by Andy Miller
Twenty years later, Davies told Jon Savage that although ‘Big Sky’ was one of his favourite songs, he was dissatisfied with The Kinks’ recording of it. “Maybe I wasn’t the right person to sing it,” he said.16 “Knowing I got the image across and the fact that a lot of people like the song is enough. But my performance is really bad. . . . It just wasn’t recorded properly . . . lxxv Davies has habitually deflected attention away from the personal nature and commercial failure of TKATVGPS by claiming either that the songs suffered from his inexperience behind the mixing desk (“those songs are demos really, pure demos . . . They’re good ideas but not executed properly. I was lacking a producer . . . “lxxvi) or that he deliberately under-recorded them (“I wanted a record that would not necessarily get airplay but would be played for friends and at parties — just play the record like playing a demo. I achieved that and it didn’t get any airplay at all. It became a cult record as a result”lxxvii) ‘Big Sky’, so scintillating in design and execution, gives the lie to both these evasions.
Coincidentally, the final two songs recorded for TKATVGPS were also the only two The Kinks carried over into their live set at the time, where they would be introduced as numbers from “an LP we had out but few people bought” or “an album we had out called The Village Green Preservation Society. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it.” (The scattered, half-hearted applause that usually followed these announcements indicates most gig goers had not). Live, ‘Big Sky’ (“as opposed to pig sty”) received the same kind of heavy rock punishment meted out to ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’. At the Fillmore West in 1970 the song resembles Hendrix’s ‘Hey Joe’, with its lethargic power chords and longwinded rolls across the tom-toms. Ray Davies shouts over the din, struggling to make those beautiful words heard above his brother, who is busy kilowatting the song to death with his guitar. Horrible.
Sadly, this was the end of the road for ‘Big Sky’. After 1972 The Kinks dropped it from their live set, never to return. Neither Ray Davies nor Dave Davies has sung it since. A pity; it is one of The Kinks’ — and the pop era’s — finest two minutes and fifty seconds, eternally fresh and, like the Big Sky himself, ultimately consoling and inspiring.
Sitting By The Riverside
‘Sitting By The Riverside’ was probably recorded in July 1968; it was definitely performed by The Kinks during their appearance on Late Night Line-Up at the end of the month. Yet oddly it was absent from the twelve-track version of TKATVGPS prepared by Ray Davies for release in September. “This is a fishing song,” he said in November. “I went fishing a lot when I was about eight,”17 and it may be that the song’s inclusion on the finished album owes more to considerations of pacing and flow than to its nominal subject matter. By the illustrious standards of its predecessors, ‘Sitting By The Riverside’ is a slight, if charming, piano and accordion (i.e. Mellotron)” shuffle, two minutes to pause and cast your metaphorical eye on the waters before turning the record over.
However, being Ray Davies, there is something awry in this picture of riparian bliss. Anxiety shrouds the riverbank. The singer needs to be calmed and pacified, not just loved. He sounds exhausted, utterly passive, happy to let the water pass him by — at last he can close his eyes. But when he does so, a dizzying rush of instruments — memories, or fears — threatens to overwhelm him. The second of these gentle cacophonies (at 1.55), mixed with the melancholy image of a willow tree, is an instance of Davies’ production and songwriting skills combining to produce something richly impressionistic. At the song’s close, the fog clears and the singer is left surveying the view with a bottle of wine, suspended half way between a harmless sunny afternoon’s lazing and a more insidious self-regarding torpor, like the phenomenal cat at its journeys’ end, high in a tree, eating itself forever.
“The best tracks to put last are the ones that lead you somewhere,” said Davies in 1993. ‘Sitting By The Riverside’ looks ahead to the album’s conclusion via the unreliable gallery of people and memories that comprise TKATVGPS’s second half, a book of pictures the singer will contemplate and eventually reject.
Animal Farm
Side two of TKATVGPS opens with its most unapologetic pop song, and a favourite of the group. “I still get shivers when I listen to it,” admits Pete Quaife, which isn’t to say that things went smoothly in the studio. “There was a big fight about ‘Animal Farm’. I thought the bass should be playing the piano introduction as well. Both Ray and Dave threw a hissy fit and said no. So it’s not there. I was a bit angry and sour about that one.” There is no evidence of this contretemps on the finished record. Quite the opposite in fact: ‘Animal Farm’ sounds light and joyful.
