This comes in a cute Dansette-style box stuffed with ten albums of antique Kinkorama and Meet the Kinks!, a fab 1960s style booklet with rare fab pix. For complete retro-authenticity, everything is in mono, this being how the original records were released back in those sacred days (so sacred that “Days” itself is now the theme tune for a car advert). It’s a lovely package, and at £75 a pop, so it should be, but it adds nothing to the back catalogue of the Muswell Hill wonders. After all, all seven albums here have only this year been re-issued in impressive ‘deluxe’ editions that similarly present them in their original mono format, but add stereo mixes, copious out-takes and rarities, all beautifully remastered by Andrew Sandoval, the boffin likewise in charge of The Kinks in Mono. Sandoval has done wonders with sound quality, but after those deluxe delights, reverting to the original albums seems an act of hair-shirted puritanism. What you get instead of all those lovely bonuses is a this-is-how-it-was verity. Except you don’t. The Kinks’ first seven albums contain just one or at most two of the singles that blasted them into contention alongside The Stones and The Who, whose early catalogues are also caught between great singles and albums that hadn’t yet learned to be albums. For the first great slew of Kinks hits – including the guitar squall of “All Day And All of The Night”, the airy social satire of “Well Respected Man” and the mournful Indian drone of “See My Friends” - you have to jump to Disc 8 containing the band’s four EPs, recorded in a manic spell between 1964-66. For the second wave of hits - “Dead End Street”, “Autumn Almanac”, “Days”, “Lola”, the substandard “Apeman”- you have to rummage among the 37 track ragbag that is The Kinks Mono Collectables, Volumes 1& 2. There (i)are(i) ‘collectables’ here – that parable of sinful swinging’ London, “Big Black Smoke”– but that these were all singles released outside the UK isn’t much of an organising principle (and results in duplicate tracks). Contrary to what one might expect from a ten album box set, the narrative arc of one of British pop’s greatest bands emerges fractured. The albums do, of course, tell a tale of their own. Kinks (1964) and Kinda Kinks (’65) reflect a group was still a gang of R&B brawlers, knocking out none too special versions of Bo, Chuck, Slim Harpo, Motown, with Ray’s early writing paying none too subtle homage to the Beatles, Beach Boys and The Kingsmen (“You Really Got Me” being a rinse of “Louie Louie”). Kinda Kinks (1965) is a transitional affair, with Ray’s songwriting talents growing, ready to blossom into the pop art wonder that is Face to Face (1966). Burned out from touring and business wrangles, Davies wrote its 14 songs in recuperation while the band toured with a stand-in. “Sunny Afternoon” is the gem in its crown, but the album has a conceptual unity, its montage of crisp social vignettes including send-ups of the nouveau riche on “Most Exclusive Residence” and young rakes on “Dandy”. Something Else (1967) maintains the mood and momentum with the mockery of “David Watts”, the family drama of the harpsichord driven “Two Sisters” and the cadent back-street romance of “Waterloo Sunset”. One can see Davies’ obsession with the local and the domestic as strength or weakness. It certainly showed conviction to turn away from the cosmic visions that swept pop between 1966-68 and instead bring forth The Village Green Preservation Society with its ode to “The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains”. The album extended hippie’s nostalgic strand into a Betjemanesque portrait of an English landscape that Davies correctly sensed was about to disappear. Critically acclaimed, it proved an act of near commercial suicide. Unabashed, Davies wrote another concept album, Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). Envisioned as a musical drama (a concept so far ahead of its time the BBC stalled) it swings easily between the rousing “Victoria” and the sly social observation of “A Hat Like Princess Marina”; an under-estimated work. There’s little on Kollectables Vol 2 to steal its light, mostly it’s also-rans like “Hold My Hand” that pale alongside proper singles like “Days” or “Lola”, though Dave Davies’s “Creeping Jean” is a tough piece of pop-psych that deserved better exposure, even a place on an album. Dave would no doubt agree. Neil Spencer

