the grave vol 4 gary indian 67 /the roamin togas / bar the door / louisiana punk groups from the sixties 1   La De Da's /how is the air up there / ugly things vol 3 jason eddie & the centremen / singing the blues / wyld beasts and weirdos sandy edmonds / ccome see me / buried alive  swamp rats / pyscho / back from the grave 4 strangers / sad and lonely / ugly thing 1 the shadows of the knight / im gonna make you mine / nuggets 1 the huns / shakedown / back from the grave 4  electric prunes / you never had it better / everywhere chainsaw sound roy junior / 24 victim of circumstances / back from the grave 4 austin texas 1966 / the mummies coveredthe rangers / justine / ho dad hootenany  done by Don & Dewey in 1958./1963 Produced by Kim Fowley,keith kessler / dont crown me / ear piercing punk the king beez / i gotta move / garage punk unknowns 2 black diamond / i want need love you / ugly things vol 1 henchmen / livin / back from the grave 3 the delvetts / last time around / nuggets 1sir douglas quintet / shes about a mover / nuggets 1the sonics / strychine / nugets 1 barbarians / moulty / nuggets 1 love this song massmottey63@gmail.com

La colección de EP’s “Blacked! (Sleazy Records) rinde tributo a grandes influencias negras del rock’n’roll con selecciones de versiones a cargo de artistas y grupos blancos. Los cuatro primeros volúmenes están dedicados a Arthur Crudup, Little Richard, Bo Diddley y The Coasters. Playlist; (sintonía) BO DIDDLEY “Bo Diddley” JO ANN and TROY “Who do you love?” BOBBY CROWN “Diddley Daddy” JIM DOVAL and THE GAUCHOS “Mama, keep you big mouth shut” DELL MACK “You can’t judge a book by the cover” THE COASTERS “Three cool cats” WAYNE FONTANA and THE MINDBENDERS “Young blood” THE APPLEJACKS “Ain’t that just like me” DOWNLINERS SECT “Little Egypt” DAVE CLARK FIVE “Poison Ivy” ARTHUR CRUDUP “That’s alright mama” THE STARFIRES “She’s long and tall” DAVE BERRY “My baby left me” MAYLON HUMPHREIS “Worried about you baby” PAUL WAYNE “That’s alright mama” LITTLE RICHARD “Tutti frutti” BOBBY VEE and THE CRICKETS “The girl can’t help it” THE TRIPPERS “Keep a knockin’” HOWIE CASEY and THE SENIORS “True fine mama” THE HUNTSMEN “Send me some lovin’ Escuchar audio

Episode one hundred and fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Waterloo Sunset” by the Kinks, and the self-inflicted damage the group did to their career between 1965 and 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a nineteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Excerpt From a Teenage Opera" by Keith West. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many Kinks songs. I've used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks' Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don't want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. And this is the interview with Rasa I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, this episode has some mentions of racism and homophobia, several discussions of physical violence, one mention of domestic violence, and some discussion of mental illness. I've tried to discuss these things with a reasonable amount of sensitivity, but there's a tabloid element to some of my sources which inevitably percolates through, so be warned if you find those things upsetting. One of the promises I made right at the start of this project was that I would not be doing the thing that almost all podcasts do of making huge chunks of the episodes be about myself -- if I've had to update people about something in my life that affects the podcast, I've done it in separate admin episodes, so the episodes themselves will not be taken up with stuff about me. The podcast is not about me. I am making a very slight exception in this episode, for reasons that will become clear -- there's no way for me to tell this particular story the way I need to without bringing myself into it at least a little. So I wanted to state upfront that this is a one-off thing. The podcast is not suddenly going to change. But one question that I get asked a lot -- far more than I'd expect -- is "do the people you talk about in the podcast ever get in touch with you about what you've said?" Now that has actually happened twice, both times involving people leaving comments on relatively early episodes. The first time is probably the single thing I'm proudest of achieving with this series, and it was a comment left on the episode on "Goodnight My Love" a couple of years back: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] That comment was from Debra Frazier and read “Jesse Belvin is my Beloved Uncle, my mother's brother. I've been waiting all my life for him to be recognized in this manner. I must say the content in this podcast is 100% correct!Joann and Jesse practically raised me. Can't express how grateful I am. Just so glad someone got it right. I still miss them dearly to this day. My world was forever changed Feb. 6th 1960. I can remember him writing most of those songs right there in my grandmother's living room. I think I'm his last living closest relative, that knows everything in this podcast is true." That comment by itself would have justified me doing this whole podcast. The other such comment actually came a couple of weeks ago, and was on the episode on "Only You": [Excerpt: The Platters, "Only You"] That was a longer comment, from Gayle Schrieber, an associate of Buck Ram, and started "Well, you got some of it right. Your smart-assed sarcasm and know-it-all attitude is irritating since I Do know it all from the business side but what the heck. You did better than most people – with the exception of Marv Goldberg." Given that Marv Goldberg is the single biggest expert on 1950s vocal groups in the world, I'll take that as at least a backhanded compliment. So those are the only two people who I've talked about in the podcast who've commented, but before the podcast I had a blog, and at various times people whose work I wrote about would comment -- John Cowsill of the Cowsills still remembers a blog post where I said nice things about him fourteen years ago, for example. And there was one comment on a blog post I made four or five years ago which confirmed something I'd suspected for a while… When we left the Kinks, at the end of 1964, they had just recorded their first album. That album was not very good, but did go to number three in the UK album charts, which is a much better result than it sounds. Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon got to number one in 1960, but otherwise the only rock acts to make number one on the album charts from the start of the sixties through the end of 1967 were Elvis, Cliff Richard, the Shadows, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Monkees. In the first few years of the sixties they were interspersed with the 101 Strings, trad jazz, the soundtrack to West Side Story, and a blackface minstrel group, The George Mitchell Singers. From mid-1963 through to the end of 1967, though, literally the only things to get to number one on the album charts were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Monkees, and the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. That tiny cabal was eventually broken at the end of 1967 by Val Doonican Rocks… But Gently, and from 1968 on the top of the album charts becomes something like what we would expect today, with a whole variety of different acts, I make this point to point out two things The first is that number three on the album charts is an extremely good position for the Kinks to be in -- when they reached that point the Rolling Stones' second album had just entered at number one, and Beatles For Sale had dropped to number two after eight weeks at the top -- and the second is that for most rock artists and record labels, the album market was simply not big enough or competitive enough until 1968 for it to really matter. What did matter was the singles chart. And "You Really Got Me" had been a genuinely revolutionary hit record. According to Ray Davies it had caused particular consternation to both the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, both of whom had thought they would be the first to get to number one with a dirty, distorted, R&B-influenced guitar-riff song. And so three weeks after the release of the album came the group's second single. Originally, the plan had been to release a track Ray had been working on called "Tired of Waiting", but that was a slower track, and it was decided that the best thing to do would be to try to replicate the sound of their first hit. So instead, they released "All Day And All Of The Night": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day And All Of The Night"] That track was recorded by the same team as had recorded "You Really Got Me", except with Perry Ford replacing Arthur Greenslade on piano. Once again, Bobby Graham was on drums rather than Mick Avory, and when Ray Davies suggested that he might want to play a different drum pattern, Graham just asked him witheringly "Who do you think you are?" "All Day and All of the Night" went to number two -- a very impressive result for a soundalike follow-up -- and was kept off the number one spot first by "Baby Love" by the Supremes and then by "Little Red Rooster" by the Rolling Stones. The group quickly followed it up with an EP, Kinksize Session, consisting of three mediocre originals plus the group's version of "Louie Louie". By February 1965 that had hit number one on the EP charts, knocking the Rolling Stones off. Things were going as well as possible for the group. Ray and his girlfriend Rasa got married towards the end of 1964 -- they had to, as Rasa was pregnant and from a very religious Catholic family. By contrast, Dave was leading the kind of life that can only really be led by a seventeen-year-old pop star -- he moved out of the family home and in with Mick Avory after his mother caught him in bed with five women, and once out of her watchful gaze he also started having affairs with men, which was still illegal in 1964. (And which indeed would still be illegal for seventeen-year-olds until 2001). In January, they released their third hit single, "Tired of Waiting for You". The track was a ballad rather than a rocker, but still essentially another variant on the theme of "You Really Got Me" -- a song based around a few repeated phrases of lyric, and with a chorus with two major chords a tone apart. "You Really Got Me"'s chorus has the change going up: [Plays "You Really Got Me" chorus chords] While "Tired Of Waiting For You"'s chorus has the change going down: [Plays "Tired of Waiting For You" chorus chords] But it's trivially easy to switch between the two if you play them in the same key: [Demonstrates] Ray has talked about how "Tired of Waiting for You" was partly inspired by how he felt tired of waiting for the fame that the Kinks deserved, and the music was written even before "You Really Got Me". But when they went into the studio to record it, the only lyrics he had were the chorus. Once they'd recorded the backing track, he worked on the lyrics at home, before coming back into the studio to record his vocals, with Rasa adding backing vocals on the softer middle eight: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Tired of Waiting For You"] After that track was recorded, the group went on a tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. The flight out to Australia was thirty-four hours, and also required a number of stops. One stop to refuel in Moscow saw the group forced back onto the plane at gunpoint after Pete Quaife unwisely made a joke about the recently-deposed Russian Premier Nikita Khruschev. They also had a stop of a couple of days in Mumbai, where Ray was woken up by the sounds of fishermen chanting at the riverside, and enchanted by both the sound and the image. In Adelaide, Ray and Dave met up for the first time in years with their sister Rose and her husband Arthur. Ray was impressed by their comparative wealth, but disliked the slick modernity of their new suburban home. Dave became so emotional about seeing his big sister again that he talked about not leaving her house, not going to the show that night, and just staying in Australia so they could all be a family again. Rose sadly told him that he knew he couldn't do that, and he eventually agreed. But the tour wasn't all touching family reunions. They also got into a friendly rivalry with Manfred Mann, who were also on the tour and were competing with the Kinks to be the third-biggest group in the UK behind the Beatles and the Stones, and at one point both bands ended up on the same floor of the same hotel as the Stones, who were on their own Australian tour. The hotel manager came up in the night after a complaint about the noise, saw the damage that the combined partying of the three groups had caused, and barricaded them into that floor, locking the doors and the lift shafts, so that the damage could be contained to one floor. "Tired of Waiting" hit number one in the UK while the group were on tour, and it also became their biggest hit in the US, reaching number six, so on the way home they stopped off in the US for a quick promotional appearance on Hullabaloo. According to Ray's accounts, they were asked to do a dance like Freddie and the Dreamers, he and Mick decided to waltz together instead, and the cameras cut away horrified at the implied homosexuality. In fact, examining the footage shows the cameras staying on the group as Mick approaches Ray, arms extended, apparently offering to waltz, while Ray backs off nervous and confused, unsure what's going on. Meanwhile Dave and Pete on the other side of the stage are being gloriously camp with their arms around each other's