Of course, the song has sadness tucked away inside it. “This was just me thinking everybody else’s mad and we are all animals anyway — which is really the idea of the whole album,” Davies told Bob Dawbarn, going on to describe himself as “just a city dropout.”lxxviii Once again, the singer seeks sanctuary in the past, this time on ‘Animal Farm’, the pastoral idyll under a wide (Big?) sky where he was happy, life was simple and people could be trusted. In the dream, his “little girl” is safe at his side — not like the big, bad, half insane world where dreams are easily snuffed out and from which she, presumably, is missing.
Mick Avory remembers The Kinks recording ‘Animal Farm’ (and possibly one other song from this period) in the larger environs of Pye Studio 1, normally used by Pye artists and producers when orchestral backing was required. Certainly, ‘Animal Farm’ has a noticeably bigger sound than much of the rest of the album, with plenty of reverb applied to the drums, percussion and the tack piano that picks out the song’s opening riff. A Mellotron has been expertly manipulated to forge the realistic “string” parts that fill out the track, while Quaife’s zooming bass line in the opening bars suggests the Davies brothers got the arrangement right. Finally, Davies’ terrific vocals, uncommonly lusty in the opening lines of the verses, put the seal on a skilled and infectious group performance.
Ray Davies seems to have been fond of ‘Animal Farm’. The song featured on Four More Respected Gentlemen and both versions of TKATVGPS. In addition to selecting it to announce the second side of the finished album, Davies recycled its introduction in a song called ‘Nobody’s Fool’, the theme to the second series of Adam Faith’s television show Budgie.18
Village Green
Ray Davies hoarded ‘Village Green’ like no other song in his growing catalogue.19 “It’s all very camp, isn’t it?” he said when it was finally released, noting that the track “was done eighteen months ago and was originally going to be the title for the album.”lxxix
Davies had a point. Musically, ‘Village Green’ is very camp and its archness is only partially alleviated by its surroundings; in comparison to its sister song ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’, written and recorded nearly two years later, it is distinctly two-dimensional. An acetate exists of‘Village Green’ where Davies’ vocals are even more mannered and sarcastic than on the finished track.20
‘Village Green’ was recorded at Pye in November 1966 or February 1967.21 The Kinks’ ranks, still with a notably Face To Face-like drum sound, are swelled by Nicky Hopkins’ harpsichord and an arrangement by David Whitaker that features oboe, cello, viola and piccolo. (Dave Davies stated in a 1967 interview that his brother’s solo album would feature “an orchestra and things like that.”lxxx) Despite Whitaker’s impressive C.V., which ranged from film soundtracks to arrangements for The Rolling Stones and Brigitte Bardot, the Davies brothers reportedly fell out with him for failing to interpret their musical wishes to the letter (or note).22 The finished track lacks the tidiness of ‘Two Sisters’, sounding cluttered in places, the extra instruments jostling for attention with The Kinks’ hearty backing vocals and a somewhat uncertain group performance.
Musically maladroit it may be, but the ever-present literary sensibility of TKATVGPS finds its fullest expression in ‘Village Green’. The song’s portrait of a van
ishing rural idyll places it firmly in an English pastoral tradition that stretches back from Shakespeare to William Blake (‘The Ecchoing Green’ from Songs Of Innocence, 1789), William Wordsworth (’Michael’, 1800) and, in the twentieth century, Orwell (yes, him again), whose symbolic use of Winston Smith’s dreams of a Golden Country in Nineteen Eighty-Four is intended to evoke just this literary heritage (“Winston woke up with the word Shakespeare on his lips.”)23 In 1982, the director, actor and former boy genius Orson Welles offered this definition of the English pastoral for the cameras of the BBC’s Arena: “I think Shakespeare was greatly preoccupied with the loss of innocence. I think there has always been an England, an older England, which was sweeter and purer, where the hay smelt better, and the weather was always springtime, and the daffodils blew in the gentle, warm breezes. You feel nostalgia for it in Chaucer, and you feel it all through Shakespeare. I think he was profoundly against the modern age.”lxxxi And lo, there are The Kinks on the cover of TKATVGPS, strolling through just such a pastoral scene.
