Gina In The Kings Road

Album: A Beach Full of Shells (2005)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is set in 1968; Kings Road, Chelsea was at the heart of Swinging London during the '60s, and Al Stewart was right in the thick of it. On New Year's Day, he moved into a basement flat in Elvaston Place just down the road in Kensington, which he immortalized in a contemporary song of love won and lost. Other songs of that period include the whimsical "Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres" and the epic "Love Chronicles," in which he recounts seeking and finding casual encounters with free-spirited girls of the flower power generation.

    Nearly four decades later, transplanted to California, and the father of two young daughters, he revisits his youthful follies of the Swinging '60s, and captures the Zeitgeist with the elusive Gina. Al has performed this song with Dave Nachmanoff, but it sounds best played solo, with a fine acoustic riff, and on at least one performance, with an attractive blonde dancing in the background. It ends with a bar or two of "She Loves You," which although superfluous, hammers home the point.

    This is a fun track with a serious message, and one that only Al Stewart could have written. Like the subject of "Carol," which he recorded for Modern Times three decades earlier, Gina is "everyone's and nobody's lover," a little girl lost who is searching for something, or someone, she can never find. >>>
    Suggestion credit:
    Alexander Baron - London, England

Comments: 1

  • Guy from Woodinville, WaGreat song from the amazingly productive Al. Love those opening lines: "Blonde hair and eyeshadow, I hyperventilate; Purple leather mini, legs up to there; Don't you cast aspersions on my naugahyde affair."
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