THE KINKS ARE THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY

The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society

The Kinks became something of an anachronism as the sixties progressed, the band’s rock’n’roll ethos playing alongside music hall and memories of an England that was fast fading from view. By 1968, when the album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society was released, the band itself was fading, too. The album’s making was fraught with difficulties, with Ray Davies first withdrawing the album from release, then proposing a double album, the same time as The Beatles’ White Album and Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. Village Green didn’t sound like either of those double albums. In fact, it didn’t sound like anything that was ‘happening’ at the time. Days was released as a non-album single in June 1968 (although it appeared on an early version of the album and is now included on the remastered CD issue). Keith Moon described the song as ‘pretty dated.’ It was indeed, but not in the disparaging way Moon intended – it was ‘pretty’ in the best sense of the word and it gave thanks and praise for times and people past. At the height of the Swinging Sixties, you had the distinct impression that Ray Davies – a keen observer of everyday life – already knew it was all over. Expressing the relation between the band and the world it inhabited, conceptual art as already a museum piece, Village Green had nothing in common with contemporary releases from The Beatles, neither with the Stones’ Beggars Banquet, nor Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, nor Led Zep’s first ever album. It was subtle, ironic, nostalgic, it was so out of kilter with contemporary trends it sounded like something not merely from another place, but another planet. ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,’ wrote L.P. Hartley in the first line of his 1953 novel, The Go-Between. The album ran contrary to any current trend or tendency, and this constitutes its lasting appeal – an appeal that was lost on critics and public at the time. It was against the fashion, and contained no references to esoteric texts or politics, and no pretensions to be anything other than a celebration of the mundane things of life: ‘There were no long guitar solos, no extended freeform jams, no lyrics based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead or The Communist Manifesto. Instead, The Kinks were singing songs about lost friends, draught beer, motorbike riders, wicked witches, and flying cats’ (Andy Miller, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society). Revolution and protest was in the air, but The Kinks were totally removed from the dark apocalyptic tone of the age. The songs bounce along like a country bus, a horse and buggy, with lyrics telling stories about village greens, cricket, and trips to the seaside. The album is a eulogy to the past, celebration by way of lamentation, so unhip as to be really unhip and caring not one jot. But once you see the wit at work, you go beyond the sadness to grasp the gentle rebellion and quiet dissent.

When The Beatles were singing about Revolution and The Stones were expressing ‘sympathy for the devil,’ Ray Davies and The Kinks were gifting us the Village Green of our deepest longings since ever. But we should qualify a little here. The Beatles themselves had one foot in the past, with Revolution actually questioning the revolutions being advocated in the day. It’s less than clear, too, that The Stones ever abandoned or escaped a distinctive sense of Britishness and nostalgia for a time that may never quite have been, and was in the process of passing in any case. The counter-cultural aspect of the sixties tends to be overstated by rock and pop journalists, to make the music and its celebrants more radical and cutting edge than they actually are. As people get older, and the past does indeed come to resemble a foreign country more and more, there is a tendency to downplay the zest for the new and play up the sense of nostalgia, rooting developments in a traditional culture and inherited ways. That culture and those ways are celebrated in their passing.

Ray Davies and The Kinks were doing this at the time, but were never quite alone in expressing a sincere love and lament for the things of the past. And it was a love mixed up with a gentle cynicism and criticism which was Davies’ speciality, a mocking tone that reveals that things may never quite have been as they appear in celebrations and lamentations. The ‘village green’ being praised by way of reminiscence may not have been the village green that parents and grandparents either knew or desired. Things may not always have been better in the past whose loss is being lamented. But as nostalgia-tinged observations on continuity and change go, Ray Davies and The Kinks are as good a place to go in rock and pop as anywhere. If there is ambiguity, a hint of mocking irony, then it is also self-mockery.

Like an early baroque minstrel who couches criticism and biting satire in whimsicality, Ray Davies is effective by way of being charming and disarming. To anyone who thinks Davies was romanticising should check the lyrics to Dead-End Street: ‘People live on dead end street. (Dead end!) People are dying on dead end street. (Dead end!) I'm gonna die on dead end street.’ Davies wasn’t engaged in apologetics, but was also drawing attention to the class-based iniquities of time and place. A number of The Kinks’ songs distil the essence of England and Englishness and what it is – or was – to be working class and English. Mocking, loving, loyal and critical at the same time, the songs are poetic and political.

The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society … even the name has a mocking and self-mocking tone. It hardly indicates the kind of revolution that offers the slightest hope of checking the advances of corporate globalisation in the present day. And its ideal seems a mythical version of an England that not only never was, but never could be. In the end, the album is tinged with the sadness that comes with self-knowledge, but celebrates the mythology for those aspects – the small rather than the grand - that were indeed real and true and which people knew to be so.

