The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society

by Andy Miller

  ‘Pictures In The Sand’, meanwhile, would have fitted easily on TKATVGPS. Only Ray Davies knows why it remains relatively unheard.

  Misty Water

  Another Village Green character cameo. Over the years Ray Davies has written his fair share of lyrics about the demon alcohol, but none quite so fizzy as ‘Misty Water’. Pitched at the other end of the social realist scale from ‘Alcohol’ or ‘When Work Is Over’, the song is a cartoon of Maria and her daughters and their fondness for a spot of the misty stuff (and ‘misty glade’ is a euphemism for pub worthy of Dylan Thomas). The singer shares the family’s taste for fog. Things go better, Maria is lovelier, hell, everything is lovelier, when seen through a misty haze — in fact, it’s paradise! He is not just drunk on alcohol, but on his memories.

  Musically, ‘Misty Water’ is upbeat and underdeveloped — mostly piano and organ until 2.07, when Dave Davies appears with a half-hearted holler and a power chord or two. The lead and background vocals seem to disagree about exactly who likes misty water, although this may be a deliberately befuddled mix-up. The track was recorded in May 1968 and was selected for Four More Respected Gentlemen. However, when that album was cancelled, the song disappeared, surfacing only briefly on The Great Lost Kinks Album and the withdrawn 10” ep that accompanied PRT’s contentious The Kinks’ Greatest Hits/Dead End Street compilation in 1983. It has not been reissued.

  Till Death Us Do Part

  Recorded in September 1968, ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ is another unjustly neglected minor classic. Written for the big-screen adaptation of the successful television comedy series (and at one stage considered as a Ray Davies solo single — see ‘Plastic Man’), to date the song has only ever been officially released on The Great Lost Kinks Album. A version using The Kinks’ backing track with one Chas Mills on vocals was included on the film’s soundtrack LP.

  The original TV series of Till Death Us Do Part featured an East-end bigot, Alf Garnett, and his long-suffering wife, daughter and son-in-law. The film depicted the Garnett family living through the London Blitz. However, for his song ‘Till Death Us Do Part’, Ray Davies ignored the hectoring tone of the series and the film. Alf Garnett’s abrasiveness is nowhere to be found. Instead, Davies penned a tender observation of the state of holy wedlock, revealing the lost little man behind Garnett’s loud-mouthed façade. The Kinks recorded the song as a slightly unsteady pub serenade, with banjo and mournful trombone accompanying one of Davies’ prettiest melodies and a touching vocal performance. He catches the vulnerability and faint hopelessness of the lyric. Life has left me behind, so let’s accept the small consolation we have — to be together till death (and beyond). The effect is both anti-romantic and rather moving. And is that Mrs. Davies on backing vocals . . . ?

  ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ is currently only available on bootleg.

  When I Turn Off The Living Room Light39

  Another song written for television. In early 1969, a year after At The Eleventh Hour, producer Ned Sherrin invited Davies to contribute to his new series Where Was Spring?. This was not a revue like the previous show, but an episodic romantic comedy starring Eleanor Bron and John Fortune, albeit with a satirical edge. As noted above, The Kinks recorded five songs for the programme, which were accompanied on screen by Klaus Voorman’s illustrations. The group itself never appeared in front of the cameras.

  ‘When I Turn Off The Living Room Light’ is one of the most popular “lost” Kinks tracks, but over the years the opening verse has caused a degree of consternation among some fans, a few erroneously interpreting it as anti-Semitic. One should recall the context in which the song was written. Whereas At The Eleventh Hour had required Ray Davies to lift stories from newspapers, his songs for Where Was Spring? were concerned with the vicissitudes of life, love and sex, the themes of the programme. It was down to Davies to fulfil the brief of that week’s show, hence song titles like ‘Let’s Take Off All Our Clothes’ and ‘Darling I Respect You’. In the case of ‘When I Turn Off The Living Room Light’, the lyric is wilfully, exaggeratedly seedy. Lust conquers all, even the prejudices of the singer. The small but crucial shift of emphasis in the final verse — we turn the light off because we’re uptight and ugly — is a twist worthy of Randy Newman, but a careless listener might miss the irony entirely, and a few have done. What is certain is that, heard cold on a Kinks’ compilation album and with no knowledge of its TV origins, the song retains its power to amuse, unsettle and confuse in equal measure.

