Schoolboys in Disgrace

There’s something wonderfully perverse about ending your theatrical era with a high school musical. Schoolboys in Disgrace is Ray Davies slipping into his blazer and tie one last time before the curtains fall on the Kinks’ RCA years, dragging his pet villain Mr. Flash back into the spotlight for an origin story nobody asked for—and somehow making it land.

By 1975, the Kinks had exhausted the grand ambitions of Preservation and Soap Opera, the audience baffled and the band seemingly trapped in a West End fever dream. But here, they find a kind of clarity. The concept is hilariously thin: naughty schoolboy gets caught with a girl, is punished, and becomes the bitter Mr. Flash. That’s it. But within that skeleton, Davies throws a tantrum of hooks, riffs, and wounded pride.

Musically, it’s back to basics—but with an arena-rock snarl. “Schooldays” opens like a mournful doo-wop ballad remembered through the haze of warm beer and old yearbooks. “The Hard Way” hits like a glam stomp filtered through PE class trauma, Ray growling his way through lines like a headmaster drunk on his own power. “No More Looking Back” is, weirdly, one of their most poignant tracks—wistful, melancholic, and beautifully unresolved. If this is Flash’s last look in the mirror, it’s his only human moment.

There’s satire here, but it’s tangled up in nostalgia. Davies isn’t just skewering the English education system—he’s grieving it. Schoolboys plays like a last slow dance with the past, a cheeky, bitter farewell to childhood innocence and the institutions that destroyed it. The production feels looser than Soap Opera, the band more energized, the whole thing a little less like homework.

Critics weren’t kind. Some saw it as another indulgent misfire from a band losing the plot. But buried under the blackboard sketches and comic-book cover lies a raw, adolescent honesty—resentful, ridiculous, and oddly moving. It’s an album that sticks out like a sore thumb in the Kinks’ catalogue, which is maybe exactly what makes it matter. One final detention before graduation.