The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society

by Andy Miller

  Mr. Songbird

  There is a famous Swiss story about a depressed man who goes to see the doctor.

  “Doctor,” says the man, “I am miserable. Everything is desperate and nothing I do seems to make it better. Please help me.”

  “You’re in luck,” says the doctor. “The great clown Grock is in town. Go and see him perform. He’s so funny! He could cheer anybody up, however low they’re feeling.”

  The man looks infinitely sad. “But doctor,” he says. “I am Grock.”

  ‘Mr. Songbird’ is Ray Davies’ version of the story of Grock (it was a London pop paper cliché at the time to refer to The Kinks’ frontman’s “sad clown face”). The song is about the power of music, not just to those who listen to it but also those who make music like Davies himself. When Mr. Songbird sings, everyone’s problems seem very small. Like the dark cloud in X-Ray that is dispersed by a few plays of ‘Phenomenal Cat’, a little melody will keep the devil at bay — but don’t doubt for a minute the devil is there. The song’s concluding phrase is Davies’ ‘one hard line’ technique in full effect, the punch line of the Grock story. There is real fear in it.

  ‘Mr. Songbird’ is a sublime Davies creation; its blithe melody and toe-tapping arrangement being both perfect accompaniment and cover for the concerns of the lyric. Nicky Hopkins’ Mellotron flute part is faultless, blocking out chords in the verses and trilling the songbird responses in the chorus.34 Pete Quaife and Mick Avory play with real lightness and care. Davies’ vocal may be double tracked, but it is unusually sincere and direct. Why the decision was made to release ‘Won-derboy’ as a single when The Kinks had a track like this in the can is a mystery. ‘Mr. Songbird’ is one of the high points of TKATVGPS.

  Or rather, it should have been. Probably recorded in late 1967 (another potential solo number?) Davies selected it for Four More Respected Gentlemen, and then did so again for the twelve-track TKATVGPS. The track was duly released in Europe as part of that album. But in the October interim while Davies was frantically revising the LP, ‘Mr. Songbird’ and ‘Days’ were dropped. ‘Days’ had been freely available as a single but, excepting its inclusion on The Great Lost Kinks Album, ‘Mr. Songbird’ was inexplicably shelved for the next thirty years. In 1998, the song finally received a full release on the British reissue of the album, although, to date, it remains unavailable in the USA. What a waste. ‘Mr. Songbird’ is far too good — no, great — a record to be forgotten, least of all by the man who sang it.

  Berkeley Mews

  In August 1970, The Kinks scored their biggest hit since ‘Sunny Afternoon’ in 1966. By his own admission, no one was more surprised by this than Pete Quaife. He had left The Kinks partly because he felt the group was winding down; few people seriously expected Ray Davies to deliver another top ten single, let alone a smash. “And then along came ‘Lola’,” Quaife says wryly. He was even more surprised when he turned the record over and played its flipside. “I thought, is that me? Wait a minute — it is me!”

  ‘Lola’ was backed with ‘Berkeley Mews’, a track recorded by the original line-up of The Kinks some two and a half years earlier, in late 1967 or early 1968. After Nicky Hopkins’ barrelhouse piano introduction, the whole group crashes in, somewhat sluggishly pounding away, with Mellotron, handclaps and even a saxophone joining in for the song’s high-kicking coda (Davies’ vocal, incidentally, is quite brilliant, teetering between pain and pride). It is one of the oddest productions of the Village Green era, but still a classic kinks recording.35

  Like ‘Misty Water’, Davies initially liked ‘Berkeley Mews’ enough to shortlist it for Four More Respected Gentlemen but changed his mind for TKATVGPS. The song’s broken-hearted account of a drunken one-night stand sounds distinctly autobiographical. Berkeley Mews was (and still is) located round the corner from Pye Records at Marble Arch, although Davies may simply have liked the genteel, champagne-and-chandeliers resonance of the name. Like ‘Starstruck’, the lyric has little to do with the Village Green concept; unlike ‘Starstruck’, the candid ‘Berkeley Mews’ failed to scrape onto the finished TKATVGPS.

  In the UK, ‘Lola’ was huge, selling in comparable numbers to The Kinks’ biggest hits from the sixties. Ironically, the single’s success meant that 270,000 British homes got to hear ‘Berkeley Mews’ as well — roughly a quarter of a million more than the album that spawned it.