  The Kinks recorded ‘When I Turn Off The Living Room Light’ at the BBC’s Riverside Sound Studios in Hammersmith on February 4th 1969. The track was first released in April 1970 on a Reprise mail order sampler album called The Big Ball, before being briefly revived for The Great Lost Kinks Album in 1973. It finally received a Ray Davies-sanctioned release on BBC Sessions 1964–1977. Although the song is emphatically not a Village Green-era composition, I include it (and the few other film and TV songs that still exist) because I think it shows that, when freed from the pressure of producing hit singles for The Kinks, Davies was still on a roll. Far from collapsing under the failure of TKATVGPS, his muse was in great shape. As we shall see, ‘Plastic Man’ was both an aberration and a turning point.

  Davies himself thought the song was an insubstantial effort and was unimpressed by its popularity. “Americans seem to love that song,” he told Jon Savage. “I don’t know why they like it. It’s like a lot of American things, films or whatever — it’s all over in the first five minutes, and the rest of it is filling.”cxii

  King Kong

  The proto-glam production, the monster title, the Marc Bolan-like vocal warble . . . ‘King Kong’ seems to be a wicked parody of Bolan’s group T-Rex, until you remember that The Kinks recorded ‘King Kong’ at least eighteen months before ‘Ride A White Swan’ provided T-Rex with their first hit single. All of which makes the thumping ‘King Kong’ even more of a puzzle. Like ‘Plastic Man’, an elaborate production has been applied to a two-dimensional song. Everyone wants to be as big, powerful and famous as King Kong — and that’s that. It is not known if the track was recorded in October 1968 (with ‘Big Sky’ and ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’), in March 1969 during the ‘Plastic Man’ sessions, or at some point in-between. However, so removed is ‘King Kong”s lyric from the concerns of TKATVGPS, it may be that the song, like ‘Plastic Man’, was recorded with a view to a specific single release. The Kinks issued it as the b-side of ‘Plastic Man’ and recorded nothing like it again.

  Plastic Man

  ‘Plastic Man’ is an awful record and an admission of defeat. What’s more, Ray Davies knew it. “This record has outgrown what a pop record can be. This record has more love for people,” he bullshitted in Melody Maker. “It’s probably not the greatest song I’ve ever written and not the greatest song I’ll ever write. But it’s the only song I could have written at this time. Even though I hated it when I first heard the acetate! But I think it could be a hit.”cxiii

  There’s the rub. Post-TKATVGPS, a hit was what The Kinks desperately needed. They knew it and so did the rest of the pop world. As Derek Johnson wrote in his review of the single in NME, “a lot hinges on this record, because The Kinks have been out of the public.eye recently — and their last couple of discs haven’t exactly been world-beaters . . .”cxiv In Melody Maker’s Blind Date column, Keith Moon once again analysed The Who’s former rivals with sardonic accuracy. After listening to just a few bars of ‘Plastic Man’, he shouted out the naffest thing he could think of — “Tony Blackburn!”40

  “They’ve done some nice things. ‘See My Friend’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’ but they haven’t done much since. I’ve liked some of the songs on their albums. I don’t think they’ve got a lot together . . . No, that’s not a lot of bottle. That means, not a lot of good.”cxv

  How galling this must have been for Ray Davies. After a dry spell of their own, The Who were back in the top ten with ‘Pinball Wizard’. Ominously, it heralded the birth
of Pete Townshend’s oft-discussed Deaf, Dumb And Blind Boy rock opera, now renamed simply Tommy. Here were The Kinks, whose own visionary concept LP had already sunk without trace, knocking out a single that sounded like a cheap and gutless rehash of ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’ — and perhaps beginning to get the sense that Tommy was going to clean up. ‘Plastic Man’ stalled outside the top thirty.

  “I hate it,” Davies has said. “It was a desperate attempt. Somebody said that we’d got to have a record out to do the tour, and that’s what they got.”cxvi

  In early 1969, Davies was in a bind. Pye was reluctant to release a single from TKATVGPS, thereby sealing the album’s flop status. With a heavy irony, the record company was also pressuring him into issuing The Kinks’ recording of ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ as a Ray Davies solo single. “Ray has wanted to do some solo singing, too,” Dave Davies told Beat Instrumental when his new single ‘Hold My Hand’ was released. “He wrote the song for the Alf Garnett movie and they naturally wanted him to bring out a record on it because it would be a good seller. But he somehow just didn’t want to do it. I think he’s a bit afraid of being typecast as a solo singer.”cxvii No doubt Ray Davies was fuming. He had let The Kinks have the album that was originally intended to be his grand personal statement, and then watched as Pye promptly abandoned it. Now they were asking him to launch a solo career with a film soundtrack tie-in. Not surprisingly, he refused.

