Kinks - Live at the Hippodrome / The Complete Concert (1974)

Strange that I never re-uped this one previously since it's an important testimony of the band during a whole live set in a rather debated period of their career, finally more interesting than what they did later to my eyes. Thanks to the visitor who reminded me to re-up it on M. Here it is. Details below.

This is not a simple update, neither a simple reup, it's the real complete version of this set played for the BBC in front of an audience. The new BBC boxset released this month features the 14 songs (I forgot to remove the Dj speech that takes the place of a song), but the 2 new are small musical trait-d'union, nothing essentiel but it's normal to substitute this one to the incomplete 12-song version I had posted. Moreover the sound quality is improved. Not very improved, but sensibly improved. Below what I wrote in the initial post.

In July 1974, 1 month after a session in the BBC studios, and whilst releasing their rather weak Preservation Act II double LP (Ray Davies said it was released "yesterday" before on the "Money Talks" intro), the band played a show at the Hippodrome, London, mixing songs from their Preservation saga with older ones. But in no way, at that times, the Kinks were requested to play "You Really Got Me" or "Waterloo Sunset" such as it will be the case in the eighties and in the present concerts of Ray Davies. At that times, the Kinks were maybe not as wondrous as they were (the version of "Lola" is particularly a wreck and sometimes the band seems not to be on the same boat), but they were a living band, and we were waiting for their next musical change. It was unfortunately the last that will inspire some excitation, even if some further albums will be better. In this set, very well recorded (nothing here of the awful sounding bootleg concerts you can find here or there), the band is really impressive, in particular Mick Avory on drums (listen to him on "Here Comes Flash" below). And all the songs from the Part II of Preservation are very superior to their album version. The audience seems very receptive. All in all, bands such as Polyphonic Spree make me think of the Kinks of that era. Just that Tim de Laughter has better songs than the ones Ray Davies composed at the times. The songs from this concert can be found for 6 of them ("Victoria", "Here Comes Yet Another Day", "Money Talks", "Mirror Of Love", "Celluloid Heroes" and "Skin And Bone") on the BBC Sessions 1964-1977 double CD, and the 6 other ones on a bootleg CD called Kinks in Concert with a RCA logo on it but it is no way an official LP. Nobody seems to have pooled the 2 6-song sets in one LP, this is therefore what I do in this post with a cover sleeve taken from a gallery here. They are from a show played 2 months before but it's OK.