shoulders. When they finally got back to the UK, they were shocked to hear this on the radio: [Excerpt: The Who, "I Can't Explain"] Ray was horrified that someone had apparently stolen the group's sound, especially when he found out it was the Who, who as the High Numbers had had a bit of a rivalry with the group. He said later "Dave thought it was us! It was produced by Shel Talmy, like we were. They used the same session singers as us, and Perry Ford played piano, like he did on ‘All Day And All Of The Night'. I felt a bit appalled by that. I think that was worse than stealing a song – they were actually stealing our whole style!” Pete Townshend later admitted as much, saying that he had deliberately demoed "I Can't Explain" to sound as much like the Kinks as possible so that Talmy would see its potential. But the Kinks were still, for the moment, doing far better than the Who. In March, shortly after returning from their foreign tour, they released their second album, Kinda Kinks. Like their first album, it was a very patchy effort, but it made number two on the charts, behind the Rolling Stones. But Ray Davies was starting to get unhappy. He was dissatisfied with everything about his life. He would talk later about looking at his wife lying in bed sleeping and thinking "What's she doing here?", and he was increasingly wondering if the celebrity pop star life was right for him, simultaneously resenting and craving the limelight, and doing things like phoning the music papers to deny rumours that he was leaving the Kinks -- rumours which didn't exist until he made those phone calls. As he thought the Who had stolen the Kinks' style, Ray decided to go in a different direction for the next Kinks single, and recorded "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy", which was apparently intended to sound like Motown, though to my ears it bears no resemblance: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy"] That only went to number nineteen -- still a hit, but a worry for a band who had had three massive hits in a row. Several of the band started to worry seriously that they were going to end up with no career at all. It didn't help that on the tour after recording that, Ray came down with pneumonia. Then Dave came down with bronchitis. Then Pete Quaife hit his head and had to be hospitalised with severe bleeding and concussion. According to Quaife, he fainted in a public toilet and hit his head on the bowl on the way down, but other band members have suggested that Quaife -- who had a reputation for telling tall stories, even in a band whose members are all known for rewriting history -- was ashamed after getting into a fight. In April they played the NME Poll-Winners' Party, on the same bill as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Moody Blues, the Searchers, Freddie And The Dreamers, Herman's Hermits, Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders, the Rockin' Berries, the Seekers, the Ivy League, Them, the Bachelors, Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield, Twinkle, Tom Jones, Donovan, and Sounds Incorporated. Because they got there late they ended up headlining, going on after the Beatles, even though they hadn't won an award, only come second in best new group, coming far behind the Stones but just ahead of Manfred Mann and the Animals. The next single, "Set Me Free", was a conscious attempt to correct course after "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy" had been less successful: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Set Me Free"] The song is once again repetitive, and once again based on a riff, structured similarly to "Tired of Waiting" but faster and more upbeat, and with a Beatles-style falsetto in the chorus. It worked -- it returned the group to the top ten -- but Ray wasn't happy at writing to order. He said in August of that year “I'm ashamed of that song. I can stand to hear and even sing most of the songs I've written, but not that one. It's built around pure idiot harmonies that have been used in a thousand songs.” More recently he's talked about how the lyric was an expression of him wanting to be set free from the constraint of having to write a hit song in the style he felt he was outgrowing. By the time the single was released, though, it looked like the group might not even be together any longer. There had always been tensions in the band. Ray and Dave had a relationship that made the Everly Brothers look like the model of family amity, and while Pete Quaife stayed out of the arguments for the most part, Mick Avory couldn't. The core of the group had always been the Davies brothers, and Quaife had known them for years, but Avory was a relative newcomer and hadn't grown up with them, and they also regarded him as a bit less intelligent than the rest of the group. He became the butt of jokes on a fairly constant basis. That would have been OK, except that Avory was also an essentially passive person, who didn't want to take sides in conflicts, while Dave Davies thought that as he and Avory were flatmates they should be on the same side, and resented when Avory didn't take his side in arguments with Ray. As Dave remembered it, the trigger came when he wanted to change the setlist and Mick didn't support him against Ray. In others' recollection, it came when the rest of the band tried to get Dave away from a party and he got violent with them. Both may be true. Either way, Dave got drunk and threw a suitcase at the back of a departing Mick, who was normally a fairly placid person but had had enough, and so he turned round, furious, grabbed Dave, got him in a headlock and just started punching, blackening both his eyes. According to some reports, Avory was so infuriated with Dave that he knocked him out, and Dave was so drunk and angry that when he came to he went for Avory again, and got knocked out again. The next day, the group were driven to their show in separate cars -- the Davies brothers in one, the rhythm section in the other -- they had separate dressing rooms, and made their entrance from separate directions. They got through the first song OK, and then Dave Davies insulted Avory's drumming, spat at him, and kicked his drums so they scattered all over the stage. At this point, a lot of the audience were still thinking this was part of the act, but Avory saw red again and picked up his hi-hat cymbal and smashed it down edge-first onto Dave's head. Everyone involved says that if his aim had been very slightly different he would have actually killed Dave. As it is, Dave collapsed, unconscious, bleeding everywhere. Ray screamed "My brother! He's killed my little brother!" and Mick, convinced he was a murderer, ran out of the theatre, still wearing his stage outfit of a hunting jacket and frilly shirt. He was running away for his life -- and that was