There are wonderful singer/ songwriters and then there's RAY DAVIES. After all, there aren't many performers who can boast over four decades or active service in the penurious music business and find themselves casting a long shadow for more than simply the groundbreaking work they bequeathed to the world when they were still young and hungry.
For The Kinks to have survived for three whole decades and retain at least a modicum of their credibility was a phenomenon in itself, yet few would have quibbled should Davies Snr have decided to hang up his guitar and accept his bus pass when the Britpop heroes began to acknowledge his influence on their generation in the mid-90s.
This writer, for one, doubted this self-confessed 'workaholic' would have taken that soft option, but he might have argued that almost 15 years later he'd be writing a review praising Davies' most recent work as being among the most vital of his career. Yet the riches galore presented to us on 'Collected' strongly suggest this to be the case.
So let's start over. The ingeniously-titled 'Collected' is one of those 'what-it-says-on-the-tin' affairs, in effect gathering the brightest jewels (and there's an absolute embarrassment of them) from Davies' recent solo albums 'Other Peoples' Lives' (2006) and 'Working Man's Cafe' (2007) along with several other crucial post-2000 recordings. The quality contained within is truly staggering and offers further confirmation (if any were really needed) that Mr.Davies really is the Daddy of them all where British songwriting is concerned.
It's interesting, but both the incidents acting as catalysts for this quintessentially English writer to write many of these songs stemmed from visits to the USA. Davies began writing tracks for what would become 'Other Peoples' Lives' during a visit to New Orleans and his time spent strolling along the levees and soaking it up is all too tangible on songs like 'The Getaway' and 'The Tourist'. The former is especially languid, with a hazy feel akin to the swampy feel of Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Born on The Bayou', while the brilliantly-observed 'The Tourist' ("in the street, the taxi drivers crawl around for vice/ to the sound of the tourists in the casino rattling the dice") is so steeped in the feel of the Crescent City you can almost smell the magnolia blossom.
The other - considerably more sinister - incident befalling Davies during his N'Awlins sojourn was a random mugging which left our have-a-go hero hospitalised after being shot in the leg by his assailant. This life-changing incident informs two more of the tracks featured here and both the horn-assisted 'Morphine Song' and the strident 'No One Listen' are among the highlights here. 'Morphine Song' is written from the point of view of a hospitalised man and what he sees in his institutionalised empire. It's full of instantly memorable images ("he's got ten grand kids, she's the third missus/ he grooves around intensive care strutting his stuff") and the music's lilting elation works as the perfect juxtaposition. 'No One Listen', meanwhile, refers to Davies' repeated travails with the Louisiana State Justice System after the shooting incident, though its' premise of the helpless individual drowning in a sea of bureaucracy ("now that we've got you in the system, somebody's gonna get back to you/ and in a few years we'll give your case a review") is all-too-credible on a universal scale.
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Elsewhere, long-term Davies addicts will be delighted by songs like 'Next Door Neighbour', 'London' and the fantastic 'Yours Truly, Confused, N10'. The first is the closest thing here to the classic late 60s Kinks characterisations and could almost be an update of 'Do You Remember Walter?' without ever once sounding less than contemporary. 'London Song' is a dense, whistle-stop tour of Davies' favourite geographical muse which refers breathlessly to everyone from Arthur Daley to The Kray Twins and has more than a touch of film noir about it, while 'Yours Truly, Confused, N10' finds Ray going head-to-head with Jools Holland's Big Band in a scabrous, swinging address to modern-day Blighty in general and more specifically the modern day version of his beloved Muswell Hill.
Yet however adept Davies' skill with social commentary, it's often when he tempers it with his wealth of personal experience that he scores on the grandest of scales. The excellent 'Working Man's Cafe' finds our hero struggling to make sense of the modern day English landscape ("everything I see looks and feels like America"), while the crunching 'You're Asking Me' is a sharp dismissal of Davies' one-time 'voice of a generation' role set to urgent rifferama bands a quarter of Ray's age would be envious of. 'After the Fall' and the alcohol denial starkness of 'Things are Gonna Change (The Morning After)' show that even wise heads sometimes fall prey to temptation and the utterly sublime 'One More Time' makes a convincing case for dignity and grace as bedfellows Rock'n'Roll can accommodate without embarrassment. Which is refreshing in itself.
I could happily go on, but 'Collected' is so glaringly devoid of weak links that it speaks more than eloquently for itself. It's the sound of one of the world's greatest songwriters doing what he does best and aligning his devastating vignettes to corking tunes alive with warmth, passion and humanity. No doubt there are plenty of young hacks out there who'd scoff loudly at me for choosing a man of pensionable age over their latest NME cover contender, but until their chosen pretender does forty years credible service and continues to strive for excellence, then Ray Davies remains my undisputed songwriting champ.
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