I came of age in the Northwest of England during the era of Britpop, so it is sobering indeed to go back to 1960s rock, explore some of the music my parents were into, and to realise that Blur, Oasis, the Verve et al. had all been done before, some thirty years earlier. In particular, as Noel Gallagher put it, Damon Albarn “would not have had a career without Ray Davies” – a bit rich coming from Noel, considering his long history of unashamed musical appropriation. But he’s got a point – alarmingly so, in fact. I listened to The Village Green Preservation Society for the first time at the age of 40, and it’s an uncomfortably close prefiguration of Blur: the mockney vocals, the music hall style sha-la-las, the rather sneering lyrics about Olde England and its peculiar denizens. That said, I find Blur heavier and harder, whereas the Kinks offered a softer sound – almost Dylan-esque organ-infused folk-rock, which was apparently an act of defiance at the end of the 60s, with Hendrix and the Who on the rise.
Anyway, as everyone knows, The Village Green Preservation Society is a lament to the disappearing, probably fictitious England described in John Major’s speech some thirty years later – a land of “long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist”. But is “The Village Green Preservation Society” parodying the small-minded conservatism of this pastoral idyll, the Marxian “idiocy of rural life”, with its excessive and neurotic attachment to quaint and absurd traditions? Or is there sympathy with this disappearing world of cricket-playing, Daily Telegraph-reading vicars, farmers, and shopkeepers? It’s hard to say, but if the precise orientation of the opener remains ambiguous, then track nine, “Village Green”, is most obviously an unapologetic tribute. Cities are denounced as dirty and hectic, the quiet and peaceful village celebrated as spiritually restorative in its purity and simplicity. By this point, it seems, Ray Davies had spent too much time in London, with its ceaseless, sharp-elbowed, incessant status seeking, and he longed for the agreeable halfwits of the countryside.
But the biting lines about American tourists give the game away. This is not merely a love letter to Chipping Norton; it is also, in effect, a rejection of modernity itself, of the frenzied complexity of city life and the American century. We can hear this in the baroque harpsicord, a throwback to Tudor England, before it was ruined by encroaching modernity and British imperial decline. And if we assume that cities are the essence of modernity, then we might plausibly argue that the same anti-modern impulse also animates “Animal Farm” and “Starstruck”, two explicitly anti-urban songs. “Animal Farm” paints a typical Daviesian picture of the world as harsh, cold, unforgiving, and “half insane”, with flight to the countryside presented as the only viable solution. “Starstruck”, meanwhile, targets a dupe of urbanity, a big city party girl who evidently considers herself superior to the bumpkins of the countryside, but who is, in fact, a victim of the city’s allure, and in acute danger of being destroyed by urban revelry, of becoming an alcoholic.
Against this backdrop of seeming anti-urbanism and anti-modernism, “Picture Book” and “People Take Pictures of Each Other” initially appear as somewhat incongruous in their apparent hostility to nostalgia. Both songs essentially say the same thing; that the act of taking photographs, and of leafing longingly through photo albums, is fundamentally empty and idiotic, a misguided attempt by fools to prove that they lived and were important to somebody (a most topical notion in this age of Instagram and surgically attached smart phones). On the surface, the Kinks seem to be lampooning precisely the kind of attempt to hold onto and preserve the past that they themselves are guilty of on this album. If we look more closely at the lyrics to these two songs, however, we see that the real reason for the rejection of nostalgic photography is that it hurts to be reminded of the past. Ultimately, Ray hates nostalgic photography because he’s so in love with the past that to be reminded of its irrevocable passing and conclusive inaccessibility is painful to him.
There’s something of this profound discomfort around change, this Peter Pan-esque refusal to accept the passing of time, in three other songs on this album, each of which focuses on specific characters. “Do You Remember Walter?” is an oddly heart-rending lament to one of Ray’s childhood friends, the rebellious Walter, who smoked cigarettes and waged war on the world, but who then got old, and is now most likely “fat and married” and pointedly uninterested in the past. Walter is lost forever, much like the Village Green, and no number of photographs will bring any of this back.
