There is a puzzle at the heart of The Kinks’ apparently nostalgic 1969 album, and 
it hinges on the ambiguity 
of that cumbersome title. There’s a lot of work going 
on inside those brackets, 
and if you accept Ray Davies’ wry invitation, you have to wonder about the relevance of Britain’s 
colonial past to the fortunes of his disappointed everyman, Arthur.

As legends go, Arthur’s is a modest one. The story Davies set out to tell isn’t necessarily the one he ended up with, but this 50-year-old concept album, already deluxed, and now granted the full boxset treatment, has a curiously elastic relationship with time. On its release, Arthur was given critical encouragement while not causing a commercial stampede. It sounded – it sounds – woozily kaleidoscopic, with petals of nostalgia folding over shards of cynicism. Under the shifting surface, there’s anger and insecurity, class consciousness and doubt, whimsy and dismay; all the Ray Davies stuff. The word he uses is “vengeful”.

At times, Arthur rocks. Dave Davies rightly notes the “droning, half-indian psychedelic” whine of contemporaneous B-side “King Kong”, and there’s the psych jam of “Australia”’s coda, but the album also attracted comparisons with George Formby. Yet, listen to it now, and the record’s melodic interrogation of English national consciousness seems boldly topical.

What Arthur became isn’t what it set out to be, though. The album overlaps slightly with The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, but it was conceived as a pop opera for Granada TV. Alan Bennett and John Betjeman were suggested as collaborators. Bennett pleaded indigestion, and Betjeman, thought Davies, would have been more suited to preserving the Village Green. Instead, Julian Mitchell, a contemporary of Absolute Beginners author Colin MacInnes, signed up to ink the detail of a story in which Arthur reflects on his life as his son emigrates to Australia.

The TV project was doomed, but Davies’ songs took their own path. The singer sees Arthur as a friend of Walter from …Preservation Society’s “Do You Remember Walter” (a childhood friend gone, the narrator assumes, to fat and ruin), but the inspiration comes directly from Davies’ family, and the emigration to Australia of sister Rosie and her husband Arthur. There is some blurring of the timelines in the story: Mitchell’s Arthur was connected to the First World War, while Davies is more concerned with the generation that rejected Churchill after the 1939–45 conflict. Davies also notes: “I wasn’t entirely comfortable, because it was about my family and personal. So I held back.”

The treasures of Arthur are well known. The anthemic “Victoria” smuggles a dagger of subversion beneath its cloak in the lines “When I grow I shall fight/For this land I shall die”, and “Shangri-La” is one of The Kinks’ finest moments, with a gorgeous melody and ambiguous lyrics which deploy empathy and satire in equal measure. Davies’ vengeful instincts are present, but it’s a mistake to imagine that the writer’s anger is directed at the little man whose reward for a lifetime 
of toil is a rocking chair and a pair of slippers. It’s the modesty of reward Davies is angry about, not the desire to overcome insecurity.

What does the boxset tell us about Arthur that previous reissues haven’t? Well, it catches The Kinks at a moment when rock music was in flux. The obvious contrast is with The Who, who in 1969 were exploring the same conceptual urges to produce Tommy. But where Pete Townshend’s pinball parable employed bombast and primary colours, Davies delivers something more akin to a kitchen-sink drama, if not a radio play. The rarities disc includes an eight-minute medley of Davies’ home demos, a charming fragment that includes a ramshackle run through “Victoria” and a pass at “Some Mother’s Son”. These sketches reveal the robustness of the tunes.

Disc Three contains what is now referred to as The Great Lost Dave Davies Album. It posits an alternate version of The Kinks in which the lyrical interest in character is replaced with raw energy and emotion. Ray Davies has suggested that Dave’s album offers the backstory of The Kinks in 1969. Musically, it suggests the influence of The Band on this most English of groups. There’s a bit of the boozer, a hint of the honky-tonk in the lovely “Do You Wish To Be A Man”, in “Hold My Hand” and plaintive country strum “Are You Ready?”. These are hymns to insecurity, delivered with absolute confidence.

The questions that troubled Davies, about the post-war settlement and the country being unfit for heroes of modest means, continue to swirl. Small wonder that the songwriter is now reworking the material into a script for a doo-wop musical. Ultimately, between the two opposing forces – Dave’s primal introspection and Ray’s character-based micro-dramas – the tensions that fuel The Kinks proliferate; and on Arthur, Ray’s instincts are to the fore. By mining so perceptively the particulars of his family history he made a work that was both of its time and universal. That it should prove topical 50 years on is beyond ironic. However you cast it, nostalgia is an empire on which the sun never stops setting.

