The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
The Kinks were something of an anachronism, the band’s rock’n’roll ethos playing alongside music hall and memories of an England that was fading. By 1968, when The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society came out, the band were fading, too. The album’s making was fraught with difficulties, with 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 albums. 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 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 – knew it was all over. Conceptual art, a museum piece, the relation between the band and the world it inhabited – Village Green had nothing in common with contemporary releases from Beatles, with the Stones’ Beggars Banquet, Hendrix’ Electric Ladyland, or Led Zep’s first ever album. It was subtle, ironic, nostalgic, it was so out of kilter with contemporary trends it sounded like something from another place, even another planet. It ran contrary to anything trend or tendency, and this constitutes its appeal. It was against the fashion, there were no references to esoteric texts or politics: ‘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 detached from the dark apocalyptic tone of the age. The songs bounce along like a country bus, a horse and buggy, with songs about village greens, cricket, and trips to the seaside. The album is a eulogy to the past, lamentation as celebration, an anachronism, so unhip as to be really unhip and not caring one jot. But once you see the wit, 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 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 them seem more radical and cutting edge than they are. As people get older, and the past does indeed resemble a foreign country more and more, they tend 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 never 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, 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.
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 so charming and disarming. To anyone who thinks Davies was romanticising should check 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 distill 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. 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.
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 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 a 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 maybe to return. We think. The songs 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, yet yearning that it may yet be so. 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 ache in the heart.
Village Green is the story of loss told in little vignettes, pictures, and portrayals, with all the old familiar faces all present again as living memory. Calling back the soul of a place through identity and belonging, the stale but still sweet scent of reminiscence, any ease obtained masking an unease in a personal parable on a pretended past. The old characters. And the loss of innocence. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” is the opening line from L.P. Hartley's 1953 novel The Go-Between. 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 feeling the sizeable ache in the heart in knowing it is gone, and your remembrances being little more than a recollection of its going. Remembrances as a series of sketches of a picturesque world of quaint characters now gone.
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 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?
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
We are the Village Green Preservation Society
God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety
We are the Village Green Preservation Society
God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety
God save the Village Green
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
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