The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society Read online

  The Kinks Are

  The Village Green

  Preservation Society

  Also available in this series:

  Forever Changes, by Andrew Hultkrans

  Dusty in Memphis, by Warren Zanes

  Meat is Murder, by Joe Pernice

  Harvest, by Sam Inglis

  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, by John Cavanagh

  Forthcoming in this series:

  Loveless, by David Keenan

  ABBA Gold, by Elisabeth Vincentelli

  Sign O’ the Times, by Michaelangelo Matos

  Unknown Pleasures, by Chris Ott

  The Velvet Underground and Nico, by Joe Harvard

  Grace, by Daphne Brooks

  Electric Ladyland, by John Perry

  Live at the Apollo, by Douglas Wolk

  OK Computer, by Dai Griffiths

  Aqualung, by Allan Moore

  The Kinks Are

  The Village Green

  Preservation Society

  Andy Miller

  2010

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  Copyright © 2003 by Andy Miller

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

  Printed in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Miller, Andy.

  The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society/

  Andy Miller.

  p. cm.— (33 1/3)

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and discography (p. ).

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-1068-8

  1. Davies, Ray, 1944- Kinks are the Village

  Green Preservation Society.

  2. Kinks (Musical group) I. Title. II. Series

  ML420.D25M55 2003

  781.42166’092’2—dc21

  2003011466

  Contents

  1. The Boy Next Door, Only Better

  2. The Kinks Are The Village Green

  Preservation Society

  3. Pictures in the Sand

  Epilogue: The Echoing Green

  Bibliography

  Select Discography

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  This book could not have been written without the considerable help of the following people:

  Keith Altham, Mick Avory, Louis Barfe, Nicola Barker, Michael Bracewell, Alex Clark, John Dalton, Peter Doggett, Dave Emlen, Jonny Geller, Clinton Heylin, Philip Hoare, Jim Irvin, Michael Keane, Tony Lacey, Stewart Lee, Shawn Levy, Linda McBride at Konk, Bill Orton, Pete Quaife, Dan Rhodes, Andrew Sandoval, Klaus Schmalenbach, Russell Smith, Ben Thompson, Jerome Wallerstein, Simon Wells, Barrie Wentzell, Paul Wright.

  In particular I would like to thank Doug Hinman for his enthusiasm and readiness to help with any enquiry, and Jon Savage, for giving me access to transcripts of the interviews he conducted with Ray Davies for The Kinks, The Official Biography.

  At Continuum, David Barker for commissioning the book in the first place, and all his subsequent encouragement.

  Most importantly, special thanks to my wife Tina for her love, support and continuing willingness to listen to The Kinks, and to me.

  The Official Kinks Fan Club can be reached at PO Box 30, Atherstone, Warwickshire, CV9 2ZX, United Kingdom, or on the web via http://kinks.it.rit.edu/.

  For M.F., M.K., P.W.

  Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them.

  The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym, 2001

  “If I could live over again I’d change every single thing I’ve ever done.”i

  Ray Davies, November 1967

  Chapter One — The Boy Next

  Door, Only Better

  In July 1966,. Disc and Music Echo magazine invited Ray Davies to review Revolver, the new album by The Beatles. It was a canny choice. The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’ had recently knocked The Beatles’ ‘Paperback Writer’ off the top of the hit parade after just one week, an event Davies would subsequently describe as “one of the joys of my life”.ii It confirmed The Kinks in their position as court jesters to the new pop aristocracy — “those brilliant piss-takers,” as George Melly called them — a part of the Carnebetian army and apart from it also. The exalted young composer, with his beautiful wife and baby daughter, sat in his residence up in leafy Muswell Hill and surveyed the city scene with detached amusement. “I had achieved everything I had set out to do creatively and I was twenty-two years old,” Davies later wrote.’iii At the end of the month, the England football team beat Germany and won the World Cup. London was swinging and Ray Davies was, in heaven.

  Sure enough, Davies’ verdict on Revolver was characteristically irreverent — to modern eyes, his comments seem like sacrilege. ‘Yellow Submarine’ was “a load of rubbish”. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ “sounds like they’re out to please music teachers in primary schools.” ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ proved merely that “the Beatles have got good memories, because there are a lot of busy chords in it.” And as for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. . . “Listen to all those crazy sounds!” exclaimed Disc’s guest critic. “I can imagine they had George Martin tied to a totem pole when they did this.”

