I’m roaring through the Australian Outback, more than 100km/h, past red dirt and yellow grass and under blue skies, and I’m listening to the Kinks.
Every day I look at the world from my window – Waterloo Sunset, The Kinks
I’d always wanted to go to the Red Centre, the wide-open Outback sung about in songs by Midnight Oil and ancient, enigmatic and empty. I went a few years back to Alice Springs, isolated and strange, and Uluru, the massive sandstone monolith hunched right at the heart of the old country.
There was no internet, and a few CDs I’d grabbed in Sydney in my rental car for the 4-hour drive from Alice Springs to Uluru. One of them was the Kinks’ Something Else, their fifth album, from 1967.
Uluru stands out alone in the middle of a vast plain of red dirt, a giant unopened eye half-peering over the horizon, expanding in your car windshield from a distant hill to a towering monolith, all the more impressive for its isolation.
This is my street and I’m never gonna to leave it / And I’m always gonna to stay here if I live to be ninety-nine – Autumn Almanac, The Kinks
The Kinks are a band that grows on me more and more the older I get. Perhaps it’s because of all the big ‘60s bands, The Kinks are the ones who seemed middle-aged even when they were young. Oh, they were hell raisers, don’t get me wrong, but Ray Davies’ lyrics always looked inward, introspectively. They were nostalgic for a world that’s never been. Ray Davies’ world view always seemed perpetually middle-aged.
Time is as fast as the slowest thing – Wonderboy, The Kinks
The Beatles looked back at the past either with droll mockery (“For The Benefit of Mr. Kite”) or soul-baring pathos (“Eleanor Rigby”). The Stones generally only looked back at things that involved them getting laid. The Who looked back, with anger.
But The Kinks often looked back with rose-coloured glasses, with wistful thoughts of the way things used to be, or should’ve been. “Waterloo Sunset,” “Death of A Clown,” “Victoria,” “Celluloid Heroes,” “The Village Green Preservation Society.”
I miss the village green, And all the simple people. – The Village Green Preservation Society, The Kinks
The Australian Outback humbles you. It’s vast, sprawling, primordial and raw. It’s the oldest place I’ve ever been. Hiking through 40C+ heat, desert black flies pickpecking away at all your exposed flesh, the world reduced to prime colours – red, blue, brown blending into yellow. You feel a weight. You feel history, and the weight of something that’s been around way longer than you, or anybody you’ve ever known.
Nobody has to be any better than what they want to be – Australia, The Kinks
The Kinks felt a weight too, even if they would never articulate it precisely as that. It’s the weight of what might’ve been, what was, what could never be. Sometimes music and a place blend together in your mind, and you can’t separate the two in your memory.
The Outback is an old, old place, older than just about anywhere else, and Ray Davies sings for me.
As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset, I am in paradise.
Nik Dirga 