The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is the sixth studio album by the English rock band the Kinks. Released on 22November 1968, Village Green was a modest seller, but it was lauded by contemporary critics for its songwriting and has subsequently been regarded by commentators as an early concept album. The album was the band's first which failed to chart in either the United Kingdom or United States, and its embrace by America's new underground rock press completed the Kinks' transformation from mid-1960s pop hitmakers to critically favoured cult band.
Ray Davies, the Kinks' frontman, loosely conceptualised the album as a collection of character studies, an idea he based on Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood. Centring on themes of nostalgia, memory and preservation, the album reflects Davies's concerns about the increasing modernisation and encroaching influence of America and Europe on English society. Musically an example of pop or rock music, the album incorporates a range of stylistic influences, including music hall, folk, blues, psychedelia and calypso. It was the first album which Davies produced on his own and was the last to feature the original Kinks line-up, as bassist Pete Quaife departed the band in March1969. It also marked the final collaboration between the Kinks and Nicky Hopkins, a session musician whose playing features heavily on piano, harpsichord and Mellotron.
Other than "Village Green", which was recorded in November1966 and re-recorded in February1967, the album's sessions ran at London's Pye Studios from roughly March to October1968. In addition to the non-album singles "Wonderboy" and "Days", the sessions resulted in numerous tracks, some of which went unreleased for years. The album's planned September1968 release was delayed by two months in the UK after Davies's last-minute decision to rearrange and augment the track listing, but release of the earlier twelve-track edition went ahead in several European countries. The album had no accompanying lead single in the UK, but "Starstruck" was issued in the US and Europe.
Despite its initial commercial shortcomings, Village Green has influenced numerous musical acts, especially American indie artists from the late 1980s and 1990s and Britpop groups including Blur and Oasis. Driven in part by this influence, the album experienced a critical and commercial resurgence in the 1990s, and it has been reissued several times, including an expanded edition in 2018. The album has since become the Kinks' best-selling album in the UK, where the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) certified it silver in 2008 and gold in 2018. It has been included in several critics' and listeners' polls for the best albums of all time, including those published by Rolling Stone magazine and in the book All Time Top 1000 Albums.
Background
In July1965, the Kinks were informally blacklisted from performing in the United States by the American Federation of Musicians. The circumstances that led to the ban are unclear but likely stemmed from several incidents during the band's first US tour; Ray Davies later attributed it to a combination of "bad luck, bad management, [and] bad behaviour". The ban persisted until Ray negotiated its resolution in mid-April1969. Despite the Kinks' recent commercial successes, the band's extensive touring and promotional appearances led Ray to a nervous breakdown in March1966.
Following Ray's breakdown, the band reduced their touring commitments and spent more time recording in the studio, a change which allowed Ray to develop as a songwriter while leaving him increasingly separated from the emerging youth and drug cultures. Author Ian MacDonald further suggests that the band's US touring ban left the group comparatively isolated from American influence, guiding them away from their earlier blues-based riffing towards a distinctly English style. In the year that followed, Ray grew obsessed with aspects of English aristocracy and the country's dying traditions. He expressed his pride of Britain in an April1966 interview with Melody Maker magazine, wishing its culture could remain distinct from that of America and Europe. He further indicated his desire to keep writing "very English songs" and hoped to convey his feelings in a new composition.
According to author Johnny Rogan, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (often shortened as Village Green) reflects a progression in the thematic linking apparent on the Kinks' albums. Originally known as a singles act, the band assembled their earliest LPs without thought towards making a larger artistic statement. Their 1964 hit singles "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" focused on simple boy-girl relationships, a format Ray derided on his May 1965 B-side "I Need You". Over the next year, Ray shifted his songwriting approach towards social commentary about contemporary British society, exemplified in the September1965 song "A Well Respected Man" and February 1966 single "Dedicated Follower of Fashion".
The band's November1965 album The Kink Kontroversy marked the first time Ray composed songs specifically for a single project, resulting in an LP which the band considered their most unified work to date. Ray further shifted his approach with the band's 1966 album Face to Face, conceptualising an LP made up of songs connected through the use of sound effects and segues. Though Pye Records's objections forced him to reestablish the traditional separation between tracks, retrospective commentators often regard the album as one of rock music's first thematically linked albums, dealing loosely with themes of English class and social structures. Despite these later sentiments, Ray was unsatisfied with Face to Face; in interviews after its release, he disparaged the album as lacking in cohesion.
