Hidden Treasures

Dave Davies' first solo album was initially lost somewhere around 1969, when the Kinks were finally granted reentry into the United States to support Arthur. Parts of it were found over the years, surfacing on The Great Lost Kinks Album and Kronikles — not to mention such earlier albums as Something Else — then on numerous Kinks reissues over the years, including many semi-official attempts to revive the record such as 1987’s The Album That Never Was or the 1999 anthology Unfinished Business. These, along with many widely circulated bootlegs, tend to diminish the surprise of Universal’s 2011 Hidden Treasures, the first official, sanctioned reissue of Dave’s Lost Album, but it does not diminish its impact. Co-compilers Russell Smith and Andrew Sandoval base Hidden Treasures on the reference acetate assembled by Warner Reprise in 1969, although in Smith’s liner notes he admits “there is no indication or evidence that Warner Reprise ever seriously considered releasing all these tracks as an LP,” considering how Dave’s album had no catalog number, unlike the scrapped Four More Respected Gentlemen and God Save the Kinks albums. The Lost Album runs for the first 13 of the 27 tracks, with the rest of the disc devoted to Dave-led Kinks tracks and solo singles, plus alternate mixes — effectively everything Dave Davies wrote and sang during the ‘60s. Anybody familiar enough with this material to be excited by this release will find no unheard songs (there are a couple of rarities, however, in a previously unreleased alternate mix of “Mr. Reporter” and a studio version of “Good Luck Charm”), but the sound quality and presentation are exquisite, the best this frequently released material has ever had, and for those who have never heard Dave Davies’ material as a piece they’re in for a treat: this is some of the best pop of the swinging ‘60s — clever, catchy, and confessional, standing proudly alongside the best of his brother Ray or any of their peers, for that matter.