by Andy Miller
There has been much debate as to why Davies took the drastic action of pulling the original LP. An explanation has never been forthcoming and we can only surmise. TKATVGPS was the album he had been working on for two years. Davies was a perfectionist, and by this stage his perfectionism was verging on the neurotic, indulged by a management and record company who hoped The Kinks’ main man would soon recapture his hit making form. In a sense, he was also reluctant to finish the project, describing it as “a pet dream”. The album was already highly personal; now it represented the missed opportunity of a solo career as well, a decisive break from the grind of ‘the hit machine’. He may have been aware that both The Beatles and The Jimi Hendrix Experience were preparing to release double albums. He may have felt that too much fine material would end up in a vault somewhere, which as it transpired, is mostly what happened. But above all, one suspects Ray Davies knew this was his best work — he was desperate to get it right.
Meanwhile, The Kinks’ professional standing sank lower and lower, as did their finances. In October, they were forced to accept cabaret residences at northern working mens’ clubs like the Fiesta Club, Stockton-on-Tees, and The Top Hat, Spennymoor. The shows were a disaster. Dave Davies would down a whole bottle of Scotch before going on stage. “You had to have a set that was slick, polished and rehearsed, and that’s what we weren’t,” says Mick Avory. “We were so out of our depth,” laments Pete Quaife. “It was kind of difficult to imagine middle-aged men screaming. They’d stare at us, then as soon as we finished they’d order another round of beer and get on with talking about what had happened down at t’mine! But we had to do it because we didn’t have any other work.”
The Kinks limped on. On November 22nd, the album Ray Davies had spent two years writing and recording, refining and perfecting, was finally released. Yet, to anyone who actually bought it that Friday, an air of haste or neglect was immediately apparent — there were discrepancies between the song titles on the label and cover (three on side one alone) and even a misprint: ‘Phenominal (sic.) Cat’. Pye placed a few more small advertisements in the pop papers and Davies discussed the different tracks in Melody Maker. The LP received just one notice, a positive write-up in Disc, whose nameless reviewer remarked that Davies had managed to by-pass “everything psychedelic and electronic”, and concluded: “The Kinks may not be on the crest of the pop wave these days, but Ray Davies will remain one of our finest composers for many years.”lIt was too little, too late. Davies’ last-minute reworkings had fatally undermined any momentum the album may have had in September, and Pye was simply not equipped to market the LP in the way companies like Apple or Track could. People bought one another ‘The White Album’ or Electric Ladyland or the Rolling Stones’ newie Beggars Banquet for Christmas in 1968 and forgot about TKATVGPS, if they even knew it existed in the first place. In an age of street-fighting men and revolution, the hit faces of 1966 singing songs about village greens, cricket and trips to the seaside sounded middle-aged, reactionary and suicidally unhip. It seemed The Kinks were over.
“You could see everything was winding down,” says Pete Quaife. “It wasn’t a madcap, hit-a-week type of affair any more. It was becoming more like work, y’know?” Quaife would leave in March 1969, after contributing to the never-released Dave Davies solo LP and the rotten ‘Plastic Man’, and The Kinks would become a different group, in more ways than one.
However, posterity would vindicate Ray Davies. The fifteen-track TKATVGPS is a work of art. By adding the two new songs and two earlier tracks (‘Sitting By The Riverside’ and ‘All Of My Friends Were There’) and dropping ‘Days’ and ‘Mr. Songbird’, he created an album whose songs seem to talk to each other, and whose intelligence, sense of humour and humanity echo down the decades, whatever its author may feel about it today.
It will be soon be forty years since TKATVGPS was released. Enthusiasm for the 1960’s swings on unabated, but the sensibility of the album is a modern one. While many of its lyrics deal with the sweet scent of the past, and the LP owes at least some of its longevity to a collective nostalgia — for The Kinks or the near-mythical 60’s — the album’s fifteen songs ring with insight and self-awareness. It is emphatically not a period piece. The Kinks aren’t The Village Green Preservation Society; there is more to it than that. The proof lays equally in the well-worn grooves of a much-loved LP or the data stream of a new CD or downloaded audio file. Listen . . .