Inspiration and conception
In November1966, as the Kinks started sessions for their next album, Something Else by the Kinks, Ray began envisioning an LP unified around his newest composition "Village Green". He considered numerous concepts over time, including writing a piece of musical theatre or pantomime or filming a television special with live bands and an orchestra. The band shelved the idea while they worked on Something Else, deeming it more appropriate for a potential solo album than a Kinks LP. Ray spent the first half of 1967 increasingly thinking about the form his solo project would take; press releases in June announced that his solo LP would be released in September, and magazine articles in July and August reported that the album would be made up of "orchestra and things like that", "ideas and songs" or one with "the songs linked up in a musical story".
In later interviews, Ray has regularly cited the Kinks' five-year ban from American performance as producing his pivot towards English-focused lyrics. Author Andy Miller instead connects Ray's writing to a broader tradition of English pastoral poetry – made up of authors like William Blake, William Wordsworth and Oliver Goldsmith – which often yearned for an idealised past rural England. Academic Carey Fleiner writes that his idealisation of both rural and home life fitted in the revival of the "heritage escapism" trend, which surged across English popular culture following the Second World War. Ray has also discussed his childhood as influencing his lyrics' sentiments towards village life. Both Ray and his brother Dave grew up in Fortis Green, a suburban neighbourhood of Muswell Hill in North London; though the area did not have a traditional village green as a common area, Ray has regularly described the area in rural terms and has compared its atmosphere to that of a village.
In writing the songs on Village Green, Ray was initially inspired by Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood, a work which focuses on the townspeople of a small Welsh town on a typical spring day. Miller further connects Ray's writing the works of English author George Orwell. He and other commentators draw particular comparison between Village Green and Orwell's 1939 novel Coming Up for Air, a work which presents a similarly ambivalent view of nostalgia. Journalist and musician Rob Chapman suggests that in addition to Coming Up for Air, Ray's lyrics further allude to other English writings, including Harold Nicolson's short stories, E. M. Forster's Bloomsbury essays and the writings of Philip Larkin. Author Ken Rayes compares the album to the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, a relationship he thinks is hinted at in the song "Village Green" by the presence of the characters Tom and Daisy, who have the same names as the novel's characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Rayes writes that Ray's notion of "an encroaching modern English culture" parallels the novel's motifs of "mythic America and the changing American dream".
Recording history
1966–1967
thumb|alt=The Kinks miming a performance in a television studio.|The Kinks performing for Dutch television in April1967, two months after re-recording "Village Green"
The Kinks first recorded "Village Green" at the beginning of the sessions for Something Else on 24–25 November 1966. They re-recorded the song in February1967. Though the song was recorded during the sessions for Something Else, Ray did not include it on that album in September1967. In November, the Kinks shifted to working on a project tentatively titled Village Green, at that time still envisaged as a Ray solo project. Ray wrote most of Village Green songs from late 1967 into 1968, though he later suggested that several had been half-finished from years earlier. while in Hinman's 2004 discography he dates both songs to sometime between late1967 and May1968. Archivist Andrew Sandoval instead writes "Sitting by the Riverside", "Starstruck", "Phenomenal Cat" and "All of My Friends Were There" may have been done anytime between late1967 and mid-1968. Between late1967 and early1968, the Kinks remained generally inactive as a band; Dave spent time promoting his recent solo single "Susannah's Still Alive", and Ray wrote weekly songs for the BBC variety series At the Eleventh Hour between 30December and 2March.
1968
March–April
The Kinks began recording Village Green in earnest in March1968. Most of the album was recorded in Pye Studio 2, the smaller of two basement studios at Pye's London offices. The band recorded any time they were able to obtain studio time, generally in the late afternoon or in the middle of the night. While Ray produced, Pye's in-house engineers operated the four-track mixing console; the band's longtime engineer Alan "Mac" MacKenzie worked on the album until departing from Pye in early1968. Brian Humphries engineered from May onward, beginning with the recording of "Days".
The band's initial March1968 sessions produced numerous recordings, only some of which ended up on the final album, including "Animal Farm" and "Johnny Thunder". Other tracks like "Berkeley Mews", "Did You See His Name" and "Rosemary Rose" went unreleased for years. The band also recorded two songs for Dave's next solo single, "Lincoln County" backed with "There Is No Life Without Love". Pye planned to issue Dave's single in the second week of April at the same time as the Kinks' next single, but the band negotiated with the label to delay the release of Dave's until August.