Before the rampant egomania, before the bloated double albums, before the mass band purgings and the hagiographic documentary in which Billy Corgan, saintly in white bathrobe, sits in a hotel room writing songs about Nazi Germany and receiving a pair of fans who present him with a huge plaster model of his own head… yeah, it’s easy to forget that before all that stuff, the Smashing Pumpkins used to be a pretty great rock band. In part, their preposterous success – over 30 million albums sold – should be considered fortunate timing. Rising out of the Chicago club scene in 1991, just as Seattle’s alternative rock underground had hit on the formula of turning angst into dollars, the Pumpkins’ mix of bruising dream-rock and bruised introversion made them seem, if not kin, at least a foil – fey flower children, adrift in grunge’s forest of tormented lumberjacks. Whereas Nirvana, Mudhoney and Screaming Trees slotted into a lineage of American punk-rock that stretched back to Black Flag and Minor Threat, Corgan had experienced no such DIY weaning: his totems were Cheap Trick, Queen, Yngwie Malmsteen. He was also ambitious, deeply so, and in a way that rubbed up the alternative gatekeepers: Steve Albini called them “by, of and for the mainstream”, while Bob Mould coined the fabulous term “the grunge Monkees” – jabs Corgan would return on Siamese Dream’s “Cherub Rock”, a sardonic riposte to what he regarded as sniffy hipsters out to spoil his deserved success. Gish was the first evidence of Corgan’s exacting manner. Recorded in a 30-day stint at Butch Vig’s Smart Studios, where Nirvana had laid down the demos for Nevermind eight months earlier, this was, by alternative standards, a fastidious piece of work. Vig speaks of hours perfecting guitar tone, and Corgan reportedly (and not for the last time) played the lion’s share of guitarist James Iha and bassist D’arcy Wretzky’s parts himself. Lyrically, it’s not much to speak of – a vague angst, sophomoric at best – but Gish is a gem nonetheless. Vig’s warm, radiant production proves a neat fit for Corgan’s dreamy guitar expressionism, and while “I Am One” and “Siva” neatly blend the ethereal and the heavy, it is the record’s softer moments – the lullaby-like “Crush”, and the Wretsky-sung “Day Dream” – that glow the brightest. Bob Ludwig’s remaster job adds fine detail, and a second CD collects 18 tracks, mostly diverting: fresh mixes of B-sides “Plume” and “Starla”, Peel sessions (including a Hendrix-channelling cover of the Animals’ LSD hymn “Girl Named Sandoz”) and “Hippy Trippy”, a fragile early take on “Crush”. Corgan may not have harboured the troublesome integrity of Kurt Cobain, but the Pumpkins’ alternative success brought with it its own problems. Iha and Wretsky hooked up, then broke up; in accordance with grunge cliché, the band’s trump card, powerhouse drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, got hooked on heroin; Billy got married, and grappled with the monumental responsibility of being the genius Billy Corgan. From all this came Siamese Dream. In places, one might call this an album of love songs – “Luna”, “Soma” and “Hummer” all address another with affection. Really, though, the subject is me, me, me. The Pumpkins may not have been “authentic” in the DIY punk sense, but it’s clear that when Corgan said he was a fuck-up, he wasn’t exaggerating. “Disarm” muses on a childhood of abuse and neglect, strummed acoustic guitar and cello laced with, as Corgan has it, “The bitterness of one who’s left alone”. Two booming anthems, “Cherub Rock” and “Today”, are equal parts earnestness and irony, on the surface wide-eyed and innocent, but coloured with a sickly patina. The winsome “Spaceboy” gives way to a snatch of audio pulled from some American TV show, a housewife complaining her partner “ends up just masturbating himself, and I end up feeling very alienated and unsatisfied…” And then there is “Silverfuck”, which finds Billy locking bits of his past self in a box under his bed – any thoughts, Dr Freud? – before the song goes up like a catherine wheel and burns out in a squall of screaming feedback. Corgan’s megalomania hides a damaged soul, and on Siamese Dream, he swaddles his dysfunction in layers upon layers of cotton-wool guitar fuzz. Its essence, more or less, is, “I’m not OK, you’re not OK… but enough about you”. Still, everyone needs a refuge, and never did the Pumpkins build one more sonically gorgeous than this. Extras? Mostly inferior takes, or material similar to that on ’94’s out-takes collection Pisces Iscariot and 2005’s Rarities And B-sides, although for those that haven’t plumbed the depths of the Pumpkins catalogue, it’s a fair brace. Louis Pattison