PYE Records

What he does next is what really impressed everyone more than anything, and I'm not talking about the suits and the haircuts, and that's what everyone remembers, right, of what Brian Epstein did for this band.

But he gets rejected by Decca Records, he gets rejected by Pye Records, Philips Records, Columbia Records.

I mean, he was shopping this band around.

He's really pounding the pavement for these guys.

And he found other things which...

Luckily, I was able to listen to, we had multitracks for sessions that weren't in the Pi, Castle, Sanctuary, or even Conk archives.

There's stuff spread out in different places.

So we had access to all this stuff, much like the songs that have turned up recently online that people were talking about from Where Was Spring.

Surprisingly enough, not everybody in the Kinks world agrees on everything.

Shocker!

So jumping back into kind of my sort of somewhat chronological notes, I suppose, of talking points, I also love or find fascinating the December 7th note about when there's the three-way payment split between Shell, Bosco Bell and Pi, just because that, as you note in the book, it seems that's very clear as to why stereo mixes just vanish for the next year.

I just found that really interesting in the context of this podcast sort of thing.

So yeah, last series towards the end, you were telling me there was increasing tension between the record company and Ray Davies.

Ray Davies wanted to make albums like Village Green Preservation Society, and the record label just wanted them to be hitmakers like they used to be.

He really didn't mind alienating the mainstream to pursue his own peculiar interests.

Yeah.

Lola, the single, was a huge commercial hit.

They were back to in the US.

They built up a head esteem of being a current happening band again so they had the leverage to dump their old record label pie hadn't treated them that well because they weren't really an album label and they wanted to be an album band or raided so an rca it was kind of like we will let you be an album band you have complete creative freedom

how many albums will they go on to make with this label