After being quickly written and recorded earlier in March, "Wonderboy" was selected by Pye from the available recordings to be the band's next single. Despite Ray's protestations that the song was insufficiently commercial for release as a single, Pye rush-released it in the UK on 5 April. Its B-side "Polly", also recorded in March, indicated Ray's continued interested in Under Milk Wood by directly referencing a character in the drama, Polly Garter. Though it was moderately advertised and was well received by music critics, "Wonderboy" flopped in the UK and was the band's worst performing British single since 1964. The failure ended the band's streak of twelve consecutive top twenty hits, the last five of which had made it into the top five. It sold 26,000 copies in the UK, roughly one-tenth of each of the band's two most recent singles, "Waterloo Sunset" (May 1967) and "Autumn Almanac" (October 1967).
Recording for the album paused from 6 to 28 April 1968 as the Kinks toured cinemas across the UK. Further indicating their diminishing status, the band were unable to support themselves as the headlining act but instead shared the bill with the Herd. Supporting acts included the Tremeloes and Ola & the Janglers, among other groups. Contemporary reviewers criticised the Kinks for their poor stage presence and often inaudible vocals; Dave later recalled that the band were insufficiently rehearsed due to Ray's intense focus on his songwriting and a lack of motivation among the other Kinks.
May–June
The band resumed work on the album in May1968, recording "Picture Book", "Misty Water" and "Pictures in the Sand". After the commercial disappointment of "Wonderboy", Ray opted to record his new composition "Days" as quickly as possible in order to reestablish the Kinks' status. Recording for the song concluded in early June and it was issued as a single in the UK on the 28th. Though the single was not as successful as the band's earlier hits, it received strong airplay and helped them return to the top twenty of the British charts, reaching and in Record Retailer and Melody Maker, respectively. Hinman writes that by early June, Ray's solo LP and the band's next album had "[slowly] mutated into one" under the expected title Village Green. Pye Records allowed the band extra time to record more tracks for Village Green and made plans to release the album in September in the lead-up to Christmas 1968.
Throughout the 1960s, the Kinks were on different record labels in the US and UK and had differing contract schedules between the two countries. By June1968, the band were contractually obligated to immediately submit a finished LP to their US label, Reprise Records. Of those songs the band had already recorded, except "Village Green", Ray sent fifteen to the label. The label titled the album Four More Respected Gentlemen in reference to "A Well Respected Man". After Reprise learned about the Kinks' plans for a September release of Village Green, the label planned to not issue Four More Respected Gentlemen immediately but instead scheduled a November release. The band again took time off from recording for a tour of Sweden from 8 to 23 June 1968. Because of the band's weakening reputation, the booking agency and the band's new agent, Barry Dickens, scheduled them to perform at outdoor public parks, seeing it as the only realistic way for the band to turn a profit.
July–August
thumb|Ray Davies's former home at 87 [[Fortis Green, North London (pictured 2016), where he composed and first rehearsed most of the LP's songs]]
After returning from Sweden, the band began rehearsing more songs for Village Green in July at Ray's Fortis Green home. To boost the album's track listing, the Kinks spent most of the second half of July recording new songs. New tracks included "Do You Remember Walter", "Wicked Annabella", "Starstruck", "People Take Pictures of Each Other" and "Sitting by the Riverside". In late July, Ray and his family moved out of their Fortis Green home to a larger Tudor house in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. Ray's previous work had been heavily inspired by life in the original area, not far from his and his brother's childhood home. He later reflected that as soon as he moved into the new house he felt unhappy.
In mid-August1968, the Kinks recorded Ray's new composition "The Village Green Preservation Society". Ray intended for the song to be the last recorded for the album, making it a twelve track LP. With its recording, he changed the album's title to The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society and did its final mixing. Publishing was assigned for the LP's songs on 16 August. Around the same time, Ray interviewed with Record Mirror and New Musical Express (NME) magazines in anticipation of the album's release, and the album cover was photographed.
September–November
In September1968, with recording for Village Green finished, the Kinks returned to Pye to record Ray's composition "Till Death Us Do Part" for a film of the same name. Extracts from the LP were played by Pye executives at the label's international sales conference, held on 5 and 6 September at London's Europa Hotel, and around 11 September, Keith Altham of NME listened to a tape of the album at the band's manager's office. Before Altham's favourable review was published in the 21 September issue of NME, Ray had Pye halt the album's production and postpone its planned UK release of 27 September.