Chapter Two —
The Kinks Are
The Village Green
Preservation Society
The English village green is a little patch of grassland that still strikes a chord in the hearts of most native men and women two hundred years after the Industrial Revolution changed the majority of us to urban dwellers. It represents rural peace and quiet, as well as a community spirit that does not obtain in towns, and sets up in most of us a yearning for that fondly imagined country paradise, lost by the growth of imperialism and capitalism which have made England an over-populated country of noisy and dirty towns and cities where the mass of men, as Thoreau put it, lead lives of quiet desperation.
The English Village Green, Brian Bailey, 1985
The Village Green
Preservation Society
By the summer of 1968, Ray Davies was still without a title for the forthcoming Kinks album. Village Green, the project’s working title, seemed too narrow — the original Village Green concept had mutated as other, more personal songs joined the fray and, although the track ‘Village Green’ remained essential to Davies’ plan for the album, it would be two years old by the time the LP was released. Things had moved on.
“I was looking for a title for the album about three months ago, when we had finished most of the tracks,” Davies told Saturday Club’s Brian Matthew in November, a few days before the record finally reached the shops, “and somebody said that one of the things The Kinks have been doing for the last three years is preserving.”li’ The suggestion was clearly enough to prompt Davies towards not just a title for his album, but also to compose what he subsequently described as its “national anthem” — ‘The Village Green Preservation Society.’ “This started out to be a solo album for me,” he told Bob Dawbarn in Melody Maker, “but somebody mentioned to me that The Kinks do try to preserve things — we are all for that looking back thing. I thought it would be a nice idea to try and sum it up in one song.”lii
At first glance, the basic elements of ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’ seem to betray the speed with which it was manufactured — four strummed chords with a simple, circling melody, modulating from C major to D major at 1:12. However, its structure is unorthodox and unpredictable, the arrangement is pin-sharp and the performances are self-assured. And then there is Davies’ deceptively acerbic lyric, which could so easily have been a showcase for resourceful use of the thesaurus (consortium, affinity, affiliate, er, vernacular . . .) and not much besides, but which transcends its own ingenuity to stand alongside its author’s finest moments — heartfelt, whimsical, and recklessly unfashionable.
‘The Village Green Preservation Society’ is carefully set up as a slow burn, everything leading to Davies’ seemingly off-the-cuff “God save the village green!” as the track begins to fade. Much of the credit for the success of this arrangement must go to Mick Avory, whose drumming is especially exuberant. The opening piano figure is similarly light and effortless.8 Ray’s close harmony vocal with Dave Davies is sustained throughout, dropping away for Ray to emphasise the last line before the modulation to D. Only at the song’s close does Davies purposefully move centre stage (literally, if you are listening in stereo), singing the last two lines solo with a backwash of falsetto harmonies. “God save the village green!” We’re left in no doubt as to whose Preservation Society, and whose album, this is.
“All the things in the song are things are things I’d like to see preserved,” said Davies at the time.liii “I like village greens and preservation societies,” he told Jona
than Cott. “I like Donald Duck, Desperate Dan, draught beer.”liv This is disingenuous and, as Davies belatedly realised, open to misinterpretation. “A lot of people accuse me in the song of being kind of fascist,” he has said. “Traditional, you know? But it’s not. It’s a warm feeling, like a fantasy world that I can retreat to.”lv As noted by Robert Christgau in his influential appraisal of the album in Village Voice, “Does Davies really want to preserve virginity? Presumably not. But the fictional form allows him to remain ambivalent.”lvi
However, there is a satirical edge to ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’ that has been dulled or lost in the years since its release.
1968 was not a comfortable year for Britain and the British. The anti-Vietnam protests outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square were the most violent manifestation of a general post-colonial unease with Britain’s diminishing role in the world. The economic climate was deteriorating, causing the Labour government to launch its “I’m Backing Britain” initiative as a spur to the consumer to buy British-made goods and support British industry in the wake of devaluation of the pound. The entertainer Bruce Forsyth released a single on Pye, called ‘I’m Backing Britain’, co-written by Pye’s musical director Tony Hatch (“Let’s keep it going / The good times are blowing our way”).
