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at a glance...
Hometown:
London, England
First Recordings: 1968
Personnel:
Ray Davies - guitar, vocals
Dave Davies - guitar, harmonica, keyboards, vocals
Mick Avory - drums
Peter Quaife - bass
Notes:
Moments like "You Really Got Me" didn't happen to many bands; once it happened to The Kinks they never looked back. For two years after that watershed moment in distorted pop genius they hammered out their energetic if not terribly authentic R&B, dressing in Mod hand-me-downs and hoping for lightning to strike again. Luckily it did once more - "All Day And All of the Night" - and the Kinks were officially in the international pop big leagues. Unfortunately the wild end of a U.S. tour saw them banned from revisiting the United States, but exile in their homeland anticipated the remarkable emergence of Ray Davies as a writer of Very English Pop Songs. Kinks Kontroversy was the first step, and Face to Face was the breakthrough. The succeeding run of studio albums -- Something Else, The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society, The Village Green Preservation Society (Or the decline and fall of the British Empire), Lola Versus Powerman and the Money-go-round, and Muswell Hillbillies - showed Davies to be among the most intelligent - and musically savvy - songwriters in pop, but only the title track from "Lola" brought them the acclaim they truly deserved. Once it did, The Kinks returned to the U.S. as a stadium rock act, keeping a high profile throughout the '70s and early '80s (an era best appreciated on 1980's One for the Road). Though they recorded some peerless tunes during this time ("Father Christmas" and "Attitude" come to mind) and survived Punk and New Wave (which they influenced both historically and contemporaneously) with dignity in tact, 1966-1971 refused to come back to them, either.
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The Kinks
The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society
Pye/Reprise, Released 1968
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It's kind of odd that this is considered the archetypal Kinks album. Yes, we can see Ray Davies' storytelling style on the grow, but Village Green ... doesn't have nearly the narrative or thematic coherence of its successor, Arthur. Yes, the band are developing their quirky combination of American R&B and traditional English music, but for their finest musical role-playing you'd have to go with Muswell Hillbillies. This one doesn't even have a "Lola" or a "Waterloo Sunset" to act as its calling card. What it does have is a determined, independent spirit, and its willful anachronisms and obstinate brilliance are indeed the quintessence of Kinks.
Village Green ... was written and recorded at a time when The Kinks had drifted perilously far from the mainstream. Banished from America, uninterested in psychedelia, embracing music hall while all around them sought heavier sounds, The Kinks' continued viability as a pop group must have seemed in doubt. And it was here that Ray Davies made his name as rock's greatest contrarian, refusing to yield to fashion while simultaneously writing and producing the best pop of his band's career.
Working in such physical and creative isolation, The Kinks most sophisticated songs to date emerged rough-hewn, and both the mono and stereo mixes of the album (available together on the Castle CD reissue) sound remarkably lo-fi, and all the more lively for it. "Wicked Annabella" and "Last of the Steam Powered Trains" have more in common with the American garage rock of the day than the more sonically polished work of The Kinks' commercial peers (The Who, The Stones), and even the album's daintier moments ("Monica," "Sitting By the Riverside") buzz with occasional distortion and accidental noise.
Distortion and noise were present on a psychic level, too, and the growth of Ray Davies' storytelling style could not hide a raw emotional subtext. Davies' struggle with nostalgia would soon become The Kinks' defining purpose, and hearing him scratch away at it here is almost painful. "Do You Remember Walter?" rants frustratedly at a friend who refused to rage against the dying of the light: "I'll bet you're fat and married / And you're always home in bed by half past eight / And if I talked about the old times you'd get bored and we'd have nothing more to say," Davies spits, clearly upset with both himself and his mate. "Picture Book" and "Last of the Steam Powered Trains" take an equally dim view of those tricked by simple nostalgia, and "Village Green" watches in disbelief as Britain's all-too-recent history becomes tourist fodder.
At opposite ends of the album sit "The Village Green Preservation Society" and "People Take Pictures of Each Other," the latter concluding that the former's backward glance is either too poisonous or too painful to suffer: "Pictures of things how they used to be / Don't show me no more please." But it's that title's track's elegant lyric, at once hilarious and haunting, that endures. The Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium, the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular, the Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliate - Davies proves himself to be pop's greatest jester, poking holes in the inflated nostalgia of fools who cast their eyes away from progress.
But look at him on the sleeve, in every picture, eyes downcast and heavy-hearted, and it's the pleading refrain you'll hear. "Preserving the old ways / From being abused / Protecting the new ways for me and for you / What more can we do?"
There was not to be an easy answer for us or for him, and his determined exploration of these feelings fuelled, remarkably, three more classic albums. It wasn't a conventional path towards a place in rock's canon, but their refusal to be conventional defined The Kinks' greatness. And no Kinks record captures that better than The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society.
If you like The Kinks, check out:
The Kinks Muswell Hillbillies
The Kinks Arthur
Blur Modern Life Is Rubbish
The Jam All Mod Cons
-- Jesse Fahnestock
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