Ray's reason for delaying Village Green release is unclear. Hinman writes the last-minute decision foreshadowed major conflicts between Pye and Ray in late 1968. Ray later suggested he was annoyed that the label demanded hit singles from him and afforded little support for full-length LPs, and Hinman suggests this annoyance moved Ray to withhold from Pye any potential Kinks singles. Miller suggests Ray may have desired to increase Village Green track listing after becoming aware that both the Beatles and the Jimi Hendrix Experience would be issuing double albums. On 30 September, a press release stated that the Kinks' next album would be released in a month as a double-record with at least eighteen songs. Interviewed in October for next month's issue of Beat Instrumental magazine, drummer Mick Avory explained that the band were talking to their record label about the possibility of having twenty songs on two LPs but sold for the price of one, something they hoped would give fans more for their money. After Ray suggested the change to Pye, the label rejected it for financial reasons but accepted a compromise of a fifteen-song single-disc LP.
The Kinks returned to Pye Studios around 12 October 1968 to record more tracks for the album, including "Big Sky", "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains" and "All of My Friends Were There", though the latter may have been recorded in July. Ray remixed several songs from the July sessions on 28 October, likely because his original mixes from August had been rushed. He submitted the final tapes to Pye for the fifteen-track LP in November. In anticipation of the UK release of Village Green, Reprise cancelled Four More Respected Gentlemen in October, only a month before its planned release.
Production
Studio aesthetic and sound
Village Green is the Kinks' first studio album which credits Ray as its producer. Halfway through the sessions for Something Else, he and the band's longtime producer Shel Talmy experienced a breakdown in their relationship, resulting in a mixture of tracks produced by one or the other. Engineer Brian Humphries later reflected that though Ray was not formally trained as a producer, he had become "quite knowledgeable" by the time of Village Green due to his practice of standing behind Talmy during the production process of the band's earlier albums. Ray's production of Village Green is subdued and his mix is generally light on the bottom end. Dave's typical Vox AC30 amplifier was likely used for most tracks, though the long sustain heard on "Wicked Annabella" suggests the use of an early-era solid-state amplifier. Ray was introduced to the instrument in May1967 while visiting the home of Graham Nash, a member of the contemporary English rock band the Hollies. He purchased his own soon after and likely first employed it in early June1967 on the Kinks' song "Lazy Old Sun". The sounds it mimics on Village Green include a horn section ("Do You Remember Walter"), accordion ("Sitting by the Riverside") and flute ("Phenomenal Cat"), among others.
Session musician Nicky Hopkins contributed extensive keyboard work for the album on piano, harpsichord and Mellotron. Hopkins had first contributed to a Kinks LP in 1965 on The Kink Kontroversy and his playing featured heavily on the band's releases to 1968. He later estimated he played "about seventy per cent" of the LP's keyboard work, while Ray played the rest, though the album's liner notes credit all of the keyboard playing to Ray.
Ray sings lead on each song except "Wicked Annabella", where Dave sings lead. Ray's vocal is generally double tracked throughout. The group sang harmony vocals together, often supplemented by a falsetto from Ray's wife Rasa Davies, who had sung backing vocals on all of the band's studio albums to that point. Typical of the band's vocal work, their barbershop harmonies include falsettos and wordless sounds like "la la" ("Village Green"), "na na" ("Picture Book") and "ba ba" ("Johnny Thunder") or nonsense phrases like "fum fum didle um di" ("Phenomenal Cat").
Band dynamics
When the Kinks rehearsed and recorded Ray's new compositions, he typically avoided sharing the songs' lyrics or melody with his bandmates. Quaife recalled: Avory suggested the practice arose out of Ray's paranoia that his songs would be stolen, while Quaife ascribed it to "Ray playing silly buggers". Both Avory and Quaife recalled being annoyed by the method since it prevented them from easily adding fills and embellishments that fitted the song. Ray explained to his bandmates that he wanted the songs of Village Green to relate to a single subject but he otherwise remained secretive about the details. Quaife later stated that the band began to understand the album's message once several compositions had been finished and that "[a]bout the time of 'Animal Farm', it all clicked".
In contrast to the Kinks' work under Talmy, Ray ensured the group ran through numerous takes of songs on Village Green. Avory recalled that after Talmy's departure, the group spent more time collaborating and "[fleshing] out the sound" in studio. All group members contributed to the recording process, though Ray held final say over all decisions. He required all band members to attend all sessions, regardless of whether they were expected to play on the particular song. Quaife recalled: "He'd keep you there for hours and he wouldn't let you out of the studio either. You'd have to be there even though you weren't doing anything."
By 1968, the Kinks had developed a reputation for group infighting, especially between Ray and Dave, and the group sometimes broke into physical altercations during rehearsals, recording sessions and concerts. Humphries later said that the band's dysfunction has been overemphasised in later accounts, adding that rather than fistfights, disagreements typically led to verbal arguments between Ray and Dave. Rasa often served as an intermediary in the studio between Ray and his bandmates. Tensions within the group culminated on 27May 1968 during a session for "Days", during which Ray and Quaife argued before the latter left the studio. Quaife remained unhappy following the incident, and he later recalled that he and Ray remained distant from one another during the band's June tour of Sweden.