literal, as Britain still technically had the death penalty at this point; while the last executions in Britain took place in 1964, capital punishment for murder wasn't abolished until late 1965 -- but at the same time a gang of screaming girls outside who didn't know what was going on were chasing him because he was a pop star. He managed to get back to London, where he found that the police had been looking for him but that Dave was alive and didn't want to press charges. However, he obviously couldn't go back to their shared home, and they had to cancel gigs because Dave had been hospitalised. It looked like the group were finished for good. Four days after that, Ray and Rasa's daughter Louisa was born, and shortly after that Ray was in the studio again, recording demos: [Excerpt: Ray Davies, "I Go to Sleep (demo)"] That song was part of a project that Larry Page, the group's co-manager, and Eddie Kassner, their publisher, had of making Ray's songwriting a bigger income source, and getting his songs recorded by other artists. Ray had been asked to write it for Peggy Lee, who soon recorded her own version: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, "I Go to Sleep"] Several of the other tracks on that demo session featured Mitch Mitchell on drums. At the time, Mitchell was playing with another band that Page managed, and there seems to have been some thought of him possibly replacing Avory in the group. But instead, Larry Page cut the Gordian knot. He invited each band member to a meeting, just the two of them -- and didn't tell them that he'd scheduled all these meetings at the same time. When they got there, they found that they'd been tricked into having a full band meeting, at which point Page just talked to them about arrangements for their forthcoming American tour, and didn't let them get a word in until he'd finished. At the end he asked if they had any questions, and Mick Avory said he'd need some new cymbals because he'd broken his old ones on Dave's head. Before going on tour, the group recorded a song that Ray had written inspired by that droning chanting he'd heard in Mumbai. The song was variously titled "See My Friend" and "See My Friends" -- it has been released under both titles, and Ray seems to sing both words at different times -- and Ray told Maureen Cleave "The song is about homosexuality… It's like a football team and the way they're always kissing each other.” (We will be talking about Ray Davies' attitudes towards sexuality and gender in a future episode, but suffice to say that like much of Davies' worldview, he has a weird mixture of very progressive and very reactionary views, and he is also prone to observe behaviours in other people's private lives and make them part of his own public persona). The guitar part was recorded on a bad twelve-string guitar that fed back in the studio, creating a drone sound, which Shel Talmy picked up on and heavily compressed, creating a sound that bore more than a little resemblance to a sitar: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friend"] If that had been released at the time, it would have made the Kinks into trend-setters. Instead it was left in the can for nearly three months, and in the meantime the Yardbirds released the similar-sounding "Heart Full of Soul", making the Kinks look like bandwagon-jumpers when their own record came out, and reinforcing a paranoid belief that Ray had started to develop that his competitors were stealing his ideas. The track taking so long to come out was down to repercussions from the group's American tour, which changed the course of their whole career in ways they could not possibly have predicted. This was still the era when the musicians' unions of the US and UK had a restrictive one-in, one-out policy for musicians, and you couldn't get a visa to play in the US without the musicians' union's agreement -- and the AFM were not very keen on the British invasion, which they saw as taking jobs away from their members. There are countless stories from this period of bands like the Moody Blues getting to the US only to find that the arrangements have fallen through and they can't perform. Around this time, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders were told they weren't notable enough to get permission to play more than one gig, even though they were at number one on the charts in the US at the time. So it took a great deal of effort to get the Kinks' first US tour arranged, and they had to make a good impression. Unfortunately, while the Beatles and Stones knew how to play the game and give irreverent, cheeky answers that still left the interviewers amused and satisfied, the Kinks were just flat-out confusing and rude: [Excerpt: The Kinks Interview with Clay Cole] The whole tour went badly. They were booked into unsuitable venues, and there were a series of events like the group being booked on the same bill as the Dave Clark Five, and both groups having in their contract that they would be the headliner. Promoters started to complain about them to their management and the unions, and Ray was behaving worse and worse. By the time the tour hit LA, Ray was being truly obnoxious. According to Larry Page he refused to play one TV show because there was a Black drummer on the same show. Page said that it was not about personal prejudice -- though it's hard to see how it could not be, at least in part -- but just picking something arbitrary to complain about to show he had the power to mess things up. While shooting a spot for the show Where The Action Is, Ray got into a physical fight with one of the other cast members over nothing. What Ray didn't realise was that the person in question was a representative for AFTRA, the screen performers' union, and was already unhappy because Dave had earlier refused to join the union. Their behaviour got reported up the chain. The day after the fight was supposed to be the highlight of the tour, but Ray was missing his wife. In the mid-sixties, the Beach Boys would put on a big Summer Spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl every year, and the Kinks were due to play it, on a bill which as well as the Beach Boys also featured the Byrds, the Righteous Brothers, Dino, Desi & Billy, and Sonny and Cher. But Ray said he wasn't going on unless Rasa was there. And he didn't tell Larry Page, who was there, that. Instead, he told a journalist at the Daily Mirror in London, and the first Page heard about it was when the journalist phoned him to confirm that Ray wouldn't be playing. Now, they had already been working to try to get Rasa there for the show, because Ray had been complaining for a while. But Rasa didn't have a passport. Not only that, but she was an immigrant and her family were from Lithuania, and the US State Department weren't exactly keen on people from the Eastern Bloc flying