Where there was paradise, there is paradise lost. Here are a few lines from ‘The Deserted Village’ by Oliver Goldsmith, first published in 1770:
Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green . . .
Here, as I take my solitary rounds,
Amidst thy tangling walks and ruin’d grounds,
And, many a year elaps’d, return to view
Where once the cottage stood, the hawthorn grew,
Remembrance wakes with all her busy train,
Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain.
It could be Ray Davies in a powdered wig.
Davies has frequently said that the ‘Englishness’ of his lyrics at this time, the profusion of cups of tea and country houses, was a product of The Kinks’ five-year banishment from America, but the English sensibility of Davies’ songwriting has a deeper, older root. If ‘Village Green’ is — dread phrase — quintessentially English, it is not because of its literal use of images of oak trees, church steeples and so on, but because it employs these images to suggest innocence has been lost. This is the very kernel of the English pastoral theme, a retrospective, self-renewing pessimism. Things will never be as good as they used to be. For Davies, The Kinks’ US ban was surely the proof, not the cause.
In ‘Village Green’, and throughout TKATVGPS, the pastoral and the personal have become entwined. “I sought fame,” says the singer, and the suggestion is that by seeking fame, he feels he has contributed to the despoiling of the village. He has abandoned love and, in doing so, has left behind a lifeless place, fit only for gawping Americans and Daisy’s husband Tom, who now owns the grocery, the pithiest and funniest detail of the entire album. The singer will return, he and Daisy will be reunited, laughter will once again be heard around the green. By its final verse, the song has become a study in pathetic self-deception, an impossibly perfect scene no better or more realistic than the “rare antiquities” snapped by those darn tourists. You can’t go home again, said Thomas Wolfe; Davies appears deluded enough to believe he can.24
Why did Davies cling on to ‘Village Green’ for so long before letting it be heard? It may be that he had reservations about revealing his “ideal place, a protected place” — “the worst thing I did was inflict it on the public. I should have left it in my diary.”lxxxii But he also saw ‘Village Green’ as a starting point for something new, not just the Village Green concept and the distinctive songs that would spring from it, but the type of work he could produce outside the strictures imposed on him by The Kinks and the demands of the hit machine. However, the moment passed; in some respects, Davies’ decision to include the song on TKATVGPS can be seen as a capitulation, not just to The Kinks but also to his wavering self-confidence. By the time it was finally released, ‘Village Green’ was confirmed as Ray Davies’ personal parable, and its lost innocence belonged to no one but himself.
Starstruck
‘Starstruck’ was recorded by The Kinks in July 1968 and included on both the twelve and fifteen-track versions of the album. Thirty-three years later, reflecting on the song in the liner notes for This Is Where I Belong, Ray Davies professed to being baffled at ‘Starstruck’s inclusion on TKATVGPS. “It is strange to think of this song being recorded by The Kinks,” he wrote, “because it is definitely a song that should be on somebody’s solo album”.lxxxiii
Sure enough, ‘Starstruck’ appears to have little in common with the Village Green theme, although as a warning on the perils of fame and the big city, it bears some relation to other Davies songs of the period, such as ‘Village Green’, ‘Berkeley Mews’ and ‘Polly’. “The lyrics are self-explanatory. It’s just something that happens,” said Davies at the time.”lxxxiv” As Johnny Rogan notes, it could be that the softly censorious lyric is addressed to a groupie, although the politeness of Davies’ vocal suggests otherwise.
Davies has claimed that the musical inspiration for the song came from his love of Motown groups such as The Temptations and The Four Tops. While it’s possible to hear echoes of, say, ‘It’s The Same Old Song’ (a minor British hit for The Four Tops in 1965) in Davies’ melody (and the snap of Mick Avory’s snare drum), in truth a person could listen to ‘Starstruck’ a thousand times before spotting the connection between Fortis Green and Detroit. It just sounds so much like The Kinks — the familiar line-up of acoustic guitar, bass, drums, piano and Mellotron, all those jolly “ba ba ba’ “s and handclaps.25
In fact, ‘Starstruck’ sounded so inimitably Kinky, it was released as a single in America, Germany and parts of Scandanavia. A basic promotional film was shot in late 1968 at Waterlow Park, Highgate, in which The Kinks half-heartedly mime and goon about in the winter chill, Ray Davies’ breath forming clouds as he sings along. The ground is muddy and the leaves are off the trees. The film plays like a bedraggled monochrome lantern show of the photographs shot on Hampstead Heath a few months earlier. Pete Quaife is just weeks from quitting the group.
