Customer Reviews

Everybody's in Show-Biz

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This CD was a Christmas gift for my 14 year old son. I only looked briefly in stores, then went straight to Amazon. Delivery was fast, and my son was thrilled with the quality and sound of the CD.

After buying the first 8 Kinks album after having seen Ray Davies with the Kast of Kinks (that's all official Kinks members minus Dave), I saw the Kast of Kinks again recently. The played some songs (amongst 40 others during a 3-hour plus show)I did not know. I found some of them on this CD and because I also wanted to hear my favourite song Celluloid Heroes in the best possible quality (SACD 2-ch), I bought this.

It is just what I wanted.

I have to disagree about this being the kinks cd to start out with.

Unless you are into rock and new orleans jazz mixture music. Some of the songs on here are just that but others are rock only. It's a great experiment though in musical styles and it does have 'celliod heroes' on it which is a straight classic song , probably one of the best rock songs ever made. But I would say start with discs that are more straightforward rock like 'sleepwalker', 'low budget' and then move on to this one. The live stuff is fun too though on this disc. I have most of their output and this one and the next few ones are not among my faves. They are interesting but if you are more into straight rock then you don't want to start here. Although 'celliod heroes' being on here makes it worth buying this cd.

This is a very interesting album, with some very fine moments. In my opinion, the better part of this album is the studio portion (the first 10 songs). Classics such as "Sitting In My Hotel", "Motorway", "You Don't Know My Name", and the better known "Supersonic Rocket Ship" and of course "Celluloid Heroes" make this album worth the price of admission. In fact, pretty much all of the studio tracks are good (except for "Unreal Reality", which I could have done without).

The second part of the album (tracks 11-23) are live tracks from the "Muswell Hillbilly" tour of the USA. The live tracks are mostly good, but the album suffers from the strange inclusion of some of the live tracks ("Banana Boat Song", "Baby Face", a bizarre 1:40 version of "Lola", and a 0:44 version of "Mr. Wonderful". Very strange indeed. Also blatantly obvious are the omission of pretty much ALL of their hits to that point "You Really Got Me, "All Day And All The Night", "Sunny Afternoon", "Victoria", "Apeman", a real version of "Lola", etc., etc. I never really understood why Ray Davies chose to do this, and as a result the album comes across as a somewhat disjointed effort. Still definately worth purchasing, but I wouldn't recommend this to someone who isn't a hardcore Kinks fan. 4 stars out of 5........

This is a great CD by The Kinks,if you are unfamiliar with The Kinks,this is a great one to start with!