The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society

by Andy Miller

  Ray Davies thought enough of ‘Phenomenal Cat’ to consider it for Four More Respected Gentlemen and both versions of TKATVGPS. The song also makes a significant reappearance in X-Ray. Late in the book, the narrator is stalked by the same (literal) cloud of dark despair that afflicts ‘Raymond Douglas’. “All he had to do was to look the cloud in the face and smile at it,” RD tells him. “Then it would become discouraged and disappear . . .”lxxxix When the predatory cloud visits the narrator at night, he disperses it by putting on TKATVGPS and playing ‘Phenomenal Cat’. Like ‘Mr. Songbird’, “I let the record play continuously, knowing that it would protect me from the darkness.” The narrator falls asleep, content that “the Phenomenal Cat would watch over me.”xc (Again, it can’t be ruled out that Davies is having some mild fun here).

  This idea of ‘Phenomenal Cat’ as an audible smile in the encroaching gloom is supported by the last and subtlest of its original production touches. As the track ends, Ray Davies and the Phenomenal Cat harmonize for the first time, high and low together, until the cat passes on his little song and fades away, leaving Davies to sing the wordless refrain alone, like the grin on the face of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat as it gradually disappears.

  All Of My Friends Were There

  Another song retrieved from the pages of Ray Davies’ diary, ‘All Of My Friends Were There’ was inspired by a real on-stage humiliation.

  “It was an R&B concert and I had a temperature of 104 but they asked me to do it because there was a contract. I had lots and lots to drink and I thought ‘It doesn’t matter’. The curtains opened and all my friends were sitting in the front row. . . . It was a terrible night and I thought I would write a song about it.”xci

  In the finished song, the drama unfolds with the woozy logic of a bad dream. The event has become a tawdry showbiz story of persecution, stage fright and booze, set to a music-hall gallop in the verses, contrasting with the lilting, wistful waltz of the choruses (not dissimilar to ‘Young And Innocent Days’ on Arthur). “I was thinking the other day about some of the things that poor Mick Avory had to play,” Davies told Peter Doggett. “All he wanted to be was a jazz and blues drummer, and I brought in all these weird songs.”xcii Avory and The Kinks acquit themselves on the album’s trickiest number, albeit with some slight, appropriate awkwardness.

  ‘All Of My Friends Were There’ takes perverse delight in Davies’ mortification. The song, like its singer, is a tragicomic jumble of paranoia, panic and deception. Are these “friends” really my friends, or friends of friends, or not friends at all? When will it be over? When can I get back to normal? In the final verse, Davies changes tack, reprising the Village Green theme of return to the past. After struggling through his comeback gig, the singer goes to a café he used to visit in happier times, where everyone was his friend and he could be himself; or at least, that’s how he remembers it. The song ends with Davies once again gazing at the (imaginary?) view, passive, dazed, exhausted. Finally, he doesn’t care.

  Like ‘Sitting By The Riverside’, ‘All Of My Friends Were There’ was recorded in the summer of 1968, but not included in Davies’ original track listing for TKATVGPS. “If I’d done that song today, it would have been A&R’d off the album,” Davies said. “But sometimes you need minor gems like that to set up other songs.”xciii Again, it seems that the last-minute inclusion of‘All Of My Friends Were There’ was a case of Davies deciding the album needed a track for reasons of continuity alone. But it is a fine Kinks recording, and one that offers a glimpse of its author’s troubled mind.

  Wicked Annabella

  Whereas ‘Phenomenal Cat’ represents the “something ‘far-out’ in the nursery” strand of British psychedelia, ‘Wicked Annabella’ is as close as The Kinks ever got to the genre’s other notable manifestation, the Freak Out. Guitars growl and shriek, vocals are menacing, double-tracked and whispered. As such, the song is perfectly suited to the younger Davies’ particular talents. “This is rather a crazy track,” said Ray Davies. “I just wanted to get one to sound as horrible as it could. I wanted a rude sound — and I got it.”xciv

  To some extent, Ray seems to have turned ‘Wicked Annabella’ over to Dave and the other members of The Kinks. The younger Davies’ vocals are suitably threatening and the group’s playing on the finished track is loud and live. Pete Quaife remembers the song as an example of that summer’s temporary spirit of collaboration between Davies and the rest of the group. During the breakdown from 1.12 to 1.19, Quaife picks out a snatch of Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring’. “It popped into my head while we were going through it and I just threw it in. It just so happened — serendipity — that I ended it at the right point and went back into ‘Wicked Annabella’.” Davies retained the improvisation for the finished recording.

