Kinks, “Mr. Churchill Says” (1969)

[listen up!]

Out here on the deep cut tip it’s possible this song is enjoyed best in the context of the whole album, Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)—strained concept (in the parenthetical) and all. Concept rock albums were all the rage at the time, of course, but the song reads as ambiguously to me as the LP at large. On the one hand, it seems to be valorizing Winston Churchill and the UK’s World War II effort, an easy piety today and in 1969. But songwriter Ray Davies’s vocal sounds mocking when the song gets to the Churchill quotes, Wikipedia includes it in a list of antiwar songs, and Davies, when questioned in an interview, said, “When the battle's over and you've won, you always look good. But what was achieved by it?” So it looks like a clear case of go figure, perhaps comparable to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” which sounds jingoistic but is actually approximately the opposite. In many ways the 4:43 “Mr. Churchill Says” functions as a novelty—my favorite part is when the air raid sirens start at about 1:35, which never fail to light me up. The guitar-playing shifts into a loose-wristed mode and the band revs up the tempo. The nervous energy somehow suggests the terrors of the German bombing campaign. Eventually there’s a thoughtful guitar solo from Dave Davies. When the singer is back with his yobs they still sound mocking, but it’s not hard to take the propaganda at “keep calm and carry on” face value either: “Mr. Churchill says we've got to hold up our chins / We've got to show some courage and some discipline / We've got to block up the windows and nail up the doors / And keep right on 'til the end of the war.”