Last time we came face to face with Richard Dawson, he was adrift in ancient Britain. The Newcastle singer-songwriter’s fifth album, Peasant, was set in Bryneich, a Middle Ages kingdom that stretched between Scotland and the River Tyne somewhere around the 6th century AD. These were faraway times, barely documented in the written word, so on the surface his new album 2020 – which is very much a record of the here and now – should feel like a world apart. Yet there’s something about the way that Dawson writes – in a vivid first-person style, full of grit and vigour – that gives his music a consistent thread, and roots it in something very human.

2020 is, without a doubt, Dawson’s most direct album to date. Entirely self-played but ambitious in its palette and bold in its arrangements, it finds him adding a new lucidity and sense of melody to his knotty and raucous take on folk music. Next to Peasant – an album that, in Dawson’s words, “sounds like it’s covered in dry mud and twig scratches” – 2020 is positively hi-fi, its spry fingerpicking and tremulous choruses presented in gleaming clarity, guitars mostly electrified and paired up with synths and chunky drums, both real and electronic.

Its 10 songs are set against backdrops of mundane modernity – town centres, provincial football pitches, flooded pubs, Amazon warehouses – and focus their gaze on a cast of characters who are down on their luck or feel alienated by the world that surrounds them. On the opening “Civil Servant”, we follow the perspective of a staff member in a job centre, dealing daily with the hopeless and the desperate, and gradually feeling his humanity slipping away. “In my bed I can hear the strangled voices/Of all the people I failed, I failed, I failed, I failed,” he chants, as guitar and drums lock into a grim, arabesque churn. Not for the first time on 2020, you’re reminded of an observation by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: that hell is other people.

The mess of human relationships is grist to Dawson’s mill, and his writing here has seldom been better. On “Heart Emoji”, a man learns of his lover’s presumed infidelity through the glimpse of a 3am text message. “Two Halves” is the tale of a child footballer and his competitive dad that captures the pair’s relationship in tragicomic style (“Stop fannying around!/Keep it nice and simple/You’re not Lionel Messi/Just pass the bloody ball”).

At times, 2020 feels almost unbearably sad. “Fresher’s Ball” starts with a father dropping off his daughter at university, and feeling a gulf of loneliness open up. But Dawson’s music comes from a place of compassion, which manifests in occasional chinks of light. On “The Queen’s Head”, a landlord and his family dash back home after receiving a call to say their pub has been flooded. They arrive to find that their neighbours – whom, Dawson points out, they have never met – are mucking in with buckets. There is the sense that community persists, even as the modern world does its best to extinguish it.

If 2020 finds Dawson approaching accessibility, there is an essential weirdness to his music that will not be entirely dislodged. “Black Triangle” is a turbulent mix of barbarian metal, billowing sci-fi keyboards and pseudo-medieval modes, and traces the story of two friends who, as young men, spot a UFO; the song has an allegorical feel, but at its heart, it’s as enigmatic as the floating prism of the title. The 10-minute “Fulfilment Centre”, meanwhile, adopts a fluttery jazz fusion reminiscent of Frank Zappa, one that more or less approximates the queasy disorientation of a shift at the zero-hours grindstone. Time spent with Dawson’s music tends to render its oddity strangely palatable, though. Take “Jogging”. On paper, it’s a six-and-a-half minute song about overcoming anxiety that revolves around the question: is the world full of hate, or am I just paranoid? Yet the anthemic chorusing and billowing synthesiser feel designed to keep dark thoughts at bay, and it culminates on a note of mildly comic triumph as the protagonist asks: would you like to sponsor him, because he’s running the London Marathon?

Tragedy and comedy, tall tales and home truths – 2020 takes all the raw stuff of life and lays it out like meat in a butcher’s window. It can be a dark listen – heavy with disappointment and anxiety, shot through with the pain of betrayal and constant reminders of man’s inhumanity to man. But Richard Dawson’s music is underpinned by a powerful sense of empathy – he’s rooting for us. And it’s hard not to conclude that 2020 is the record we need right now: a state-of-the-nation address for a nation in a bit of a state.