1968 was also the year Conservative MP Enoch Powell urged the repatriation of African and West Indian immigrants in a speech which quickly passed into infamy: “As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with blood.” People marched against Powell, and for him. In a photograph from the time, an Asian woman balances her baby in one hand and a homemade placard in the other: ‘WE ARE BACKING BRITAIN’. Meanwhile a group of porters from Smithfield meat market demonstrate in their blood-spattered overalls, laughing and carrying a banner: ‘SMITHFIELD SAYS: A GEORGE CROSS FOR ENOCH’.
So 1968 was a year of anger and unrest, of fear of the future and nostalgia for a safer past, of preservation societies, affinities and affiliates, not all of them wholesome — something Davies was undoubtedly aware of. Early in the year, he had penned a satirical song called ‘We’re Backing Britain’ for the BBC TV programme At the Eleventh Hour.9 In this context, the lyrics of ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’ are less quaint, less escapist; rather, they mock the certainties of protest with a list of utterly idiosyncratic demands, then make a personal plea for moderation: what more can we do? “I’m not particularly patriotic — perhaps I’m just selfish,” Davies told Derek Boltwood six months after the album was released, “but I like these traditional British things to be there. I never go to watch cricket any more, but I like to know it’s there. . . . It all sounds terribly serious, but it isn’t really — I mean, I wouldn’t die for this cause, but I think it’s frightfully important.”lvii
It may lack the righteousness and glamour of ‘Street Fighting Man’, but unlike The Rolling Stones’ modish call to arms, Davies’ quiet song of defiance is not a pose. Taken either as autobiography or satire, as a curtain raiser for the album, or as the world’s gentlest and most oblique protest song, ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’ is central to Davies’ map of the Village Green, and the great thęme of his songwriting at this time — the ambiguous allure of the past. The Kinks simply dusted it with magic and passed it on.
Do You Remember Walter
“The past is a curious thing,” says George Bowling, the middle-aged narrator of George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air. “It’s with you all the time.”lviiiBowling, a dissatisfied insurance salesman, fat and washed up in a stagnating marriage, yearns for the landscape of his childhood. “What was it that people had in those days?” he wonders. “A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure. More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity.’lixThese could be the words of Ray Davies in 1968, contemplating a bygone age and all of twenty-four years old.
In Coming Up For Air, George Bowling contrives an escape from the routine and frustration of his day-to-day existence by returning to Lower Binfield, the small country town in which he grew up. The trip is a disaster. Lower Binfield has changed almost beyond recognition; Bowling’s long wished-for homecoming brings only disillusionment and despair, depriving him even of the safe haven of his memories. There is no return because, of course, there cannot be. Elsie, the sweetheart Bowling left behind twenty-five years earlier, is now married to a tobacconist. She is old at forty-seven, her hair completely grey. More to the point, “She didn’t know me from Adam. I was just a customer, a stranger, an uninteresting fat man . . . she didn’t even recognise me. If I told her who I was, very likely she wouldn’t remember.’lx
If the title track is the national anthem of TKATVGPS, ‘Do You Remember Walter’ is its lyrical heart. It is one of Davies’ finest songs, a meditation on friendship and time which, in common with his best work, takes an everyday image or commonplace event (commuters at Waterloo, the stars on Hollywood Boulevard) and finds the universe within it. “Walter was a friend of mine, we used to play football together every Saturday,” said Davies shortly before the album’s release. “Then I met him again after about five years and we found out we didn’t have anything to talk about.”lxiDavies transformed this awkwardness into art.