to the US. And it was a long flight. I don't know exactly how long a flight from London to LA took then, but it takes eleven and a half hours now, and it will have been around that length. Somehow, working a miracle, Larry Page co-ordinated with his co-managers Robert Wace and Grenville Collins back in London -- difficult in itself as Wace and Collins and Page and his business partner Eddie Kassner were by now in two different factions, because Ray had been manipulating them and playing them off against each other for months. But the three of them worked together and somehow got Rasa to LA in time for Ray to go on stage. Page waited around long enough to see that Ray had got on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, then flew back to London. He had had enough of Ray's nonsense, and didn't really see any need to be there anyway, because they had a road manager, their publisher, their agent, and plenty of support staff. He felt that he was only there to be someone for Ray Davies to annoy and take his frustrations out on. And indeed, once Page flew back to the UK, Ray calmed down, though how much of that was the presence of Rasa it's hard to say. Their road manager at the time though said "If Larry wasn't there, Ray couldn't make problems because there was nobody there to make them to. He couldn't make problems for me because I just ignored them. For example, in Hawaii, the shirts got stolen. Ray said, ‘No way am I going onstage without my shirt.' So I turned around and said to him, ‘Great, don't go on!' Of course, they went on.” They did miss the gig the next night in San Francisco, with more or less the same lineup as the Hollywood Bowl show -- they'd had problems with the promoter of that show at an earlier gig in Reno, and so Ray said they weren't going to play unless they got paid in cash upfront. When the promoter refused, the group just walked on stage, waved, and walked off. But other than that, the rest of the tour went OK. What they didn't realise until later was that they had made so many enemies on that tour that it would be impossible for them to return to the US for another four years. They weren't blacklisted, as such, they just didn't get the special treatment that was necessary to make it possible for them to visit there. From that point on they would still have a few hits in the US, but nothing like the sustained massive success they had in the UK in the same period. Ray felt abandoned by Page, and started to side more and more with Wace and Collins. Page though was still trying to promote Ray's songwriting. Some of this, like the album "Kinky Music" by the Larry Page Orchestra, released during the tour, was possibly not the kind of promotion that anyone wanted, though some of it has a certain kitsch charm: [Excerpt: The Larry Page Orchestra, "All Day And All Of The Night"] Incidentally, the guitarist on that album was Jimmy Page, who had previously played rhythm guitar on a few Kinks album tracks. But other stuff that Larry Page was doing would be genuinely helpful. For example, on the tour he had become friendly with Stone and Greene, the managers who we heard about in the Buffalo Springfield episode. At this point they were managing Sonny and Cher, and when they came over to the UK, Page took the opportunity to get Cher into the studio to cut a version of Ray's "I Go to Sleep": [Excerpt: Cher, "I Go to Sleep"] Most songwriters, when told that the biggest new star of the year was cutting a cover version of one of their tracks for her next album, would be delighted. Ray Davies, on the other hand, went to the session and confronted Page, screaming about how Page was stealing his ideas. And it was Page being marginalised that caused "See My Friend" to be delayed, because while they were in the US, Page had produced the group in Gold Star Studios, recording a version of Ray's song "Ring the Bells", and Page wanted that as the next single, but the group had a contract with Shel Talmy which said he would be their producer. They couldn't release anything Talmy hadn't produced, but Page, who had control over the group's publishing with his business partner Kassner, wouldn't let them release "See My Friend". Eventually, Talmy won out, and "See My Friend" became the group's next single. It made the top ten on the Record Retailer chart, the one that's now the official UK chart cited in most sources, but only number fifteen on the NME chart which more people paid attention to at the time, and only spent a few weeks on the charts. Ray spent the summer complaining in the music papers about how the track -- "the only one I've really liked", as he said at the time -- wasn't selling as much as it deserved, and also insulting Larry Page and boasting about his own abilities, saying he was a better singer than Andy Williams and Tony Bennett. The group sacked Larry Page as their co-manager, and legal battles between Page and Kassner on one side and Collins and Wace on the other would continue for years, tying up much of the group's money. Page went on to produce a new band he was managing, making records that sounded very like the Kinks' early hits: [Excerpt: The Troggs, "Wild Thing"] The Kinks, meanwhile, decided to go in a different direction for their new EP, Kwyet Kinks, an EP of mostly softer, folk- and country-inspired songs. The most interesting thing on Kwyet Kinks was "Well-Respected Man", which saw Ray's songwriting go in a completely different direction as he started to write gentle social satires with more complex lyrics, rather than the repetitive riff-based songs he'd been doing before. That track was released as a single in the US, which didn't have much of an EP market, and made the top twenty there, despite its use of a word that in England at the time had a double meaning -- either a cigarette or a younger boy at a public school who has to be the servant of an older boy -- but in America was only used as a slur for gay people: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Well Respected Man"] The group's next album, The Kink Kontroversy, was mostly written in a single week, and is another quickie knockoff album. It had the hit single "Til the End of the Day", another attempt at getting back to their old style of riffy rockers, and one which made the top ten. It also had a rerecorded version of "Ring the Bells", the song Larry Page had wanted to release as a single: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Ring the Bells"] I'm sure that when Ray Davies heard "Ruby Tuesday" a little over a year later he didn't feel any better about the possibility that people were stealing his ideas. The Kink Kontroversy was a transitional album for the group in many ways. It was the first album to prominently feature Nicky Hopkins, who would be an integral part of the band's sound for the next three years, and the last one to feature a