But if the obstreperous Walter ended up toing the line of middle-class mediocrity, “Johnny Thunder” and “Last of the Steam-Powered Trains” present us with characters whose rebellion proved more enduring. Johnny Thunder is a Rumblefish style, motorcycle-racing miscreant who will never surrender to the ubiquitous social pressure to grow up. The swaggering and exuberant “Last of the Steam-Powered Trains” combines Ray’s lamentation of the passing of Olde England with his abundant scorn of the bourgeoisie and their pulse-stilling lifestyle. Is the reference to “the blood and sweat brigade” a tribute to the declining blue-collar working classes, with their live-for-the-day mentality and tendency to spend their wages in the pub before midnight on Friday? Either way, both Johnny Thunder and the last steam train provide fantastical counterpoints to the pitifully domesticated Walter, eternally young rebels who preserved their independence and escaped stultifying middle-class conformity, to live brutish, short, masculine lives of self-sufficient risk taking.
So far, so bursting with ideas. Unfortunately, however, only around half of the fifteen songs on Village Green Preservation Society deal with the Kinks’ trademark themes of the irretrievable past and a disappearing England. The remaining songs are, broadly speaking, rather bizarre. My understanding is that Ray Davies was sniffy about 1960s psychedelica, but no other term will adequately describe songs like “Big Sky”, “Sitting by the Riverside”, or “Phenomenal Cat”. “Big Sky”, with its “Parklife”-esque spoken choruses, is a deceptively bleak number, about the indifference of an all-powerful but unsympathetic god to the problems of human beings. “Sitting by the Riverside” starts as a boppy, cheery, music hall rock song about lounging around on a summer’s day and generally feeling good about life, until, in the last thirty seconds, everything goes slightly mad and garish, perhaps when the wine runs out. Strangest of all is “Phenomenal Cat”, about a fat, Buddhistic feline sitting in a tree and dispensing spiritual wisdom. Formerly thin, the cat learned the secrets of existence in Hong Kong and then “gave up his diet”. This is either a serious existential statement, that life is pointless so you might as well indulge yourself, or it’s a lampooning of the excesses of psychedelic rock. Anyway, it’s a shame they didn’t put this on the Eat, Prey, Love soundtrack.
In my opinion, the strange miscellany in the second half of the album compromises its thematic cohesion, and it might usefully have been trimmed. The same is true of the two songs on Village Green Preservation Society that deal with women. Given that most 60s rock bands sang predominantly about wanting to “hold your hand” (or, conversely, about not being able to get any “satisfaction”), it’s striking how little of this album is about sex and women. The two representations of femininity here stick out like sore thumbs. “Wicked Annabella” is a horrifying and sinister Halloween rock song about a kind of Baba Yaga-esque witch who makes magic potions and kidnaps recalcitrant children, a “Red Right Hand” for the 1960s. “Monica”, meanwhile, provides an unexpected burst of Caribbean calypso music, complete with Mighty Sparrow vocals and a lyrical serenade to a bewitching, but good natured and, despite her profession, loyal prostitute. Maybe someone should have sat Ray down on a chaise longue and asked him about his mother.
Overall, The Village Green Preservation Society is ordered around some unusual creative impulses. If we focus predominantly on the first half of the album, then we are confronted by a profound conservativism, a renunciation of hectic, complex, chaotic modernity in favour of an ordered, peaceful, rural – perhaps even feudal – ideal, the country squire impugning both the economic liberalism and the radical socialism of the city and the modern age. On songs like “Johnny Thunder” and “Last of the Steam Powered Trains”, this is coupled with a celebration of eternal youth and rebellion, a distinct distaste for middle-aged, middle-class conformism. Arguably, both sentiments point to a fundamental discomfort with growing older and the passing of time – a profoundly British sentiment in the 1960s, perhaps, given the UK’s declining status as a world power. And yet the second half of Village Green Preservation Society is comprised predominantly of thematically disparate and thoroughly strange songs about, variously, God, stage fright, a witch, a psychedelic cat, and a Caribbean prostitute. Taken together, I suppose it makes for an interesting contribution to British rock culture of the 1960s. But, for my money, the standout songs are relatively few and far between, the production values are tinny and primitive, and the album’s feted theme of a vanishing England is only carried through on around half of the songs. Influential, for sure, but give me Modern Life Is Rubbish any day.
* * *
Highlights: “Village Green Preservation Society”, “Last of the Steam Powered Trains”, “Village Green”