Phenomenal Cat
Prior to 1968, The Kinks had only ever flirted with psychedelia — the influential ‘See My Friends’, the backwards tapes of ‘Autumn Almanac’ — but TKATVGPS contains two numbers, ‘Phenomenal Cat’ and ‘Wicked Annabella’, that sail unusually close to the cosmic wind blowing through British pop at the time. According to Robert Christgau, who had a low tolerance for English “impersonal artsiness”, the songs “might have been turned out by some Drury Lane whimsy specialist”.lxxxv Yet while both tracks have the trappings of psychedelia, neither could be said to be truly psychedelic. Ray Davies was too smart (and too uptight) to deal in either unconditional bliss or plain lysergic infantilism.26
Davies referred to ‘Phenomenal Cat’ as a nursery rhyme, and superficially the song is a snug fit with such Brit psych classics as ‘The Gnome’ by The Pink Floyd or The Fleur De Lys’ ‘Gong With The Luminous Nose’.27The underground adopted, or co-opted, figures like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, both for the perceived trippiness of their work and the romantic dream of childhood it evoked. Ray Davies shared the British psychedelic scene’s pastoral idealization of lost youth; where he differed was in the belief that, with a childlike view of the universe (and enough L.S.D.), one could get back to that walled garden. “Maybe Village Green Preservation Society was my psychedelic album,” Ray Davies told The Onion in January 2002. “I withdrew into my little community-spirited . . . my trivial world of little corner shops and English black-and-white movies. Maybe that’s my form of psychedelia.”lxxxvi
‘Phenomenal Cat’ is a funny mix of Mellotron, electric guitar and tambourine, with Mick Avory playing what sounds like the small practice kit he had had made for Kinks rehearsals. The song’s decorative introduction was created by holding down the Mellotron keys and letting its “flute” tapes spool through. Ray Davies is double-trac
ked throughout, while the cat himself is a speeded-up Dave Davies, fabricated by slowing down the track’s master tape. In common with other Mellotron-heavy Davies productions such as ‘Lavender Hill’ and ‘Mr. Songbird’, it is thought ‘Phenomenal Cat’ was recorded in late 1967, by which time the psychedelic bandwagon was rolling out of town. Would it be too much to interpret the ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ flutetrills, faux-naive fabulist lyrics and magic singing cat as vaguely satirical? After all, ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’ would pull a similar trick with the conventions of R&B. And this was a group whose guitarist, though not averse to wearing a preposterous Noddy hat and conducting interviews with ‘LOVE’ and ‘DAVE’ written on his knuckles, gave short shrift to the beautiful people in the press (“There’s something very strange about a flower scene in Acton — people walking around with flowers up their noses, cream on their hair and riding on a number 233 bus. I mean, it’s not very beautiful, is it?”lxxxvii) and whose bassist, in late 1967, said this:
“I just let the whole flower people, L.S.D., love thing flow over my head. I just laughed at it. The trouble is it changed a lot of good blokes, who everybody rated, into creeps. Instead of expanding minds, L.S.D. seemed to close minds into little boxes and made a lot of people very unhappy. You still can’t beat going to the pictures, a couple of pints and a fag. The Kinks all agree that Sunday dinner is the greatest realisation of heaven.”lxxxviii
No wonder people thought they were unfashionable.
Whether modish or mocking, the psychedelia of ‘Phenomenal Cat’ is all surface. The lyric is another Ray Davies rumination on the dangerous charm of the past. The cat who perches in a tree, eating himself forever, is the same ambiguous figure who sits idly drinking wine by the riverside all day, who flicks compulsively through old family photo albums, who lives in a museum and is going insane. The Phenomenal Cat, fantastically, has flown from Cowes to Kathmandu and unlocked the very secrets of the universe; now all he wants to do is wallow and eat, eat and wallow, until he ends up feeding on himself. Like many of those around the Village Green, the cat has found his rest, but at a price.28