session drummer (Clem Cattini, rather than Avory, played on most of the tracks). From this point on there would essentially be a six-person group of studio Kinks who would make the records -- the four Kinks themselves, Rasa Davies on backing vocals, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. At the end of 1965 the group were flailing, mired in lawsuits, and had gone from being the third biggest group in the country at the start of the year to maybe the tenth or twentieth by the end of it. Something had to change. And it did with the group's next single, which in both its sound and its satirical subject matter was very much a return to the style of "Well Respected Man". "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was inspired by anger. Ray was never a particularly sociable person, and he was not the kind to do the rounds of all the fashionable clubs like the other pop stars, including his brother, would. But he did feel a need to make some kind of effort and would occasionally host parties at his home for members of the fashionable set. But Davies didn't keep up with fashion the way they did, and some of them would mock him for the way he dressed. At one such party he got into a fistfight with someone who was making fun of his slightly flared trousers, kicked all the guests out, and then went to a typewriter and banged out a lyric mocking the guest and everyone like him: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"] The song wasn't popular with Ray's bandmates -- Dave thought it was too soft and wimpy, while Quaife got annoyed at the time Ray spent in the studio trying to make the opening guitar part sound a bit like a ukulele. But they couldn't argue with the results -- it went to number five on the charts, their biggest success since "Tired of Waiting for You" more than a year earlier, and more importantly in some ways it became part of the culture in a way their more recent singles hadn't. "Til The End of the Day" had made the top ten, but it wasn't a record that stuck in people's minds. But "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was so popular that Ray soon got sick of people coming up to him in the street and singing "Oh yes he is!" at him. But then, Ray was getting sick of everything. In early 1966 he had a full-scale breakdown, brought on by the flu but really just down to pure exhaustion. Friends from this time say that Ray was an introverted control freak, always neurotic and trying to get control and success, but sabotaging it as soon as he attained it so that he didn't have to deal with the public. Just before a tour of Belgium, Rasa gave him an ultimatum -- either he sought medical help or she would leave him. He picked up their phone and slammed it into her face, blacking her eye -- the only time he was ever physically violent to her, she would later emphasise -- at which point it became imperative to get medical help for his mental condition. Ray stayed at home while the rest of the band went to Belgium -- they got in a substitute rhythm player, and Dave took the lead vocals -- though the tour didn't make them any new friends. Their co-manager Grenville Collins went along and with the tact and diplomacy for which the British upper classes are renowned the world over, would say things like “I understand every bloody word you're saying but I won't speak your filthy language. De Gaulle won't speak English, why should I speak French?” At home, Ray was doing worse and worse. When some pre-recorded footage of the Kinks singing "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" came on the TV, he unplugged it and stuck it in the oven. He said later "I was completely out of my mind. I went to sleep and I woke up a week later with a beard. I don't know what happened to me. I'd run into the West End with my money stuffed in my socks, I'd tried to punch my press agent, I was chased down Denmark Street by the police, hustled into a taxi by a psychiatrist and driven off somewhere. And I didn't know. I woke up and I said, ‘What's happening? When do we leave for Belgium?' And they said, ‘Ray it's all right. You had a collapse. Don't worry. You'll get better.'” He did get better, though for a long time he found himself unable to listen to any contemporary rock music other than Bob Dylan -- electric guitars made him think of the pop world that had made him ill -- and so he spent his time listening to classical and jazz records. He didn't want to be a pop star any more, and convinced himself he could quit the band if he went out on top by writing a number one single. And so he did: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"] Or at least, I say it's a single he wrote, but it's here that I finally get to a point I've been dancing round since the beginning of the episode. The chorus line, "In the summertime", was Rasa's suggestion, and in one of the only two interviews I've ever come across with her, for Johnny Rogan's biography of Ray, she calls the song "the only one where I wrote some words". But there's evidence, including another interview with her I'll talk about in a bit, that suggests that's not quite the case. For years, I thought it was an interesting coincidence that Ray Davies' songwriting ability follows a curve that almost precisely matches that of his relationship with Rasa. At the start, he's clearly talented -- "You Really Got Me" is a great track -- but he's an unformed writer and most of his work is pretty poor stuff. Then he marries Rasa, and his writing starts to become more interesting. Rasa starts to regularly contribute in the studio, and he becomes one of the great songwriters of his generation. For a five-year period in the mid-to-late-sixties, the period when their marriage is at its strongest, Ray writes a string of classic songs that are the equal of any catalogue in popular music. Then around 1970 Rasa stops coming to the studio, and their marriage is under strain. The records become patchier -- still plenty of classic tracks, but a lot more misses. And then in 1973, she left him, and his songwriting fell off a cliff. If you look at a typical Ray Davies concert setlist from 2017, the last time he toured, he did twenty songs, of which two were from his new album, one was the Kinks' one-off hit "Come Dancing" from 1983, and every other song was from the period when he and Rasa were married. Now, for a long time I just thought that was interesting, but likely a coincidence. After all, most rock songwriters do their most important work in their twenties, divorces have a way of messing people's mental health up, musical fashions change… there are a myriad reasons why these things could be like that. But… the circumstantial evidence just kept piling up. Ray's paranoia about people stealing his ideas meant that he became a lot more paranoid and secretive in his songwriting process, and would