Where Was Spring? - magazine article from https://missingepisodes.proboards.com/thread/7800/where-spring-bbc2-1969-70
By Jason Barnard
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 for the programme. 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 to insiders, dedicated fans and on at best, poor-quality tape until now. Why “Let’s Take Off Our Clothes” and “Darling, I Respect You” were never officially released is uncertain, though likely comes down to Ray Davies’s own wishes. I have been informed a recording of Where Was Spring? exists as a 16mm telecine transfer.
In that period, 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.
Further information
Andrew Sandoval and Doug Hinman’s book THE KINKS – ALL DAY AND ALL OF THE NIGHT, The Day-By-Day Story Pt 1: 1940-1971, is the most comprehensive record of the Kinks’ early career ever assembled and provides further details
Well, one out of two ain’t bad. Darling I Respect You is worthy of a listen. Let’s Take Our Clothes Off could and should be left in the dustpan. But let’s be real, neither have the lighthearted quality of previously released tunes from this program.
I’m glad the two recordings turned up eventually, even though the songs are a bit underwhelming at first listen. It’s nice to hear something ‘new’ by The Kinks after all these years. What I would like to know is how and where the two songs actually turned up.
Do you know if there is any more kinks songs,that are available for release?
Special thanks for these 2 “new” Kinks songs from 1969, one of the best period in Kinks history, coming just after Village Green and before Arthur and Lola.
Ray Davies singing Bob Dylanesque on “Darling I Respect You” is a must listen
“Lets Take of our Clothes” for its’ title alone is a song that is hard to forget.
Hopefully the last missing Kinks song from “Where Was Spring”, “We Are Two of a Kind”, will be found and made available soon.
For an avid Davies obsessive(!) this is a fabulous find. I never thought I’d hear, ‘Let’s Take Off Our Clothes’ – quirky and endearing with its jaunty opening verse and thoughtful chorus/denouement. Davies also wrote a bunch of tunes for an another satirical show called The Eleventh Hour. I wonder what became of them?
Wow , quite something that after so many years have passed these two songs have come to light.It’s slightly eerie, like stepping back in time when Ray Davies was at his most innovative. The songs themselves do not have the same depth and wit of ‘When I turn off the living room light’ & ‘Where did my Spring go’ ( previously released songs from the same tv series) but welcomed nevertheless. I also would be interested to know if any there are any existing recordings of Ray’s songs from the Eleventh Hour – unlikely I guess?
What a good find, like others I never thought I’d hear them. It’s years since anything ‘new’ has circulated from that period. It does make me wonder why only these 2 have turned up and not the other one as well.