Tensions in the group eased after the Kinks returned to England and resumed recording in July, at which time Ray reluctantly allowed for more creative input from his bandmates. Avory recalled it was the first time in the group's history that they worked together during recordings. Quaife was unsure what precipitated Ray's change, but remembered the period as being "amazing", with a "lightened up" Ray allowing them to suggest things during both the rehearsal and recording process. He further remembered Ray's reluctance returning near the end of the album's recording sessions. Though Quaife departed the Kinks roughly four months after the release of Village Green, he reflected decades later that the album was the high point of his career, mostly due to the collaborative nature of its recording.
Mono and stereo versions
Despite an industrywide trend towards stereo sound, Ray still favoured mono when he mixed Village Green. As was typical for the time, he mixed the album in both formats, and Pye released both versions of the album in the UK. In the US, Reprise's parent company Warner Bros.-Seven Arts halted mono production in January1968; Village Green was therefore the Kinks' second US LP after Something Else to be issued exclusively in stereo.
The album's stereo and mono mixes contained obvious difference from one another. Because Ray remixed some tracks in late October1968 after finding his original August mixes rushed, the twelve- and fifteen-track editions contained additional differences. The original stereo ending of "People Take Pictures of Each Other" featured a jazz band coda lifted from a pre-existing tape, which Miller writes served to express "That's All, Folks!" at the album's close. Ray was forced to erase it from subsequent mixes due to copyright issues, but not before it was included on the stereo release of the twelve-track edition of Village Green.
Songs
Overview
Music
Among musicologists and band biographers, Andy Miller and Mike Segretto say that Village Green is composed mainly of rock and pop music, while Mark Doyle sees it as an album of various genres; Doyle writes it draws from "eclectic and cosmopolitan" styles, fitting in the contemporary Pop art movement. According to Doyle and Segretto, the music incorporates the stylistic influences of "English folk-pastoral traditions", music hall, psychedelia, calypso, blues, raga rock and acid rock.
Music critics Jonathan Donaldson and Jem Aswad each place the album with the baroque pop of the late1960s – exemplified by the Zombies' 1968 album Odessey and Oracle, Love's 1967 album Forever Changes and the music of the Left Banke – a trend critic Greg Kot terms "orchestral guitar-pop". The Smithsonian Institution's book on the history of music groups the album with the pop-rock of the 1960s and the genre's trend towards cohesive albums rather than collections of popular singles. Musicologist Stan Hawkins describes the album's sound as generally "flowery, tranquil and dreamy", influenced equally by music hall and American rock and roll, and author Patricia Gordon Sullivan writes that many of its songs further the music hall overtones first established the previous year on Something Else. Ray instead subsequently characterised the album as departure from the band's previous music, terming its songs "rock/folk tunes". Hal Horowitz of American Songwriter magazine similarly writes that the album's generally acoustic approach and simple production made it more readily described as "melodic folk/pop" than as rock music.
Lyrics and concept
In contemporary interviews, Ray explained that the songs on Village Green are "all related in a way", and Dave suggested that the album is "about a town and the people that have lived there", where "the village green is the focal point of the whole thing". The tracks often serve as portraits of the village's inhabitants or as a description of local attractions or activities; character studies include "Johnny Thunder", "Monica" and "Do You Remember Walter", about a biker, a prostitute and a lost friend, respectively. Other songs display an interest in memory and its relationship with photographs, such as "Picture Book", "People Take Pictures of Each Other", the unreleased song "Pictures in the Sand" and "Village Green", where the value of the community consists in being photographed by American tourists. In a May1969 interview, Ray stated that the album expressed his love of "traditional British things" and his hope that they would persist. He added:
In the decades after its release, Village Green developed a cult following. The album's themes appealed to English songwriters, and Stephen Thomas Erlewine writes its "defiantly British sensibilities became the foundation of generations of British guitar pop". Noel Gallagher of Oasis and Blur's guitarist Graham Coxon each named the album as one of their favourites. It has been a major influence on Blur's principal songwriter Damon Albarn, who expressed similar sentiments of nostalgia for a past England on Blur's albums Modern Life is Rubbish (1993) and Parklife (1994). John Harris of The Guardian suggests that the Kinks' influence is apparent on several of Albarn's compositions, such as "Tracy Jacks" from Parklife, which features a George Bowlingesque character. who covered its songs extensively in the late1980s and 1990s. Other artists incorporated its elements into their own work.