often not tell his bandmates the titles of the songs, the lyrics, or the vocal melody, until after they'd recorded the backing tracks -- they would record the tracks knowing the chord changes and tempo, but not what the actual song was. Increasingly he would be dictating parts to Quaife and Nicky Hopkins in the studio from the piano, telling them exactly what to play. But while Pete Quaife thought that Ray was being dictatorial in the studio and resented it, he resented something else more. As late as 1999 he was complaining about, in his words, "the silly little bint from Bradford virtually running the damn studio", telling him what to do, and feeling unable to argue back even though he regarded her as "a jumped-up groupie". Dave, on the other hand, valued Rasa's musical intuition and felt that Ray was the same. And she was apparently actually more up-to-date with the music in the charts than any of the band -- while they were out on the road, she would stay at home and listen to the radio and make note of what was charting and why. All this started to seem like a lot of circumstantial evidence that Rasa was possibly far more involved in the creation of the music than she gets credit for -- and given that she was never credited for her vocal parts on any Kinks records, was it too unbelievable that she might have contributed to the songwriting without credit? But then I found the other interview with Rasa I'm aware of, a short sidebar piece I'll link in the liner notes, and I'm going to quote that here: "Rasa, however, would sometimes take a very active role during the writing of the songs, many of which were written in the family home, even on occasion adding to the lyrics. She suggested the words “In the summertime” to ‘Sunny Afternoon', it is claimed. She now says, “I would make suggestions for a backing melody, sing along while Ray was playing the song(s) on the piano; at times I would add a lyric line or word(s). It was rewarding for me and was a major part of our life.” That was enough for me to become convinced that Rasa was a proper collaborator with Ray. I laid all this out in a blog post, being very careful how I phrased what I thought -- that while Ray Davies was probably the principal author of the songs credited to him (and to be clear, that is definitely what I think -- there's a stylistic continuity throughout his work that makes it very clear that the same man did the bulk of the work on all of it), the songs were the work of a writing partnership. As I said in that post "But even if Rasa only contributed ten percent, that seems likely to me to have been the ten percent that pulled those songs up to greatness. Even if all she did was pull Ray back from his more excessive instincts, perhaps cause him to show a little more compassion in his more satirical works (and the thing that's most notable about his post-Rasa songwriting is how much less compassionate it is), suggest a melodic line should go up instead of down at the end of a verse, that kind of thing… the cumulative effect of those sorts of suggestions can be enormous." I was just laying out my opinion, not stating anything as a certainty, though I was morally sure that Rasa deserved at least that much credit. And then Rasa commented on the post, saying "Dear Andrew. Your article was so informative and certainly not mischaracterised. Thank you for the 'history' of my input working with Ray. As I said previously, that time was magical and joyous." I think that's as close a statement as we're likely to get that the Kinks' biggest hits were actually the result of the songwriting team of Davies and Davies, and not of Ray alone, since nobody seems interested at all in a woman who sang on -- and likely co-wrote -- some of the biggest hit records of the sixties. Rasa gets mentioned in two sentences in the band's Wikipedia page, and as far as I can tell has only been interviewed twice -- an extensive interview by Johnny Rogan for his biography of Ray, in which he sadly doesn't seem to have pressed her on her songwriting contributions, and the sidebar above. I will probably continue to refer to Ray writing songs in this and the next episode on the Kinks, because I don't know for sure who wrote what, and he is the one who is legally credited as the sole writer. But… just bear that in mind. And bear it in mind whenever I or anyone else talk about the wives and girlfriends of other rock stars, because I'm sure she's not the only one. "Sunny Afternoon" knocked "Paperback Writer" off the number one spot, but by the time it did, Pete Quaife was out of the band. He'd fallen out with the Davies brothers so badly that he'd insisted on travelling separately from them, and he'd been in a car crash that had hospitalised him for six weeks. They'd quickly hired a temporary replacement, John Dalton, who had previously played with The Mark Four, the group that had evolved into The Creation. They needed him to mime for a TV appearance pretty much straight away, so they asked him "can you play a descending D minor scale?" and when he said yes he was hired -- because the opening of "Sunny Afternoon" used a trick Ray was very fond of, of holding a chord in the guitars while the bass descends in a scale, only changing chord when the notes would clash too badly, and then changing to the closest possible chord: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"] Around this time, the group also successfully renegotiated their contract with Pye Records, with the help of a new lawyer they had been advised to get in touch with -- Allen Klein. As well as helping renegotiate their contracts, Klein also passed on a demo of one of Ray's new songs to Herman's Hermits. “Dandy” was going to be on the Kinks' next album, but the Hermits released it as a single in the US and took it into the top ten: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, “Dandy”] In September, Pete Quaife formally quit the band -- he hadn't played with them in months after his accident -- and the next month the album Face To Face, recorded while Quaife was still in the group, was released. Face to Face was the group's first really solid album, and much of the album was in the same vein as "Sunny Afternoon" -- satirical songs that turned on the songwriter as much as on the people they were ostensibly about. It didn't do as well as the previous albums, but did still make the top twenty on the album chart. The group continued work, recording a new single, "Dead End Street", a song which is musically very similar to "Sunny Afternoon", but is lyrically astonishingly bleak, dealing with poverty and depression rather than more normal topics for a pop song. The group produced a promotional film for it, but the film was banned by the BBC as being in bad taste, as it showed the group as undertakers. But the single happened to be released two days after the broadcast