When the never-ending and tiresome question “Beatles or Stones?” is asked, there is always a group of die-hards that loudly proclaims… The Kinks! While Ray and Dave Davies’ gang never quite achieved the same level of success as their rivals (not even that of The Who), they remain one of the most important and influential rock groups of the sixties. Much like Lennon and McCartney, or Jagger and Richards, the Davies brothers knew how to stretch their fingers out into a variety of styles. The Kinks did it all. From rhythm’n’blues powered rock to garage rock, stadium rock, Elizabethan rock, country, classic pop, folk, cabaret… the list goes on. Although impressive, versatility was becoming more of a prerequisite than anything; above all what made them stand out was how they managed to retain the most ‘Britishness’, so to speak, out of all the prominent groups of the time. In their style, their songwriting and their references, they were THE ultimate English band. Be you a fan or not, it was this aspect that would go on to influence future generations. If it wasn’t for The Kinks, we wouldn’t have had The Jam, XTC, Madness, The Smiths, Blur, Pulp, Oasis, Divine Comedy and countless others…
Within the rollercoaster of a career that they had, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is undoubtedly their diamond. Released in November 1968 on Pye Records, but written over the course of the two preceding years, The Kinks packed the record with true pop classics. They are particularly rarefied in this instance by the fact that this album was the antithesis of the pop of its decade; while most of the long-haired bands were plugging into amp walls to blow stadium roofs into the sky, The Kinks were doing exactly the opposite. The songs from this album seem like they’re from another time. The Beatles were stirring up Revolution and The Rolling Stones were unleashing their Street Fighting Man, but in a clever and subdued tone The Kinks were twirling out jaunty manifestoes of cricket and strawberry jam. Ray was only 24 years old at the time of their sixth album’s release, but he had clearly already matured into a sensitive and soulful songwriter. However, neither this precocity, nor the conspicuous release of Village Green at this time, owed much to chance. The Kinks had already seen it all by this point, as though they were only able to claim a 4 year career, they were built on a rather unstable basis. Dave and Ray can only be described as an unlikely pair, despite being brothers. Dave was handsome and single-minded, shredding away on his guitar with exuberant and palpable cockiness, while Ray, clutching his writing pen, would step up to the microphone with a solemn and introverted air that betrayed him as the eldest. Originally from Muswell Hill in north London, they started off by tracing the tracks of their elders The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, more or less copying their habits. Then, incredibly quickly, with just one song that came out in August 1964, they surprised everyone by inventing garage rock with “You Really Got Me”. Produced by the brilliant Shel Talmy, this two-minute-fourteen-second maelstrom completely shook up Swinging London. Over the following months, Ray Davies’ style became more refined and delicate as he continued off the beaten track with his songwriting. With hits such as “A Well Respected Man” and “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”, Ray dipped his increasingly worn pen in acid to critique British society with its own excesses. As time went on however, even in their melodies, the violence of “You Really Got Me” was quickly falling off of the agenda. Songs such as “Sunny Afternoon” and “Waterloo Sunset” - true musical poems - were consolidating The Kinks’ place in history as a special group, as fluent in humour and nostalgia, as in bitterness and melancholy.
This innovative style coincided with the emergence of a new format: the album. Rock groups left their singles behind them in order to better think of their releases as novels that had a beginning, a middle and an end. With Face to Face, their fourth creation, released in October 1966, The Kinks signed off on a kind of concept album. Ray wanted to link each song together with sound effects, but their label - Pye - didn’t support the idea, considering it too avant-garde and anti-commercial. The following year, Something Else saw Ray Davies plunge deeper into English folklore, seemingly driven to recover a sense of nostalgia. This style subsequently reached its climax with the aforementioned The Village Green Preservation Society. It was an album designed to fully embrace all the clichés of who they were, collected over the course of their career, and of an England being overrun by pop. Some didn’t warm to this approach, deeming it passé, failing to persevere through to the nuanced and beautiful depictions of mundane experiences that could only be fruits of a great sensibility from the songwriter. With his songs about “lost friends, draught beer, motorbike riders, wicked witches and flying cats”, as Ray described it in his 1994 autobiography X-Ray, The Village Green Preservation Society didn’t seek to say that “it was better before” but meticulously depicted the overlap in two worlds as one ceded to the other, with a sideways glance to those who’d try to see it as anything other than the operations of history. This sixth album was anchored in folk music and enhanced with Nicky Hopkins’ harpsichord and Mellotron. Funnily enough, across the Atlantic Ocean, other artists were beginning to turn their gazes away from the current trends and into their rear-view mirrors, like Bob Dylan.
A true craftsman throughout his career, Ray Davies went so far as to invent recurrent characters to animate his lyrics; Daisy, Walter, Johnny Thunder and Monica. They were all inspired by old acquaintances, friends and family members. Simple working class people clearly important to him in some way, that haunt the record with a sense of a childhood lost and mourned. “The Village Green could be anywhere. It’s all in my head, probably…”, said the songwriter in an interview for Uncut magazine in November 2007. “Everybody’s got their own Village Green, somewhere you go to when the world gets too much. The real Village Green is a combination of places in north London: the little green near my childhood home in Fortis Green, Cherry Tree Woods, Highgate Woods. That little green is where we played football, and where we stayed ‘til it was dark. There was mystery there; it was where we heard stories.” Ray was clearly in need of his own ‘village green’, especially with the constant avalanche of concerts, and with a label under him that was longing for another “You Really Got Me” and reeling from a ban from the United States. In 1965, the year prior to their Village Green release, The Kinks’ unbridled aggression went so punk rock on American territory that the musicians’ union banned them from putting on any concerts until 1969! The decision affected their international popularity, which was mainly limited to Europe at that point… “I was angry”, explained Ray Davies in the same interview, “and I repressed the competitive instincts that had made me write hit singles. It wasn’t ‘I think I’m burned out, I can’t be successful’. It was more ‘I’m deliberately not going to be successful this time. I’m not going to make You Really Got Me, part III.’… Village Green is probably one of the first indie records. It was also a culmination of all these years of being banned from America. I felt we’d had a raw deal, the band were being punished unjustly. And I just wanted to do something English. I wanted to write something that, if we were never heard of again, this is who we are. It was a final stand for things about to be swept away, ideals that can never be kept.”
Consequently, few people bought Village Green when it came out, though it would go on to become an essential part of the history of rock. Ray Davies himself was expecting a commercial failure. “We knew it wouldn’t be successful, but in a sense, it did everything I wanted it to do. When people think about The Kinks, they still think about that album. And most of them have never heard it!” Today, the gift of hindsight makes it possible to fully appreciate the album for its extraordinary and lasting richness. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society almost reads like the instruction manual for the perfect song. Useful, right?