  A compromise was reached. The Kinks would record a new, specially written song for release in the spring; better that than a repeat of the ‘Wonderboy’ fiasco a year earlier, when Davies had been coerced into finding a single in the tape vault. He had produced hits under record company pressure before — ‘Set Me Free’, for instance — but up in the huge, empty house in Borehamwood, Davies faltered badly. ‘Plastic Man’ is entirely without warmth or charisma, a rank impersonation of The Kinks delivered through gritted teeth, as fake and phony as its subject. Unbelievably, it has the distinction of being the first Kinks single recorded and mixed on an eight-track desk, but the extra studio polish does little to hide the resentment at its core.

  In the press, Davies declared that ‘Plastic Man’ marked the end of his solo ramblings under the guise of The Kinks’ name. “What is important is that it’s the first ‘group’ record that has been made for a long time,” he said penitently. “It certainly expresses my brother Dave’s feelings. But it’s a part of each one of us.”cxviii Shortly afterwards, the part of ‘Plastic Man’ that was Pete Quaife left The Kinks for good.

  Nevertheless, the plan nearly worked. ‘Plastic Man’ was warmly received by disc jockeys and music journalists, who welcomed back what sounded like the ‘brilliant piss-takers’ of yore. John Dalton was swiftly ushered back into the fold and television appearances were lined up. A promotional film was shot. It looked like The Kinks were on course for a sizeable hit. And then the BBC instituted its ludicrous ban for the single’s use of the word ‘bum’ and ‘Plastic Man’ rapidly turned to dust, leaving Davies complaining about “a BBC monopoly” in Record Mirror: “I suppose it’s doing as well as any record could be expected to do that’s been out for four weeks and hasn’t had a television plug,” he sniffedcxix. As a result, the bespoke single sold even fewer copies than ‘Wonderboy’. The Kinks turned to Granada TV, Arthur and America, for preservation.

  ‘Plastic Man’ marks the moment in Ray Davies’ career when his plans for an artistic life outside The Kinks came to a twenty-five year halt, only partially interrupted by his 1985 television film Return To Waterloo.41 Had ‘Plastic Man’ been a hit — or even had it been any good — Davies might yet have been able to divide the strands of his work, as he had wanted to in The Kinks’ better days. After the failure of TKATVGPS, ‘Plastic Man’ represented his final opportunity to separate Ray Davies and The Kinks, but it too failed. Instead, from hereon in Davies tried to fuse his personal musical ambitions with The Kinks’ brand. Sometimes this approach succeeded — Arthur, Muswell Hillbillies, half of Preservation Act 1. On other occasions, the results were disastrous. After Schoolboys In Disgrace, the balance swung back to the group, or at least what Davies thought people wanted from a rock group. The Kinks became a polished arena act, cranking out the hits and tracks from shiny-but-patchy new albums. By the late 70s, those albums were going top ten on Billboard and selling hundreds of thousands of copies. It took a decade, but having been denied the opportunity in the 1960’s, Ray Davies finally broke America. It was a hollow victory. By that point, The Kinks had become a plastic phenomenon, and the intricacies and sensibilities of the 60’s group that bore their name had long since perished. They were fixed in the pantheon of Classic Rock™, well respected, doing the best things so conservatively.

  Where Did My Spring Go?

  The failure of TKATVGPS affected Ray Davies deeply. After the humiliation of ‘Plastic Man’, he threw himself into the writing and recording of Arthur, a project that was a commission from Granada Television. Locked away in his new mansion, we know Davies struggled to write. Granada’s last-minute decision to cancel the television play left him with half of a finished product, a soundtrack but no movie to go with it. While Arthur has its share of marvellous songs, the production is more generic than on the previous few Kinks albums, and the self-indulgence of late 60’s rock has started to impinge both on the group’s sound and Davies’ writing. The Kinks’ unique subtlety is beginning to drain away.