  ‘Wicked Annabella’ is another pure Village Green character song, a pen portrait of the local witch, although it should be noted that the tales of Annabella’s wickedness are all second-hand and are being employed to keep children in their beds and out of the wild woods. In this respect, it is another psychedelic nursery rhyme like ‘Phenomenal Cat’, though too scary (and noisy) for a lullaby. As the recording draws to its extended close, the tape is doused in echo and reverb, becoming a suitably infernal cauldron of feedback and disembodied laughter.29

  The Kinks never performed ‘Wicked Annabella’ outside the studio, but in recent years it has become one of the highlights of Dave Davies’ live set. “Wooah! Bogeyman’s coming!” he shouts at the start of the great version to be found on Rock Bottom, Live At The Bottom Line, and proceeds to tear it up, proving thirty years on that the song now belongs entirely to him.

  Monica

  Another character song squirreled away at the end of Side Two, ‘Monica’ is one of a line of Kinks calypsos that began in 1965 with ‘I’m On An Island’ and would go on to include ‘Apeman’ and ‘Supersonic Rocket Ship’. Fortunately for ‘Monica’ and us, Davies mostly eschews the cod-Jamaican delivery he would later employ on such tunes. Over a pleasant syncopated backing of acoustic guitar, congas and organ (no bass until the second verse), he croons a sort-of love song to the village prostitute. “I like the way I did ‘Monica’,” he told Craw-daddy. “I didn’t actually say she was a prostitute. . . . If you say somebody is a prostitute or a hooker you’re restricted.”xcv

  Recorded in the spring of 1968, ‘Monica’ is the flimsiest thing on TKATVGPS, but as far as Davies was concerned, the song was a keeper from the beginning. He selected it for Four More Respected Gentlemen and both editions of TKATVGPS, and The Kinks recorded it twice for the BBC, on July 1st and July 9th 1968. In 2001, the second of these takes was released on BBC Sessions 1964–1977 and is chiefly remarkable for Pete Quaife’s bass fluff at 1.23 and a different, non-faded ending, which is to say it isn’t very remarkable at all.

  One gets the impression that Davies thought he had been very clever with ‘Monica’, maybe even subversive. “It’s about a prostitute and the BBC has played it,” he bragged to Melody Maker when the album was released, although perhaps he should have been more circumspect about admitting it. Four months later, Auntie Beeb would have her revenge by banning The Kinks’ new single ‘Plastic Man’ for its shameless use of the word ‘bum’.

  People Take Pictures Of Each Other

  “I’m not very witty at all. I feel intensely about a lot of things but it might come out in a funny sounding way,” said Ray Davies in late 1969. “If you can make a funny song and then have one very hard line, you reach people. That’s just a construction thing.”xcvi

  ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’, ‘Big Sky’, ‘All Of My Friends Were There’: TKATVGPS has quite a few Ray Davies songs built on this artful blueprint — the sting in the tale, the one very hard line — but none of them does it quite like ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’, and no other Village Green track packs the same emotional punch. In its final minutes, the album’s mix of frivolity and despair achieves a new level of intensity. Davies p
rogrammed the song as the LP’s finale on both the twelve and fifteen-track versions, and may even have written it with that purpose in mind (viz. the schematic reappearance of the oak tree from ‘Village Green’ and the family snaps from ‘Picture Book’). It works. Set against the songs that have preceded it, ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’ is both a conclusion and a confession; the entire lyric is the long “very hard line” that Davies hopes will connect. Where ‘Picture Book’ concluded with a bang, ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’, and TKATVGPS, ends with a whimper: please, don’t show me any more.