  Polly

  Recorded in late 1967 or early 1968, ‘Polly’ is the sound of The Kinks firing on all cylinders, combining the familiar Davies theme of the not-so-innocent abroad in the big city with a full, coherent group sound of the sort not found on either Something Else By The Kinks or TKATVGPS (‘Love Me Till The Sun Shines’, ‘Funny Face’ and ‘Wicked Annabella’ are all rave-ups written by and / or showcasing Dave Davies). It proves that, when he wanted to, Ray Davies could produce Kinks records in this period that were simultaneously smart and noisy. In the case of ‘Polly’, he may have felt the song was a throwback to Face To Face and ‘Big Black Smoke’, hence its consignment to the b-side of ‘Won-derboy’. “I didn’t like ‘Polly’ at all,” Davies admitted to Jon Savage.” ‘Pretty Polly Garter’, that’s all I wanted to say really, I don’t know why. . .”civ Nevertheless, Davies thought enough of the track to select it for Four More Respected Gentlemen.

  In fact, there was a tragic source of inspiration for ‘Polly’ and ‘Big Black Smoke’. “I knew a girl who was like that,” Davies told Savage. “She ran our first fan club.

  She died of junk.”cv Once again, the pastoral yearning for home and lost innocence in The Kinks records of this period has a personal foundation.

  In one other obvious respect, ‘Polly’ is closely related to the pure Village Green character concept, Polly Garter being the name of a character from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. It should be noted, however, that Davies only borrowed the name. His Polly has little or nothing to do with the Polly Garter of Under Milk Wood?36 Pretty Polly was also a brand of popular ladies’ stockings — the song was actually called ‘Pretty Polly’ on early pressings of the single — so there is at least one extra joke hidden in her surname. If Polly’s are the legs on the advertising hoardings, it explains why those all those people can’t be wrong and she is such a hit with the fellas.

  Wonderboy

  The Kinks recorded ‘Wonderboy’ (or ‘Wonder Boy’ — the title has varied for thirty-five years) in early 1968. It is that rare animal in The Kinks’ catalogue from the Village Green era: a potentially great song undermined by its treatment in the studio. Down in the Pye basement, Davies’ inspiration seems temporarily to have deserted him. The production is flat, there are few dynamics in the arrangement and The Kinks sound listless and unconvinced by the song (which, according to Pete Quaife, they were). The combination of a facile clip-clop rhythm, weedy background vocals and Nicky Hopkins’ one-speed keyboard arpeggios produces something un-mistakeably kitsch, a style Davies had flirted with on his records but usually pulled back from. Unfortunately, this time he confirmed and compounded the offence by singing “as if recently stunned by a heavy blow from a blunt instrument,” as Chris Welch put it in Melody Maker. It was all too much. Initially, we know Davies was proud of his new composition; but for whatever reason, when the time came to capture ‘Wonderboy’ on tape, he buried it.

  The pity is that ‘Wonderboy’ conceals one of Davies’ most insightful and compassionate lyrics. Supposedly penned during a vodka-fuelled long night of the soul, it sees Davies offering both despair and hope to a newborn baby. At the time, the Denmark Productions court case was still dragging on (as it would continue to do throughout most of 1968) and Davies was caught up in a doomed love affair, the same one that would inspire the sweet sorrow of ‘Days’. ‘Wonderboy’ tries to find wisdom in the mire. Life is what you make it, Davies says to the baby boy, but even if you make a mess of it, that’s all part of the wonder of being alive. Life may be lonely but that’s no reason to be sad, because the rest is up to you.

  Alth
ough ‘Wonderboy”s lyric suggests mistakes are all part of life’s rich pageant, whoever made the final decision to issue the track as a single, it was not a good one. Within weeks of its half-expected failure on the charts, the record had been pretty much disowned by Ray Davies. “It should never have been released,” he told Keith Altham in August. After a few promotional appearances and the unsuccessful package tour of April 1968, the song was dumped from The Kinks’ live set and the group never performed it again. To date, Davies has not revisited it in his solo live shows nor, in contrast to ‘Days’, has the song been much covered by other artists (Eddi Reader being the only notable exception). It seems that ‘Wonderboy’, like much of TKATVGPS, reminds Davies of the beginning of an unhappy period in his life, personally and professionally.37 “It felt that (sic.) the people who bought the record had not understood my own little subtext,” he writes in X-Ray. “They were buying a Kinks record. To me it was a cry for help.”cvi

