The Kinks - Documentation, Unreleased Material and Out-takes

Documentation, Unreleased Material and Out-takes

Unlike contemporaries such as the Beatles, whose recording legacies are well-preserved, almost no studio documentation of the Kinks' recording history from the 1960s survives. Ray Davies is known to have kept a diary, but he has yet to allow public scrutiny of it. Pye Records, unlike larger labels like EMI, kept very few of the Kinks' session tapes, acetates and out-takes—most were destroyed, wiped, or recorded over by the mid-1980s. From the RCA period onwards, both documentation and tapes were preserved, mainly because The Kinks were given creative license at their own Konk Studios, but, as Doug Hinman notes, "Until and unless there is some access to the vaults of Konk Studios, this aspect of the Kinks' recording legacy will remain far from definitive." Later box set release such as Picture Book have increasingly included more previously unreleased material and commentary.