The Kinks

The Kinks: “Muswell Hillbillies/Everybody’s In Show-Biz – Everybody’s A Star” (SuperDeluxe Edition 6Lp+4cd+Blu-ray BMG, 2022)

The series of SuperDeluxe reissues celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kinks' discography continues, following “The Village Green Preservation Society” (3xLp + 3×7” singles + 5xcd, 2018), “Arthur Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire” (4×7” + 4xcd, 2019) and “Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround – Part One” (2×7” + 3xcd, 2020).

This time the treatment goes big, and the focus isn’t on just one album, but two: “Muswell Hillbillies”, the London band’s ninth studio Lp and the first released on Rca after the end of their long-standing deal with Pye Records, originally issued in November 1971, and its follow-up “Everybody’s In Show-Biz – Everybody’s A Star”, from 1972.

“Muswell Hillbillies” takes its title from the north London neighbourhood of Muswell Hill, where Ray and Dave Davies grew up and formed the Kinks in the early Sixties. It tackles major social themes tied to the frustrations of modern life and the precarious condition of the British working class, spanning a variety of styles from pop to rock, by way of country and music-hall. The album, devoid of hits or generation-defining anthems, was not well received by the public and sales were disappointing. In reality, fifty years on, “Muswell Hillbillies” comes across as a solid, coherent work, buoyed by effective, never trite songwriting, so much so that some consider it the finest output Ray Davies and co. ever produced.

The same cannot be said of “Everybody’s In Show-Biz – Everybody’s A Star”, a transitional double album, evenly split between studio recordings and live cuts from Carnegie Hall, which foreshadows the conceptual, vaguely vaudevillian turn Davies would take starting with the following album.

The box set is lavish, as the Kinks have accustomed us to for years now with reissues of their most important albums, and it includes the remastered 2014 edition of “Muswell Hillbillies” on coloured (blue) vinyl, with the addition of a second (also blue) bonus vinyl featuring alternate versions, demos, a Peel session and so on; the remastered 2016 edition of “Everybody’s In Show-Biz – Everybody’s A Star” on double coloured (orange) vinyl, with the addition of a third (also orange) bonus vinyl featuring nine live tracks; a single vinyl with eleven brand new remixes carried out by His Majesty Ray Davies himself; four cds, without the bonus material mentioned above, containing the 2022 remastered versions of the two albums, plus one, roughly thirty minutes long, titled “The Kinks 1971 US Tour Travel Montage”, presenting a largely pointless collage of songs, promos and live inserts drawn from the Kinks' 1971 US tour.

Added to all this is an amateur video, also from ’71, on Blu-ray, shot and narrated by Ray Davies, a 52-page book with stories, previously unseen photos, an interesting essay penned by Doug Hinman, the band’s biographer, and a detailed index of the cds’ contents (though, oddly, not of the vinyls’). Rounding out the edition are a map of historic London locations tied to the Kinks’ story, 6 photos of the band, and a die-cast metal pin bearing the group’s logo from the Rca era.

The box set is on sale on Amazon for the eye-watering sum of €149.24 and, given the almost total absence of unreleased material or any significant extras and, above all, the availability on the market of the individual Lps and cds in the versions contained here, it’s a purchase we can only recommend to the band’s longtime fans, ideally of the compulsively completist variety.

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09/05/2026