Love & Hate, Michael Kiwanuka’s 2016 breakthrough and UK chart-topper, was the result of a uniquely inspired collaboration that teamed the London-based singer-songwriter with two fellow polymaths: studio auteur/music scholar Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton and emerging hip-hop producer/multi-instrumentalist Inflo. Together, they built the tracks playing a variety of instruments, surrounding Kiwanuka’s strikingly soulful vocals and evocative guitar work with strings and female backing chorales. The LP’s centrepiece, “Black Man In A White World”, was Kiwanuka’s finest song to that point, while in the US, he went from virtual unknown to artist on the rise when “Cold Little Heart”’s captivating hook was used as the theme of HBO drama Big Little Lies.

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The songwriter and his two cohorts were delighted by what they’d achieved, Kiwanuka calling Love & Hate “perfect – 
I wouldn’t change a thing”, and Burton citing Pink Floyd and Isaac Hayes as reference points: “I actually can’t wait to try to do it again some point.” Reuniting to create this follow-up album, Kiwanuka, Burton and Inflo have dipped into the same expansive palette – the washes of strings, the purring choirs, Burton’s fixation with vintage film music and Inflo’s dexterity on drums and all manner of analogue and electronic keyboards, while drawing on Kiwanuka’s acknowledged late-’60s and ’70s inspirations: Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul, Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information, Eddie Hazel’s Game, Dames And Guitar Thangs and, most prominently, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.

Kiwanuka is structured in movements, like a classical symphony, with shape-shifting interludes connecting one track to the next. The album’s first movement begins with the beating of congas and what sounds like a lo-fi recording of a Caribbean beach party, soon erupting into the visceral groove of “You Ain’t The Problem”, on which Kiwanuka sets his thematic course, shifting his ruminations into a social context as he confronts a chaotic world. “Don’t hesitate/Time heals the pain/You ain’t the problem,” he sings in the chorus, seemingly reassuring himself as well as all those reeling from the uncertainties of present-day existence.

At the four-minute mark, the instrumentation and backing vocals drop away, isolating a delicate keyboard carrying the melody into the next track, “Rolling”, its hammering, Stax-like groove bringing additional urgency to the refrain, “Rolling with the times/Don’t be late”. A guitar figure provides the bridge to “I’ve Been Dazed”, which sets the tone and structure for the meat of the album. It begins with Kiwanuka’s hushed voice, at once vulnerable and determined; other elements – drums, choir and string section – enter one by one, until this intimate ballad almost imperceptibly blossoms into full-on grandeur, like a cautiously optimistic orchestral 
update of Thunderclap Newman’s “Something In The Air”.

Kiwanuka is loaded with memorable songs, but the best way to experience them is by listening to the album from start to finish. Each successive movement follows a similar pattern, aiming for immersiveness and effect, mirroring the approach of psychedelic landmarks from the Floyd’s A Saucerful Of Secrets to Tame Impala’s Currents. “Piano Joint (This Kind Of Love)”, ornamented like a lush Tin Pan Alley standard, resolves into a rapturous melodic payoff, as Kiwanuka sings, “All I know is/My, oh my, this kind of love/It’s taken me from my enemies/Don’t let the pressure get to me”, his yearning vocal gliding over opulent strings. Meanwhile, the crack of a gunshot is followed by an emphatic snare hit, introducing the propulsive groove of “Living In Denial”, the backing chorale mimicking a sprightly horn section, à la Swingle Singers.

The questioning, mid-tempo “Hero” features an intensely emotional extended guitar solo from Kiwanuka, before a Morricone-like transition leads into the seven-minute opus “Hard To Say Goodbye”, its eerie, Portishead-recalling guitar lick juxtaposed with siren-like backing vocals straight out of a ’40s Hollywood fantasy. The album ends with the double-decker finish of the shimmering ballad “Solid Ground” and swirling technicolor panorama “Light”; but best of all may be “Final Days” which, equal parts Marvin and Massive Attack, sums up Kiwanuka’s beguiling, brave nature.

The December 2019 issue of Uncut is on sale from October 17, and available to order online now – with Bob Dylan on the cover and an exclusive unreleased Dylan track on our free CD. Elsewhere in the issue, there’s Robert Smith, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Pink Floyd, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Prince, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Lynne, Booker T, Tindersticks and much more.