of "Cathy Come Home", the seminal drama about homelessness, which suddenly brought homelessness onto the political agenda. While "Dead End Street" wasn't technically about homelessness, it was close enough that when the TV programme Panorama did a piece on the subject, they used "Dead End Street" to soundtrack it. The song made the top five, an astonishing achievement for something so dark: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dead End Street"] But the track also showed the next possible breach in the Kinks' hitmaking team -- when it was originally recorded, Shel Talmy had produced it, and had a French horn playing, but after he left the session, the band brought in a trombone player to replace the French horn, and rerecorded it without him. They would continue working with him for a little while, recording some of the tracks for their next album, but by the time the next single came out, Talmy would be out of the picture for good. But Pete Quaife, on the other hand, was nowhere near as out of the group as he had seemed. While he'd quit the band in September, Ray persuaded him to rejoin the band four days before "Dead End Street" came out, and John Dalton was back to working in his day job as a builder, though we'll be hearing more from him. The group put out a single in Europe, "Mr. Pleasant", a return to the style of "Well Respected Man" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion": [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Mr. Pleasant”] That was a big hit in the Netherlands, but it wasn't released in the UK. They were working on something rather different. Ray had had the idea of writing a song called "Liverpool Sunset", about Liverpool, and about the decline of the Merseybeat bands who had been at the top of the profession when the Kinks had been starting out. But then the Beatles had released "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", and Ray hadn't wanted to release anything about Liverpool's geography and look like he had stolen from them, given his attitudes to plagiarism. He said later "I sensed that the Beatles weren't going to be around long. When they moved to London, and ended up in Knightsbridge or wherever, I was still in Muswell Hill. I was loyal to my origins. Maybe I felt when they left it was all over for Merseybeat.” So instead, he -- or he and Rasa -- came up with a song about London, and about loneliness, and about a couple, Terry and Julie -- Terry was named after his nephew Terry who lived in Australia, while Julie's name came from Julie Christie, as she was then starring in a film with a Terry, Terrence Stamp: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] It's interesting to look at the musical inspirations for the song. Many people at the time pointed out the song's similarity to "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band, which had come out six months earlier with a similar melody and was also named after a place: [Excerpt: The New Vaudeville Band, "Winchester Cathedral"] And indeed Spike Milligan had parodied that song and replaced the lyrics with something more London-centric: [Excerpt: Spike Milligan, "Tower Bridge"] But it seems likely that Ray had taken inspiration from an older piece of music. We've talked before about Ferd Grofe in several episodes -- he was the one who orchestrated the original version of "Rhapsody in Blue", who wrote the piece of music that inspired Don Everly to write "Cathy's Clown", and who wrote the first music for the Novachord, the prototype synthesiser from the 1930s. As we saw earlier, Ray was listening to a lot of classical and jazz music rather than rock at this point, and one has to wonder if, at some point during his illness the previous year, he had come across Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy, which Grofe had written for Paul Whiteman's band in 1928, very much in the style of "Rhapsody in Blue", and this section, eight and a half minutes in, in particular: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, "Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy" ] "Waterloo Sunset" took three weeks to record. They started out, as usual, with a backing track recorded without the rest of the group knowing anything about the song they were recording -- though the group members did contribute some ideas to the arrangement, which was unusual by this point. Pete Quaife contributed to the bass part, while Dave Davies suggested the slapback echo on the guitar: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset, Instrumental Take 2"] Only weeks later did they add the vocals. Ray had an ear infection, so rather than use headphones he sang to a playback through a speaker, which meant he had to sing more gently, giving the vocal a different tone from his normal singing style: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] And in one of the few contributions Rasa made that has been generally acknowledged, she came up with the "Sha la la" vocals in the middle eight: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] And the idea of having the track fade out on cascading, round-like vocals: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] Once again the Kinks were at a turning point. A few weeks after "Waterloo Sunset" came out, the Monterey Pop Festival finally broke the Who in America -- a festival the Kinks were invited to play, but had to turn down because of their visa problems. It felt like the group were being passed by -- Ray has talked about how "Waterloo Sunset" would have been another good point for him to quit the group as he kept threatening to, or at least to stay home and just make the records, like Brian Wilson, while letting the band tour with Dave on lead vocals. He decided against it, though, as he would for decades to come. That attitude, of simultaneously wanting to be part of something and be a distanced, dispassionate observer of it, is what made "Waterloo Sunset" so special. As Ray has said, in words that seem almost to invoke the story of Moses: "it's a culmination of all my desires and hopes – it's a song about people going to a better world, but somehow I stayed where I was and became the observer in the song rather than the person who is proactive . . . I did not cross the river. They did and had a good life apparently." Ray stayed with the group, and we'll be picking up on what he and they did next in about a year's time. "Waterloo Sunset" went to number two on the charts, and has since become the most beloved song in the Kinks' whole catalogue. It's been called "the most beautiful song in the English language", and "the most beautiful song of the rock 'n' roll era", though Ray Davies, ever self-critical when he's not being self-aggrandising, thinks it could be improved upon. But most of the rest of us disagree. As the song itself says, "Waterloo Sunset's fine".