Songs of Love 12
My A-Side/B-Side distinction is, I admit, an arbitrary and at times a tenuous one. Sometimes whether a song is “positive” or “negative” is impossibly subjective, sometimes it depends from what angle I approach it. And so this time, I’ve gone for two edge cases, from a broadly similar time period, to help illustrate that. Our A-Side here is a song about someone left bereft after a break-up, who nonetheless genuinely wishes their lover all the best. Our B-Side is someone who’s also suffered a break-up, who seems to be putting a brave face on it, but is in fact failing to move on. As any critic can tell you, it’s all in the reading, and in what you choose to focus on.
A-Side
Performed by The Kinks
Written by Ray Davies [1]
Released 1968
Break ups, and partings more generally, often excite a tempestuous mix of emotions, as we saw previously with ‘Last Goodbye.’ Sadness, naturally, perhaps regret or guilt. Resentment or bitterness, at times. Maybe some excitement for what’s ahead or relief that the difficult times may be over. And then there’s the overriding emotion of this song: gratitude for what’s been[2]. Yes, there’s sadness, “but it’s all right,” we’re assured. It’s an impressive thing to be able to muster, and a generous impulse. So many songs that we’ve looked at have a difficult relationship with the past: this one is, it seems, wholly positive.
The future, too, seems bright. This is a broadly optimistic song, one which looks forward to experiencing a happy future in which past experiences can be remembered fondly. In fact, there’s a sense that the singer is actually better for those experiences (“now I’m not frightened of this world, believe me”). The sense is that they’ve been improved by their relationship, maybe by their lover personally. Which is why they can be so filled with gratitude at what is presumably a sad time. They know that their lover is “with me every single day;” not, it seems, in the obsessive, melancholic sense we’ve seen in several songs already, but as a sort of guiding light for, perhaps, the rest of their life.
Which brings us to the tricky part. Because the past is a shining light of happiness that will shine forevermore, while the future is a hopeful place lit by that light. The present, though, is painful. As the bridge tells us, Davies’ voice shifting to a more subdued tone, “the night is dark,” a sharp contrast from the “light that lights on you.” For now, the singer can’t avoid the melancholy, the recrimination. They know a better tomorrow is coming, yes, but for now they’re poised on the threshold between those two happy moments.
And the trouble with that is that the present is all we ever experience. The past is a memory (and memory cheats), the future nothing more than a dream. They both have the power to hurt and to worry, but also to soothe. We live entirely in the present, though, and so when that’s unpleasant, past and future are little consolation. Their only power is to dull pain, to distract from present reality, and one gets the sense this singer is too clear-eyed for that.
And yet despite that, what makes this an A-Side is that that’s not where the focus of the song is. The pain seeps through in the bridge, but only temporarily, before the singer returns to thanking their former lover for all they gave. Through an effort of will, they’re concentrating on the bright past and future rather than the dim present, being grateful rather than resentful, hopeful rather than despairing.
This is the song of someone choosing to put a brave face on their present situation. There’s a certain kind of existential heroism in that, in refusing to be cowed. One could also call it delusion, of course, but this is not a song of delusion. This is a song that confronts reality, but refuses to bow to what is temporary. There’s a romanticism to the song, and particularly its invocation of the past (“endless days,” “days when you can’t see wrong from right”), but it’s a romanticism (indeed a Romanticism) of childlike innocence. And the singer doesn’t wish for that state back. Rather, they want to, in Blakean terms, move from innocence to experience without losing sight of the former. It’s a brave and compelling move, as much in its emotional honesty (something for which Davies is, perhaps unfairly, not necessarily renowned as a songwriter[3]) as anything.
[1] It’s perhaps worth mentioning Andrew Hickey’s compelling theory that Davies’s wife Rasa contributed far more to many of the Kinks’s songs than posterity or songwriting credits would suggest. As Hickey himself suggests, this is not to suggest that Ray himself was not the principal creative force behind some of the finest singles of the 60s, but if there’s any truth at all to it, then Rasa too deserves to be celebrated.
[2] I am choosing, for my purposes here, to read this song as being about a romantic relationship, but it’s worth noting that it’s not necessarily so; Ray Davies claims it to have been written about his sister moving to Australia, a subject which would recur in numerous Kinks songs (including their whole next album).