  And then, in late 1969, the doors to America swung wide open. Not only was The Kinks’ performance ban rescinded but, thanks to a self-consciously serious rock press and Reprise’s assiduous (if patronising) ‘God Save The Kinks’ campaign, Arthur was received as a work of genius. Rolling Stone ran two reviews of it in one issue. “A masterpiece on every level,” said Mike Daly, while Greil Marcus called Arthur “the best British album of 1969.” “It shows that Pete Townshend still has worlds to conquer, and that The Beatles still have a lot of catching up to do,”cxx he wrote, a sentence that must have put Marcus on the Davies Christmas card list for years to come. Although Arthur was not a hit, and The Kinks comeback tour of America was often a shambles — the musicians had never even used stage monitors before — the basis was there for a career revival. The Kinks had a future again. Over the next few years, the tension between Davies’ desire to carry on exploiting the group and his highfalutin musical ambitions would result in some very uneasy listening. Ironically, the wit and decorum of TKATVGPS would soon seem like a golden age.

  So ‘Where Did My Spring Go?’ seems like a fitting way to end this book. The song was written for the second episode of Where Was Spring? (and recorded at the BBC’s Riverside Sound Studios on Jan 28th 1969) but in all other respects it is the perfect coda to the story of TKATVGPS. Under a conspicuously pastoral title, its lyric confronts the album’s theme of ageing with humour and honesty. The group’s performance is tight and well thought-out and Davies’ restrained production, though no doubt the result of circumstance, allows the song to breathe. He sounds properly agitated as he reels off a list of his lost properties; teeth, hair, shoulders, chest, hormones, energy, skin, muscles, liver, heart, bones, not to mention ‘go’. Even as the lyric drolly subverts the romantic clichés of walking in the rain and candlelit nights of lovemaking, Davies sings the lines in a panic-stricken yelp, while The Kinks whip up a nerve-jangling racket behind him. The singer has been used, employed, destroyed . . . such existential humour would not find another outlet in British pop until the arrival of The Smiths in the early 1980s.42

  Davies considers this performance of ‘Where Did My Spring Go?’ to be a demo and nothing more, henceits current obscurity (The Great Lost Kinks Album and bootleg only), yet as far as we know, he has never tried to rerecord the song. Sometimes, however, a demo catches something a more polished production might miss or obliterate. In the case of ‘Where Did My Spring Go?’, the January 1969 recording captures the last gasp of the original Kinks in their prime. It shows Ray Davies could have carried on writing songs
and making records in the vein of TKATVGPS. For whatever reason — Pete Quaife’s departure, the changing rock scene, Davies’ need for new challenges, commercial opportunities for The Kinks in the USA, the intensely personal letdown of TKATVGPS — he chose not to. Perhaps he had simply gone as far as he could with these versions of the group and himself.

  The Kinks were dead — long live The Kinks.

  Epilogue — The Echoing Green

  Days they’ll remember all their lives . . . Have you ever wondered what The Kinks will tell their children and grandchildren years hence? About the days when they used to sing and play — and people screamed and applauded. We’re lucky enough to be able to appreciate the Kinks now, when they are at the height of their stardom. Lucky, aren’t we?

  Fabulous 208, September 7th 1968

  In Russia, nostalgia is regarded as an illness. Or at least it used to be. In the good old days.

  Simon Munnery, The League Against Tedium

  The TKATVGPS revival began within months of the album’s release and summary disappearance. As noted, the American music press acclaimed The Kinks as prophets without honour in their own land, an accolade Ray Davies was all too happy to accept. British magazines quickly fell in behind their cool older cousins; an early issue of Zigzag carried a retrospective appreciation of The Kinks, accompanied by a photograph of Ray Davies on Hampstead Heath on that sunny August afternoon in 1968. Although the album was unavailable for many years, its tracks were spilled across cheap compilations like Golden Hour Of The Kinks. Those in the know compiled their own tapes of the LP.

  The age of the compact disc opened up many groups’ back catalogues to exploration and exploitation — and few groups’ back catalogues have been exploited quite so thoroughly as that of The Kinks. Listeners who only knew the group from their 60’s hits discovered an album full of songs as good as those golden oldies, but one that was fresh and unfamiliar. Like Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter or No Other by Gene Clark, classic album status was bestowed on this lost artefact, pulling in yet more admirers and converts (and back catalogue sales — in a reversal of fortune, these days TKATVGPS is reportedly The Kinks’ best-selling original album).