  Davies told Mark Breyer and Rik Vittenson that the song was inspired by a wedding he and Rasa had attended. “The guy was in the navy . . . and he put a flag up in the back garden . . . and they all stood there and they took a picture. And then she got the camera and took a picture of him . . . and he got the camera and took a picture of her. . . . That’s where that came about. I just got the line and then built on that.””xcvii ‘Raymond Douglas’ expands on this in X-Ray: “That lyric sums up the way I feel about the world of photographic images . . . I think that pictures only encourage nostalgia. I like to remember people the way they were. . . . The camera may not lie, but it is not entirely honest.”xcviii

  ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’ resonates far beyond its photographic inspiration, with the kind of authorial empathy and acuity most poets or novelists would give their eyeteeth for. As Rob Chapman writes, the lyric “offers a cameo of human beings validating a transitory existence and also serves as a metaphorical postscript for the swinging ’60’s”.xcix That it does so while set to a silly vaudeville piano vamp is a mark of Ray Davies’ peculiar genius. The tune dashes up and down the ivories, nearly falling over itself in the process. The Kinks keep on top of the arrangement — just about — while Davies sounds out of breath and on edge. There is something neurotic about the wordless vocal tics that punctuate the song, and something desperate about the singsong round the piano as the track fades. The summer has passed by, childhood and freedom have vanished, love has been stolen away. You used to matter to someone, but now you don’t. You might as well sing. It’s all you’ve got — that, and your photographs.30

  At the end of the song, Davies brilliantly restates his album’s double-edged preoccupation with the past, four lines that are as spare as a haiku. In 1975, he would close Schoolboys In Disgrace, and bring the curtain down on the era of Kinks’ conceptual productions like Preservation and Soap Opera, with the determined self-admonishment of ‘No More Looking Back’. But in 1968, things are less clear-cut and more pensive. At the conclusion of TKATVGPS, Davies displays a vulnerability that is deeply affecting. In the years that followed, the leader of The Kinks would hide behind hard rock, Big Ideas, and a self-consciousness about the ‘craft’ of songwriting which often stifled his work. Here, he sounds exhausted and desperate but maybe on the verge of the freedom alluded to so longingly throughout the album. All he has to do is look away . . .

  Thrillingly, ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’ has the distinction of being the only track on the original album to attract a contemporary cover version — El Salvadorian group Los Comets who, in 1969, recorded the song as ‘Hay Que Respetar . . . ’31

  Ironically, for one so sensitive to the despotism of the photographic image, (“It makes events which should be ambiguous turn into absolutes, and it disallows personal interpretation,”c) Ray Davies cannot resist putting a gloss on the pictures that adorn the sleeve of TKATVGPS. “When one of the founder members leaves, the band is dead. Once you lose the thing — the four originals getting together, going through it together, forming the band together — once that goes, the group is a different group. That picture signs it off.”ci

  Chapter Three — Pictures

  In The Sand

  In a sense, Ray Davies’ final selection and sequencing of tracks on TKATVGPS is his greatest achievement. After a year of piecemeal recording sessions, he created a coherent, intelligent work. The LP is a concept album in the truest sense of that much-abused term, held together not by narrative and rock star hubris but by sound, imagery and ideas. “The subtext to the whole record was more interesting than the songs themselves,”cii says the young narrator of X-Ray, but he is misguided (and so is Davies for putting such slyly defensive words into his mouth). The secret of the record is that the songs create a subtext by virtue of being mostly wonderful songs. In later Davies concept works, starting with Arthur the following year, too many tracks sound like they’ve been shrunk or expanded to fit the premeditated subject matter.32 And as any weary listener to Preservation Act 2 will tell you, you can’t whistle subtext.

  Davies was an inveterate and compulsive writer (taking into account his contributions to At The Eleventh Hour, Kinks recording dates and record releases, it can be estimated that he composed at least twenty songs in the first three months of 1968 alone) and the themes of the album are the themes of most of his work at this time. As Andrew Sandoval notes, many Davies songs from late 1967 to late 1968 would fit easily onto TKATVGPS, largely because Davies was principally writing about himself.

  “Over the years I have left a lot of songs off records,” Davies told Peter Doggett in 1993. “I get bored with songs — not because they’re bad, but because I’ve moved on. You always feel you should record the most recent thing you’ve written.”ciii There follows a survey of Ray Davies songs recorded by The Kinks in the principal period the group was working on TKATVGPS which did not make the final cut of the album, some of which remain obscure. Although, technically, recording began in November 1966 with ‘Village Green’, for obvious reasons I have not included tracks from Something Else By The Kinks nor the attendant singles and flipsides (so no ‘Waterloo Sunset’ or ‘Autumn Almanac’).

