Ignored   Obscured Restored

Back in 1969, BBC Two aired a late-night sketch comedy and satire series starring Eleanor Bron and John Fortune, produced by Ned Sherrin.  Ray Davies of the Kinks was commissioned to write songs for several episodes, ultimately contributing five:

• “We Are Two of a Kind”
• “Where Did My Spring Go?”
• “When I Turn Off the Living Room Light”
• “Let’s Take Our Clothes Off”
• “Darling, I Respect You”

Two of the songs — “When I Turn Off the Living Room Light” and “Where Did My Spring Go?” — eventually surfaced on the Kinks’ 1973 compilation The Great Lost Kinks Album.  The other three, however, seemed destined to remain lost to history.  The BBC had wiped the tapes of the shows, and the songs hadn’t been heard since their original broadcasts.

Now, two more have resurfaced.  “Let’s Take Our Clothes Off” and “Darling, I Respect You” were recently uploaded to the internet by a bootlegger known as Prof Stoned, giving us the chance to hear these long-lost musical curiosities for the first time in 57 years.

The sound quality is less than stellar, but hey, better than nothing!  (Who knows what the source was!). The lyrics, meanwhile, can be a bit cringe-worthy. (The same could be said of “When I Turn Off the Living Room Light,” which I included in a January 2019 post about misogynistic and politically incorrect songs.). Still, these tunes deserve to be heard in context: Davies wrote them specifically to accompany the satirical material in the television episodes, rather than as conventional Kinks songs.

That leaves just one song still missing: “We Are Two of a Kind.”  After 57 years, two of these musical time capsules have finally resurfaced.  Let’s hope the last one doesn’t take quite so long to turn up!

Enjoy… until next week.