[3] Like several of his most interesting songwriting contemporaries (Pete Townshend, Syd Barrett, John Lennon and, to some extent, David Bowie all spring to mind), Davies’s songwriting is informed at every turn by his own idiosyncrasies; a paranoia rooted in his traumatic personal life and, most obviously, a pathological horror of suburbia. There’s a real openness to much of his writing, once you get past the affectations.
B-Side
Performed by The Walker Brothers
Written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David
Released 1965
With a break-up, especially a sudden one, there are a couple of things that can happen to all of the love and affection you felt for your ex. It can curdle and harden, and turn into resentment or even hatred, especially if the break-up itself was acrimonious. We see that an awful lot in these kinds of songs, where the relationship itself becomes a checklist of sins, like a jobsworth St. Peter at the gates of heaven. In this kind of song, the positive emotion of the relationship is turned back on itself, like a crashing wave being sent back to sea.
But there’s something else that can happen, that you see rather less in pop music, presumably because it’s less dramatic. Sometimes the affection lingers – perhaps not in the same way or to the same extent, but it’s there nonetheless. You’d probably deny that you still love the person in question, but you think very fondly of them. You know you shouldn’t dwell on them; maybe you even succeed in that, but you hope, constantly, that they’re doing all right.
It seems nicer, and it’s certainly more pleasant to see and experience. But in its own way, this kind of reaction could be just as destructive as the anger and hatred. It can represent a kind of melancholia, a word that just will not stop showing up in these entries. It can represent a refusal to make a break with the past, a lingering connection with someone who may, in at least some cases, have done you real harm.
And so we come to this, a song that wants to reassure the ex that everything is fine, that they should look after themselves, that they don’t owe anyone anything. It’s like some awful therapy-speak TikTok relationship advice, only written in the 60s and with a tinge of irony to its presentation.
The singer here wants to ease the burden of their ex. “Breaking up is so very hard to do,” and so they reassure the ex that they should make it quick, even run away. “Don’t try to spare my feelings” – the implication being, of course, that the ex’s feelings are more important than the singer’s. We might be tempted to imagine that this is a pattern of behaviour, that the singer is so used to placing their lover’s feelings and comfort ahead of their own that this has come to extend even to the ending of their relationship. That’s a reach, perhaps, but it seems in tune with what we’re shown here.
Which would be bad enough if this was the kind of break-up that comes of two people realising that they’re incompatible and choosing to part, but the song seems intent on letting us know that that’s not the case:
If you really love him
And there’s nothing I can do
If the way I hold you
Can’t compare to his caress
My darling, if this is goodbye
I just know I’m gonna cry
So run to him before you start crying too
It’s pretty clear, then: there’s another person in the picture. Not only that, but this isn’t a prospective partner who’s caught the eye, a temptation the other party in this relationship has been trying to resist; the reference to “his caress” suggests pretty heavily that the singer’s ex has been cheating on them with this man. And still there’s no recrimination, no (justified) anger: the singer is perfectly happy to concede to this man and admit to being outdone.
It's about the gentlest of break-up songs but, as already suggested, it has deeply troubling implications. A break-up can erode at the very foundations of the self, causing someone to question everything about themselves. But there simply doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of self there in this instance. Perhaps it’s already been eroded in one way or another, but at the very least this is not a singer who is at all intent on standing up for themselves, or even willing to do that. They’re gentle and selfless, things which would normally be virtues, but in this instance we can understand to be causing them pain.
I mentioned earlier that there’s an irony to this song, and certainly it would be possible to read a kind of bitter sniping between the lines here, or indeed to perform it as such. That’s very much not how Scott Walker performs it here though, his voice dripping with earnest sincerity, the arrangement all bombast. This is the performance of someone offering up their heart on a plate, still kneeling in supplication after being done wrong. Like a lot of the Walker Brothers’ career, it’s amusing to compare to Walker in his later gnomic meat-punching mode, but that just makes the sincerity here all the more striking.
That’s not to say there’s no irony here, though. After all, irony in a dramatic sense is understood by the audience, not the characters. The irony comes through in precisely the kind of reading I’ve been doing here, the disjoint between what the singer is expressing and what we might understand of the situation. There’s bitterness there, but it’s implicit, perhaps coming only from the audience. That’s the tragedy of this song; as with ‘Days,’ there’s an innocence here, but in this case the innocence is in the process of being broken.
