Four More Respected Gentlemen

Four More Respected Gentlemen
A black-and-white photograph of the four Kinks standing around a tree. The image is close-up on their faces as they all look in different directions. A caption on the image says "The Kinks Days Out Now!"
For the album cover, Reprise planned to use Harry Goodwin's June 1968 photograph of the Kinks, which NME published in its 6 July 1968 issue (pictured).[1]
Studio album (unreleased) by
Recorded
StudioPye, London
GenreRock
LabelReprise
Producer
The Kinks recording chronology
Something Else by the Kinks
(1967)
Four More Respected Gentlemen
(1967–1968)
The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
(1968)
Singles from Four More Respected Gentlmen
  1. "Days" / "She's Got Everything"
    Released: 24 July 1968

Four More Respected Gentlemen is an unreleased album by the English rock band the Kinks. The project arose out of the band's different American contract schedule, which obligated them to submit a new LP to Reprise Records in June 1968. As the band continued recording their next album, released later in the year as The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, bandleader Ray Davies submitted fifteen completed master tapes to Reprise. The label planned to issue the LP in the US in November 1968 but abandoned the project only a month beforehand for unclear reasons.

Reprise initially expected to include twelve tracks on Four More Respected Gentlemen, but later resequenced it to have eleven. The eleven tracks were mostly recorded between late 1967 and June 1968 and are generally fast rock songs. Davies later stated that he intended the album to satirise English social etiquette, though commentators dispute his characterisation. Following Reprise's abandonment of the album, its songs were spread across several subsequent releases, including Village Green and the US compilation albums The Kink Kronikles (1972) and The Great Lost Kinks Album (1973). Work on the LP did not proceed beyond the white-label test-pressing stage. As of 2000, only two test pressings are known to exist.

  1. ^ Hinman 2004, p. 116.