Two Lost Kinks Recordings From BBC’s Where Was Spring? Resurface After 57 Years

Two recordings by the Kinks, written and performed for a long-vanished BBC Two series and presumed gone for good, have surfaced nearly six decades after they were broadcast. “Let’s Take Off Our Clothes” and “Darling, I Respect You” were taped off-air from Where Was Spring?, the 1969 sketch show for which Ray Davies composed five original songs, and have now been made public in this quality for the first time.

“Let’s Take Off Our Clothes” was recorded at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith on 10 February 1969 and went out on BBC Two on 17 February, the fourth of the show’s episodes. Until now it had never circulated among collectors in any form.

“Darling, I Respect You” followed a week later, recorded on 17 February and broadcast on 24 February in the fifth episode. A version of that song has been in circulation for years, but only as a badly degraded recording; this newly surfaced copy is dramatically clearer.

Both songs have been added to YouTube, with the files made available for download by the collector known as Prof Stoned on his blog. Their release leaves just one of Davies’s five compositions for the series, “We Are Two of a Kind,” still unheard by anyone outside the BBC of 1969.

Where Was Spring? paired Eleanor Bron and John Fortune in a run of two-handed sketches, mostly playing couples, produced by Ned Sherrin and interspersed with animated sequences by Klaus Voormann, the designer of the Beatles’ Revolver sleeve. Stanley Myers arranged and directed the music, performed by the North Kensington Festival Wind Ensemble. The series followed hot on the heels of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, released on 22 November 1968, with the BBC commissioning Davies to write a song for each episode. As with so much studio television from the period, the corporation wiped its own master tapes, and for decades the songs survived only through whatever off-air recordings collectors happened to have made at the time, if any survived at all.

Two of the five songs, “Where Did My Spring Go?” and “When I Turn Off the Living Room Light,” were later released properly and have long been available to fans. The rest existed only as rumour or, at best, poor-quality tape until now.

There had been talk at the time of turning the Where Was Spring? songs into a Kinks EP, with the possibility of expanding it into a full LP. Neither happened. Ray Davies was already developing a very different project with Granada Television, and within weeks that idea had become the concept album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). The Kinks began recording it in May 1969, starting with “Drivin'” and “Mindless Child of Motherhood,” and though the television play built around the same storyline was never made, the album went on to become one of the most acclaimed of the band’s career.

For Kinks collectors, the reappearance of “Let’s Take Off Our Clothes” and a cleaned-up “Darling, I Respect You” help to close most of the gap in one of the more obscure corners of Ray Davies’s late-1960s output, an offshoot of Village Green that very nearly vanished for good.