  The Kinks were so productive in 1968 that they also found time to record two fabulous Dave Davies singles (‘Lincoln County’ b/w ‘There Is No Life Without Love’, and ‘Hold My Hand’ b/w ‘Creeping Jean’) plus a few tracks for Davies’ still unreleased solo album (including ‘Crying’ and ‘Do You Wish To Be A Man?’). I do not have space to discuss those songs here, but it can only be hoped that this fine album will finally receive a legal release in the coming year or so.

  Finally, The Kinks recorded three instrumentals in this period. ‘Easy Come, There You Went’ and ‘Spotty Grotty Anna’ are studio jams or warm-ups. Both circulate on bootleg, although ‘Spotty Grotty Anna’ briefly received an official release in the early 1980s, against Davies’ wishes. The track was named in honour of London’s most notorious groupies (“Every group knew her,” remembers Pete Quaife, “especially the Dave Clark Five”). The third instrumental remains unheard in any form, although Ray Davies has spoken warmly of it in interviews. Its title? ‘Mick Avory’s Underpants’.

  She’s Got Everything

  If it sounds like a relic from the glory days of The Kinks, that’s because it is. ‘She’s Got Everything’ was more than two years old by the time it appeared as the b-side of ‘Days’. Recording took place during the spring of 1966, although the song may have received additional overdubs for its belated 1968 appearance. The track is an unreconstructed rave of the sort not minted by The Kinks since ‘Till The End Of The Day’, with a Dave Davies guitar solo that is both timeless and utterly ridiculous.

  ‘She’s Got Everything’ is not a product of the Village Green concept in any of its incarnations, but Ray Davies’ decision to release it when and how he did is interesting. In the summer of 1968, despite having many more recent Kinks tracks to choose from, he selected a song that, even when it was recorded, must have sounded old-fashioned. The tracklisting for TKATVGPS was still in flux, and it is clear that Davies did not want to waste any potential candidates for the finished album as b-sides. It seems appropriate, however, that the nostalgia of ‘Days’ should be matched with a song that recalls The Kinks in their hunting jackets and leather boots — and, given the late date of its recording, one that is almost a knowing pastiche of the sound formerly
made by that group (as is the manic absolutism of the lyric).

  Lavender Hill

  ‘Lavender Hill’ was recorded in August or September 1967, at roughly the same time as ‘Autumn Almanac’, and features some prominent use of Mellotron and backwards tapes. One of the projects Davies was reported to be working on in 1967 was an album of songs about London but although there is a Lavender Hill in Battersea, South London, made famous by the Ealing comedy The Lavender Hill Mob, Davies makes it clear in the song’s opening lines that his Lavender Hill is a make-believe place, a sun-drenched refuge where songbirds sing and people have tea and biscuits, and dream of daffodils and summer breezes. The idea of Lavender Hill as Davies’ very own promised land is reinforced by the reference to sugar and milk i.e. milk and honey. It is another wistful song of escape by the beleaguered leader of The Kinks.

  After its fleeting appearance on The Great Lost Kinks Album, this lovely song has never been reissued. The only place to hear it (and ‘Pictures In The Sand’, ‘Rosemary Rose’, ‘Misty Water’, ‘Where Did My Spring Go?’, ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ etc etc) is on one of the numerous CD bootlegs containing the GLKA tracks.33

  Rosemary Rose

  Yet another song to mention treasured holiday snaps (taken, as in ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’, at the age of just three), ‘Rosemary Rose’ is a Ray Davies miniature from late 1967 or early 1968. In a few short lines, Davies sketches out the thoughts and feelings of a parent as they ponder their teenage daughter’s growing pains, caught somewhere between liquorice and cigarettes. At well under two minutes, the track is notable for Nicky Hopkins’ baroque harpsichord work and, of course, the reappearance of Rose, the Davies sister who emigrated to Australia with her husband Arthur, and the inspiration for Face To Face’s ‘Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home’. It sounds transitional, half way from a Ray Davies solo offering to a Village Green character vignette. Officially unavailable for nearly thirty years, ‘Rosemary Rose’ is another suppressed gem from The Great Lost Kinks Album.