Five years, says Davies, yet Walter reminds him of “a world I knew so long ago”, a world before the Kinks, before the hits, the screaming and the breakdowns — hardly surprising there wasn’t much to say, especially if the famous pop star only wanted to linger on the old times. They were going to be free, Ray and Walter; like Edward Lear’s Owl and Pussycat, they were going to sail away to sea (“in a beautiful pea-green boat / They took some honey / And plenty of money . . . ”) but somehow they never did it. And yet, Davies seems to suggest, in the end neither man would wish for the other’s fate — Walter is bored by the singer’s reminiscing, while Davies scoffs at Walter’s early bedtime (and conformity). In the final reckoning, that isn’t what counts. “There’s a line in the lyric — ‘People often change but memories of people remain’ (sic.) — which sums up what this is about,” said Davies,lxii and at the song’s conclusion he slows everything down to emphasise the point. The awkwardness, the sadness of things, Davies says, is the price we pay for change, but we should try to preserve the memory regardless.
Davies matched the winding, conversational lyric of ‘Do You Remember Walter’ with one of his most precocious melodies. The tune skips up and down the scale like a piano exercise (see also: ‘Picture Book’, ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’). That the finished track sounds neither precious nor pretentious is a tribute to Davies’ single-minded arrangement — every instrument and production nuance has been made a slave to the lyric and the vocal. Against the measured pounding of the piano and bass (and Mick Avory’s Boys’ Brigade snare rolls), Davies sings with passionate restraint, his vocal track cleverly enhanced by some occasional double-tracking and a hazy Mellotron line that shadows the melody; like Walter, an echo. The effect is rousing at times, melancholic at others. Having paused to deliver the song’s parting shot, the Mellotron. line is left behind as the track fades, as if to bear it out — our memories are what remains long after names have been forgotten.10
Picture Book
In 2002, Ray Davies was called upon to pen sleeve notes for his own various artists tribute album, This Is Where I Belong: The Songs Of Ray Davies & The Kinks. There are three selections from TKATVGPS on the album, of which ‘Picture Book’ is one; “brave” is how Davies describes Bill Lloyd and Tommy Womack’s decision to tackle it. The song was not written for The Kinks. “They were songs that I should have consigned to my private collection,” he writes. “Both songs [‘Picture Book’ and ‘Muswell Hillbilly’] are inspired by my family and mention people that really existed.”lxiii
Yet, from the beginning, ‘Picture Book’ was always one of TKATVGPS ‘s most visible and significant songs. Recorded in the spring of 1968, it was selected by Davies for the aborted Four More Respected Gentlem
en, and for both twelve and fifteen-track versions of the album where, as noted above, it falls in behind ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’ and ‘Do You Remember Walter’, the opening triumvirate that introduces the major themes and images of the LP. The Kinks also included ‘Picture Book’ in their July 26th appearance on the Colour Me Pop strand of BBC 2’s Late Night Line-Up, a full five months ahead of the album’s release. The group performed it again the following February on another BBC 2 music programme Once More With Felix, hosted by the folk singer Julie Felix.11
In other words, however Ray Davies may feel about it today, ‘Picture Book’ was an important song to The Kinks and an important piece of the whole Village Green jigsaw. In the studio, Pete Quaife recalls being drilled through multiple takes of the track, as Davies struggled to get it finished to his satisfaction. ‘Picture Book’ is a scruffier proposition than either of the songs that precede it, the final minute a mish-mash of assorted “yeah yeah yeah”s, “na na na”s, and even a “scooby dooby doo” or two, lifted from Sinatra’s ‘Strangers In The Night’, and crooned by Davies in suitably ironic fashion. Despite their reported fatigue, The Kinks’ playing sounds enthusiastic. The track progresses so jauntily, in fact, that one can easily miss the grit at its centre; these family photographs were taken “a long time ago” and the happiness they represent — the happiness of childhood — has gone forever.
“No one could afford a bloody camera,” Dave Davies told Bill Orton in 2001. “I didn’t know anybody that had a camera, not even on our street. It wasn’t a big thing, unless you went on holiday — Ramsgate or whatever. We had pictures of that . . .’lxiv Two such pictures are reproduced in Dave’s autobiography. In one, Ray Davies, no more than twelve years old, stands on the beach between his brother Dave and their nephew Terry (the son of their sister Rosie and her husband Arthur, both of whom would one day have songs, whole albums, written about them). Dave and Terry are on all fours, like dogs; Ray is holding them both by the hair, grinning from ear to ear.