  “This is the first Beatles LP I’ve really listened to in its entirety, but I must say there are better songs on Rubber Soul,” Davies concluded, gleefully contradicting himself. He then delivered one final sliver of faint praise. “I don’t want to be harsh . . . the balance and recording technique are as good as ever.”iv

  Although he feigned a distance from his contemporaries, in reality Ray Davies kept a keen eye on their successes — and failures. “Sometimes the rivals are closer to you in life than the friends,” he said.v Among those he paid particular attention to were The Beatles and The Who. “Townshend was very competitive,” Davies recalled in 1988. “Paul McCartney was one of the most competitive people I’ve ever met. Lennon wasn’t. He just thought everyone else was shit.”vi

  With the benefit of hindsight, two of Davies’ remarks about Revolver stand out. Of the Indian sound of George Harrison’s ‘Love You To’, he observes, “This sort of song I was doing two years ago — now I’m doing what the Beatles were doing two years ago.” With the guitar drone of their 1965 single ‘See My Friends’, The Kinks had anticipated the vogue for ‘raga rock’, as practised by The Beatles, The Byrds and The Rolling Stones. By mid-1966, however, Davies seemingly wanted to reach back to a pre-experimental Beatles — to a whole pre-experimental pop music that incorporated elements of jazz and music hall — an impression confirmed by what he had to say about ‘Good Day Sunshine’: “This is back to the real old Beatles. I just don’t like the electronic stuff. The Beatles were supposed to be like the boy next door only better.”vii

  The boy next door only better — it could be a description of Ray Davies. For the obstreperous Kinks frontman, ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’ was more than just a boast, it was a mod
us operandi. “Most people think from a business point of view, ‘Well, that’s popular, we’ll do that,’ “says Mick Avory, The Kinks’ drummer through the 1960’s and beyond. “But Ray never thinks like that. He thinks, ‘What can I do that’s not going to follow their trend?’ And that’s where he goes next.” In summer 1966, while all around was experimentation with tape loops, phasing, backwards guitars — the atmospheric interference of the gathering psychedelic storm — Davies was concentrating on songwriting craft. ‘Sunny Afternoon’ was the first manifestation of a new signature Kinks style that would culminate two years later in The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. But by then, few people were listening.

  After several delays, track revisions and some last-ditch recording sessions, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (hereafter known as TKATVGPS) was released in the UK on November 22nd 1968, coincidentally the same date The Beatles released their new double LP set, The Beatles a.k.a. ‘The White Album’. Two years on, the close-run rivalries of 1966 were ancient history. Worldwide, The Beatles sold two million copies of their album in a week, and were once again hailed from pop paper to broadsheet as the most splendid avatars of the age. The Kinks, meanwhile, were mostly forgotten or ignored. TKATVGPS charted nowhere in the world; the combined US sales of the album and its predecessor Something Else By The Kinks were estimated at a paltry 25,000. The Who, meanwhile, were readying Tommy, the blockbusting concept LP that would seal their reputation as rock’s heaviest innovators. Banned from performing in America, supposedly for offensive behaviour, The Kinks could only watch as their hellraising rivals marched on without them. It was an embarrassment for a group who, just a year earlier, could still be relied upon to sell 200,000 singles with every release, and whose chief songwriter was routinely feted as pop’s most sparkling auteur. The humiliation was compounded by an awareness among the handful of people that got to hear it that, in TKATVGPS, Ray Davies had produced his best work to date.

  The Kinks’ new album wilfully disregarded anything fashionable in British rock or pop at the time. 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,” as Davies wrote in his autobiography X-Ray.viii He drew on a well of personal and traditional sources to create an album which, although nominally concerned with the characters that live around a village green, goes deep into territory rarely explored in pop: memory, regret, failure, growing old. The record sounds very English, but its Englishness is a sideshow, a metaphor for the universal problem Davies was wrestling with — the problem of being alive.

  These days, TKATVGPS is widely acknowledged as the high point of Ray Davies’ often confounding career, a turn of events he seems to find both gratifying and infuriating, ruefully referring to the album both as his favourite Kinks album and “the most acclaimed flop of all time . . . I mean, even the people who talk about it, haven’t heard it.”ix To Jon Savage, he was brusque in his assessment. “There were two points in my life, in my career, when I should not have been allowed to put records out: then and in 1973 to 1975 . . . It’s a very intimate album. That’s the problem. Paul Schrader once said to me, ‘When you get a good story, you get a personal problem, then you turn it into a metaphor.’ I didn’t do that. I just got the personal problem. But in a way Village Green is a metaphor. I still listen to it, and it’s still the most durable record from that period.”x

  Davies’ mixed emotions about the album stem from the circumstances in which he made it. For two years, he worked on TKATVGPS as a potential stage presentation, then a solo project, then as a new Kinks record. The group stockpiled enough wonderful music for two albums, much of which remains officially unavailable. As the pop climate shifted around him and The Kinks’ fortunes waned, he persevered. The LP’s line-up went from twelve tracks to twenty to fifteen. And when Davies’ pet project was finally released it flopped. Worse, it was ignored. The group’s profile on the pop scene was minimal and The Kinks’ label, Pye Records, was a singles-based outfit that had yet to adapt to the switch to albums that had occurred in the wake of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. So in late 1968, no one knew Ray Davies had just painted his masterpiece — small wonder he regards its belated elevation to cult status with scepticism.