  ‘Wonderboy’ has a reputation as John Lennon’s favourite Kinks record, but Lennon never complimented Davies on the song directly: the story came back to him via Grenville Collins, who had heard from a third party that Lennon had been spotted in a restaurant or nightclub (the tale varies in the telling) demanding that the single be played over and over again. “I guess that approval from my peers meant that ‘Wonder Boy’ had not been a complete mistake,” wrote Davies many years later.cvii The story may be true or it may not, but aside from the sympathy one feels for Lennon’s fellow diners or dancers — Kinks fans or no — the anecdote speaks volumes about the group’s diminished status in the spring of 1968. The Kinks’ new single had unceremoniously flopped, and Ray Davies was reduced to taking comfort from the second-hand patronage of a Beatle.

  Did You See His Name

  ‘Did You See His Name’ was one of the songs Ray Davies wrote in early 1968 for the television series At The Eleventh Hour. “They phoned me on a Monday morning wanting the song by Wednesday,” he said. “I tried to use topical ideas.”cviii Davies drew inspiration for lyrics from stories he found in the newspaper. In the case of ‘Did You See His Name’, the song both relates an incident of petty theft and also the effect the newspaper report of the offence has on the thief i.e. he is so ashamed he kills himself (in “his gas-filled maisonette” — a typically deft Davies detail).

  “My GP, Doctor Aubrey, was an old-school doctor, in the Boer War and all that,” Davies said. “I was looking through various stories for ‘Did You See His Name’ in the local paper because I had to write a story about a man with a tragedy in his life. I saw an obituary for Doctor Aubrey, and it made me feel a real shit for getting stories from ordinary people.”cix

  The Davies compositions from At The Eleventh Hour, as noted above, were not performed by The Kinks, but by the singer Jeannie Lamb and a small orchestra. The Kinks’ version of ‘Did You See His Name’, therefore, is an oddity. As far as we know, the group attempted no other songs from the series. It was hastily recorded in spring 1968 and is something of a bare bones production with Ray playing organ, clocking in at a mere 1.55. Although it is unlikely the track was ever seriously considered for TKATVGPS, it was submitted to Reprise as part of Four More Respected Gentlemen. However, when FMRG was cancelled, ‘Did You See His Name’ remained on the shelf until the 1972 release of Reprise’s The Kink Kronikles collection. Nearly thirty years later, the song made its UK debut on BBC Sessions 1964–1977.

  Days

  In the last few years, ‘Days’ has become something of a pop standard, one of those much admired and covered songs whose provenance may be unclear in many people’s minds. ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’ are synonymous with The Kinks; but after thirty years of radio play, its use in adverts and the sad death of Kirsty MacColl (who scored a top twenty UK hit with the song in 1989), ‘Days’ belongs to a wider audience. It articulates how we would all like to remember our friends, our lovers and our lives: gratefully, and without regret. It is Ray Davies’ wisest song.

  As recounted earlier however, the circumstances of ‘Days” recording in May 1968 were as turbulent as any in The Kinks’ short but volatile life up to that point. The resulting track should be the sound of raised voices and rising panic. Instead, the song shines a light into the darkness and finds solace there.

  ‘Days’ is one of Davies’ great performances, spine-tingling in the bridge as he sings to hold back the night (“It’s like saying goodbye to somebody, then afterwards feeling the fear—you actually are alone,” he later said).cx However, like ‘Wonderboy’, the production is rather flat and it takes a few listens to distinguish between instruments — acoustic and electric guitars, bass, harmonium and piano, with Nicky Hopkins’ trusty Mellotron duplicating string sounds. Mick Avory’s drumming builds at the back of the mix, really only coming alive in the stirring lead-in to the final chorus (2.00 — 2.05). The track ends with the same sort of gentle crescendo that occurs twice in ‘Sitting By The Riverside’, the sound of nostalgia rising up. However, unlike the later song where the cacophony threatens to overwhelm the singer, in ‘Days’ it leads to resolution, finishing in a harmonious D major chord, and the sense of an ending promised by Davies’ lyric.