The songs offer a gentle commentary on a nation in decline, presenting a critique that is also a celebration of the things that once held different people, people separated by class, together. The sardonic tone scarcely conceals a genuine fondness for the past. In retrospect we can see the album as an achingly sad portrayal of national symbols in their fading, soon to be no more. It is a mournful reflection on the slow decay and eventual disappearance of the world we once knew, and increasingly knew less, and which, once gone, can never return.

Village Green is easily located in the English tradition of pastoral tragedy, revolving around an ever-resurgent nostalgia for times we thought once were and still ought to be. Gone but never gone, and … we like to think … maybe to return. The songs on the album express that longing. The gentle irony of a maybe yesterday that maybe tomorrow. The songs have us looking back, with the implicit feeling that things will never be as good as they once were, or thought they were, yet yearning that it may yet be so, for the first time. Ray Davies had written in this vein before, of course, most notably on Waterloo Sunset. His words and mood touch the yearning that causes the heart to ache.

Village Green is the story of loss told in little vignettes, pictures, and portrayals, with all the old familiar faces present once again as living memory. Calling back the soul of a place through identity and belonging, the stale but still sweet scent of reminiscence hangs in the air, with any ease obtained serving to mask an unease in a personal parable on a pretended past. The old characters. And the loss of innocence. The past is indeed a different country, but you can remember just enough of the different doings of folk past as to ground the pretence in something real, producing an enchanted world of familiar bounds, bonds, and boundaries.

And all the time feel the sizeable ache in the heart in knowing that it is gone, your remembrances being little more than a recollection of its going. These remembrances constitute a series of sketches of a picturesque world of quaint characters, all gone now.

And the future foreboding that spawns an even more intense love of a seemingly simpler and safer past. The authorities cared as little for you then as they do now. But you were surrounded by warm, affective ties and bonds to others who did care. You live on as anachronism. And express your protest through the quiet anger of sadness and wit, and a series of idiosyncratic demands that continue to evoke the world we have lost.

We are the Village Green Preservation Society

God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety

We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society

God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties

Preserving the old ways from being abused

Protecting the new ways for me and for you

What more can we do?

We are the Draught Beer Preservation Society

God save Mrs. Mopps and good old Mother Riley

We are the Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium

God save the George Cross and all those who were awarded them.

We are the Sherlock Holmes English speaking vernacular

Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty, and Dracula

We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity

God save little shops, china cups and virginity

We are the skyscraper condemnation afiliates

God save Tudor houses, antique tables, and billiards

Preserving the old ways from being abused

Protecting the new ways for me and for you

What more can we do?

God save the Village Green

I note the reference to ‘good old Mother Riley.’ I wonder how many people now remember Arthur Lucan (or even care to), the actor who played Mother Riley. My mum worked at St Helens Theatre Royal, the manager of which was Slim Ingram, from the early sixties to the late eighties. I quote from Slim’s obituary in The Guardian (September 2013): ‘Perhaps Slim's greatest claim to fame was as the company manager for two touring shows between 1952 and 1954, produced by the former dancers Gaston and Andrée. The shows starred Arthur Lucan as Old Mother Riley. Lucan collapsed in the wings of the Tivoli theatre, Hull, in 1954 and Slim carried him to his dressing room, where Lucan died.’ I heard the tale of how good old Mother Riley died in the arms of Slim Ingram told often. It all connects up. ‘God save … vaudeville and variety’ as the song goes. Except I’d call it music hall, the more raucous and ribald origins of variety.

And God save the village green!

The song Village Green waxes lyrical about a place far from all the noise of city, left long ago in the search for fame and fortune.

I miss the village green

And all the simple people

I miss the village green

The church, the clock, the steeple

I miss the morning dew, fresh air and Sunday school

The song reminisces about a girl called Daisy, who was left behind and went on to marry Tom the grocer boy, who now owns a grocery. The song ends with a promise to one day return, and talk about the old days.

I come from a town rather than village, but from that part of the town that goes by the charming name of Dentons Green, with an old(ish) church between two pubs. I remember the days of cobbled streets, when there was a little shop on every corner, and the odd few in between. I remember all the quaint old characters, too, and became one myself in the end. We never had anyone called Daisy, but did have a grocer called Tom, who was an Elvis fan, (and who took over from Grocer Jack no less).

Like the time and place it describes, you wish the song would play forever.

The little shops went, Grocer Tom packed up and went to Graceland to see Elvis and Daisy ... the only Daisy I have ever come across is a dazzling winger who plays for Flint Town United Ladies.

Everything changes,

everything moves, everything

evolves, everything flies

and goes away...

- Frida Kahlo

And I wish it wasn’t so.

Thank you for the days

Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me

I'm thinking of the days

I won't forget a single day, believe me.

(The Kinks – Days).