  For the other members of The Kinks, the LP is more straightforwardly special. Dave Davies calls it “a very beautiful record”.”xi “It was more of a band effort,” says Mick Avory. “It was collaborative, rather than him writing a song and going in like session men and just -doing it.” Bassist Pete Quaife, who would leave the group a few months after the album’s release, agrees. “This is what made it unique,” he says. “When we made that LP all of us managed to get in ideas and put them over and do them, which was amazing. It’s the best album we made. I know I played on the damn thing, but every time I listen to it I think — this is worth something, this album. It really is.” Thousands of people all over the world — who, pace Ray Davies, have actually heard it — would agree.

  In the time it took to make TKATVGPS, The Kinks dropped off the pop radar. They were yesterday’s men, an identity the ever-contrary Ray Davies seemed to embrace on his instantly out-of-date new album. “I think the fashion in music was probably a bit different,” says Mick Avory with knowing understatement. “That was The Kinks — always trying to set a trend ahead of its time!”

  The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is not just the best album The Kinks ever made, but as the years have passed since its release, it stands revealed as the only album of the pop era to look beyond the 1960s and consider what might happen next. This is the story of how, by conspicuously failing to set a trend, The Kinks created something enduring and unsurpassed, not just the most perfect manifestation of Ray Davies’ inimitable wit, sadness, quiet anger and charm, but also a timeless reminder that every party, however fabulous, has to come to an end.

  * * *

  Back in 1966, The Kinks followed ‘Sunny Afternoon’ with their first great album Face To Face and another classic single, ‘Dead End Street’, whose descending bass figure and kitchen-sink drama scenario made it a minor key reprise of ‘Sunny Afternoon’. For the first time, The Kinks revealed their full range as an ensemble. The LP showcased the new facets of Davies’ writing —vulnerability (‘Fancy’, ‘Too Much On My Mind’), the importance of family (‘Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home’), mores of money and class (‘A House In The Country’, ‘Most Exclusive Residence For Sale’), as well as the aforementioned brilliant piss-taking (‘Dandy’, ‘Session Man’). Although not specifically written about him, this last song has become synonymous with Nicky Hopkins, the shy young keyboard player featured prominently on Face To Face, whose distinctive piano and harpsichord parts would do much to define The Kinks’ sound for the next two years. “He was the kid at school that everybody liked. He could pick up a song up practically before it had been played,” recalls Pete Quaife fondly. “And it would be exactly what was wanted. Exactly! It was wonderful to watch.”

  Face To Face was recorded bit by bit between October 1965 and June 1966. Davies had originally planned to link the tracks with sound effects, some of which survive on the finished LP — the waves at the beginning of ‘Holiday In Waikiki’, Kinks’ manager Grenville Collins answering the phone on ‘Party Line’. However, Pye Records objected to such self-indulgence and Davies was required to rework the album, editing some of the sound effects and dropping some tracks (‘End Of The Season’, possibly ‘Big Black Smoke’). It set an ominous precedent for the protracted gestation and forcible alteration of TKATVGPS.

  Face To Face was a commercial success, but the idea of creating a more sophisticated, interlinked piece of work still preoccupied Ray Davies. “I wasn’t too keen on the last LP,” he said in February 1967. “It was more of a collection of songs than an LP, it didn’t seem to fit together
too well.”xii In the studio, he continued to push The Kinks forward, employing an arranger to score light orchestral accompaniment on ‘Two Sisters’ and a new song Davies had high hopes for ‘Village Green’.

  However, although Davies was on a creative winning streak, all was not well. The previous year,.the pressures of touring and promotional work had driven him to a nervous breakdown. The earnings from his songwriting were being held in escrow while an acrimonious legal suit between Davies and The Kinks’ former management/publishing team of Larry Page and Eddie Kassner dragged on through the courts (the case would go as far as the House of Lords, and would not be resolved until October 1968). He felt increasingly constricted by the machinery of the pop business, the relentless demand for new product, while being simultaneously frustrated by The Kinks’ enforced exile from the USA. Furthermore, Davies’ insistence on following his own musical path was creating divisions within The Kinks, never the most harmonious group in the first place. “I think that Pete and Dave are happier playing rock’n’roll. Mick and I seem to prefer the kind of thing we’re doing now,” he told Record Mirror. “I can’t see us changing the type of song we’re recording at the moment. We’ve only had a few singles out on those lines and there’s plenty of scope.”xiii

  The sessions for what would become Something Else By The Kinks continued through the spring of 1967. In the course of these recordings, the relationship between The Kinks and producer Shel Talmy came to an end, leaving Ray Davies as the group’s sole leader in the studio. There is some dispute over who produced what in this period — both men claim the perfect ‘Waterloo Sunset’ is his recording alone — but Davies subsequently bemoaned the lack of an outside influence on both Something Else and TKATVGPS. “I’d come off producing those hits, three or four hits, so they thought, ‘Oh let him do it’,” he told Jon Savage. “Probably I wouldn’t have listened to anybody else but they could have been a better production.”xiv At the time however, Davies relished this new freedom.