Arthur or Not Arthur: That is the Question

Landmark Kinks album inspires Chris Tullar’s Not Arthur

An acclaimed late sixties concept album provided the inspiration for a local songwriter to conceive, record and stage a concept album all his own. Counter-intuitively, Chris Tullar’s Not Arthur bears almost no similarity whatsoever to The Kinks’ 1969 Arthur LP. But that hasn’t stopped him from staging a live premiere of Not Arthur, preceded by a start-to-finish performance of Arthur. The special one-night-only concert took place July 6 at the Grey Eagle in Asheville.

Why The Kinks?
Legendary British rock band The Kinks are revered for their early classics: proto-garage rockers like “All Day and all of the Night” and “You Really Got Me.” Their hits continued into the ‘70s (“Lola”) and even the 1980s (“Come Dancing”), and the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. The band broke up in ‘96, but persistent rumors tease a possible reunion between brothers Ray and Dave Davies.

Yet despite the acclaim that The Kinks have earned, they’ve always been more popular in the UK than in the States. Part of that might be explained by primary songwriter Ray Davies’ distinctly English perspective. His lyrics often reflect concerns unique to the British Isles, and the band’s music – while always rocking – owes a significant debt to music hall, a peculiarly English style of music. Sometimes, even British fans didn’t quite get what Davies was on about.

In practical terms, that means that while the group’s seventh studio album, 1969’s Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) is today held in high esteem among critics, at the time of its release it fared poorly among the record-buying public. In fact, Arthur was the first Kinks album not to chart at all in the UK; in the U.S. it stalled at #105 on the Billboard 200 chart.

As originally conceived, Arthur was planned as the soundtrack for a Granada TV special set to air in late 1969. Beset by scheduling and financing challenges, the TV special was never completed nor aired. But The Kinks did their part: Ray Davies wrote more than a dozen songs, and the band recorded in sessions throughout the summer. The conceptually-oriented Arthur LP arrived in shops in October 1969. A single from the record, “Victoria” made it to #30 on the UK chart, but wasn’t even released Stateside.

All of which makes Arthur quite a left-field choice for inspiration for Chris Tullar, leader of progressive pop group Carpal Tullar. He says that the kernel of the idea came two years ago when drummer Courtney Cahill (formerly of Modern Strangers) suggested they work together on a creative project. “I’d never really collaborated before,” he admits.

Timeline of a Concept
But Tullar agreed, and when Cahill asked him to come up with an idea, he randomly decided to use a 55 year old album as a kind of writing prompt. He recalls thinking, “Let’s take a concept album and just use the song titles to make a new album.” Tullar says that Cahill found a list of the greatest concept albums – Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, The Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia, Pink Floyd’s The Wall and select others – and then simply picked one he hadn’t heard.

“In an age when people can’t even get through a song without skipping to the next one in their playlist, it’s grounding to have something that’s designed to be listened to start-to-finish,” Tullar says. And for him, that aesthetic carries over to live performance as well. “I’m not all that interested in going to see bands just play a loose collection of songs; I want it to be more of an experience. I want spectacle.” Those principles would guide the creation of Not Arthur.

The two enlisted Troy Crossley, guitarist and Cahill’s former band mate in Modern Strangers. Crossley brought with him experience staging live shows; he’s a prime mover in the Asheville-based revival of The Rocky Horror Show.

But almost as soon as writing began, Cahill bowed out of the project. “He got to a point where he realized, ‘These guys are going to gel,’ and then he quit,” Tullar says with a laugh. So he and Crossley largely developed the project as a duo. “There are still some skeletons of Courtney’s work in it,” Tullar admits.

Working with Crossley and drummer Evan Scott, Tullar completed the writing phase of Not Arthur in August 2022. Recording began in 2023, and by early June of this year, the sessions were done… almost. “Just this morning I added charango [an Andean stringed instrument] and accordion,” Tullar says with a nervous chuckle. “The album is going to be mastered in a couple of weeks, and we’re still adding, still coming up with ideas.”

Not Arthur, not at all
Chris Tullar confesses to only a passing familiarity with the album upon which his original concept is built. “If you asked me to sing [The Kinks’] ‘Brainwashed,’ I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it,” he admits. Moreover, he insisted that his collaborators avoid listening to Arthur during the creation phase. “These guys had never even heard ‘Victoria’ on the radio,” Tullar says.

Using only twelve existing song titles (example: “She’s Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina”) as the basis for an original work is an idiosyncratic approach, but it worked in the case of Not Arthur. Tullar and his writing partners crafted a narrative that’s in the rock opera tradition of fantastical and convoluted, yet entertaining. As with any conceptual work, distilling the story down to a paragraph is nearly impossible, but Tullar gives it his best shot.

“Our main character, Arthur, is a disgruntled prog-rock deejay who’s been fired,” Tullar explains, noting that the character is “very loosely based” on Asheville deejay Brian Blades. “This obsessed deejay gets inducted into a Cult of the Sacred Sequence. He gets totally brainwashed by an audio tape with this perfect sequence of notes. Arthur eventually gets flown to Australia, where he’s been given a mission to play it at festival of people and brainwash everybody.” Arthur has an arch-nemesis, Mandolina, who herself is a musician. “His way to destroy her is to make everyone disinterested in her,” Tullar explains.

“Okay, so it is convoluted,” he concludes. “It should be.”

The performing lineup for the Not Arthur premiere included members of Carpal Tullar plus Ian Reardon and Chris Carter from Alarm Clock Conspiracy, Andrew Thelston and the Ska City horn section. As Tullar and his musical associates began preparing the stage show, they decided that for its debut, the performance would be music-only. No libretto, no narration, no actors. “But I would really like Not Arthur to eventually get to a point where it becomes a real stage show,” Tullar says.

The official release of Not Arthur was the night of the Grey Eagle concert; the album will initially be available digital-only. “It’d be nice to have a physical format, too,” Tullar muses, pausing to think on it. “I could put it on a flash drive,” he announces. “Somebody give me $5.”

As the show date loomed, Tullar knew he had to come up with a name for the group that would perform Arthur and Not Arthur. “I thought about calling us The Dismantlists, because we’re dismantling something that exists,” Tullar explains. “But then I thought, ‘Remantlists,’ because we’re making something else.”