  Sales of‘Days’ were respectable rather than spectacular. By The Kinks’ high standards, this was a low-key success. “I still have a lot of faith in our latest single ‘Days’. If we like a record and like making it, it becomes a successful venture,” Davies told Record Mirror, with a degree of selective amnesia. “Some releases are slow and perhaps this is one of them.”cxi The Kinks worked it accordingly, recording the number twice for BBC Radio38 and promoting it on Top Of The Pops, Late Night Line-Up and The Basil Brush Show. In fact, ‘Days’ is the ultimate grower, thirty-five years and counting. On first listen, it is a rather underwhelming production, certainly compared to the firework display of hits that preceded it. Part of its modern popularity is due in no small measure to its inclusion on years of budget Kinks’ compilations.

  In October 1968 Davies dropped ‘Days’ from the final version of TKATVGPS. This was despite the song’s obvious lyrical ties to the Village Green concept and its provisional inclusion on both Four More Respected Gentlemen and the twelve-track version of the album. It may be Davies felt that, with his choice limited to fifteen tracks, ‘Days’ had already been made available as a single and could be discarded. However, this does not explain why, save for a valedictory performance for BBC 2’s Pop Goes The Sixties on New Year’s Eve 1969, he and The Kinks then ignored one of their classic songs for the next twenty years. ‘Days’ received its first significant live outing on 18th April 1988 in Berkeley, California. Perhaps in the intervening years, the song grew on Ray Davies like it grew on everyone else (or because it grew on everyone else — ‘David Watts’ and ‘Stop Your Sobbing’ only returned to The Kinks’ live repertoire in the early 1980s after hit cover versions by The Jam and The Pretenders respectively).

  By the early 1990s, ‘Days’ was established as a popular classic, and was finally acknowledged as such by its writer. The track has been reinstated on the most recent British edition of TKATVGPS. The Kinks rerecorded the song for To The Bone in an almost identical arrangement to the original single, and it has become a fixture of Ray Davies’ solo shows, where it is usually preceded by the ‘Daze’ / ‘end of the group’ story. This may be an example of artistic license on Davies’ part, but so what? ‘Days’ is, after all, about coming to terms with your past. When Ray sings ‘Days’, he and the audience share their own nostalgic communion; one of the most expressive and compassionate pop has to offer.

  Pictures In The Sand

  Unlike its photographic partners, Ray Davies has never deemed ‘Pictures In The Sand’ worthy of an official release. Although the track was recorded in the spring of 1968 (a Pye acetate exists coupling the track with ‘Picture Book’), it was never considered for TKATVGPS or for Four More Respected Gentlemen. In 1973, Reprise issued the song on The Great Lost Kinks Album, presumably against Davi
es’ wishes, but since that album’s deletion a couple of years later, ‘Pictures In The Sand’ has never reappeared, and all attempts to include it in subsequent reissue programs have been frustrated.

  Davies’ apparent reluctance to let ‘Pictures In The Sand’ be heard by a wider audience is mystifying. The track is one of his most beguiling creations, a classic Kinks confection of the late 1960’s. Over a polite backing of acoustic guitar, bass, drums, harmonica and organ, Davies sings of sipping tea on the promenade and writing messages on the beach, before leading the chorus into a balmy seaside sing-a-long (even bringing them in with an “all together now!”). The singer knows he is wasting his time trying to draw his love, because pictures in the sand will always be washed away, but he does it anyway. The track draws to a close with a fade reminiscent of the bouzouki-led theme to the 1964 movie Zorba The Greek (a.k.a. ‘Zorba’s Dance’, a top ten British hit for Marcello Minerbi in 1965).

  ‘Pictures In The Sand’ shares the shoulder-shrugging lethargy of ‘Sitting By The Riverside’, although without the latter’s air of defeat. In fact, Davies had attempted to record a similar song during the sessions for Something Else By The Kinks. ’Sand On My Shoes’ shares its melody and arrangement with ‘Tin Soldier Man’, but its lyric is similar in several respects to ‘Pictures In The Sand’. However, ‘Sand On My Shoes’ does not really go anywhere (it comes across as an inferior retread of ‘Sunny Afternoon’) and it is easy to see why Davies scrapped it and refined the concept in later songs.