The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society Read online

  The week after, the release of the widely acclaimed and chart bound ‘Waterloo Sunset’, a shock headline appeared in New Musical Express: RAY DAVIES QUITTING KINKS? Davies, it was reported, was considering following the example of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, who had renounced touring to concentrate on his group’s music.

  “A substitute will have to take my place,” said Davies. “There just isn’t enough time for me to make personal appearances and work on the Kinks’ records. On Wednesday, for instance, I have to leave on our Scandinavian tour in the middle of my work. This kind of situation hinders my songwriting activities, and it’s also obviously a handicap to the group. I still intend to sing on the Kinks’ records, because my work is written around the group. There is no question of my severing all connection with them. It’s possible I may also undertake work of an individual nature, as long as it does not conflict with my interests with the Kinks.”xv

  The Kinks’ management rushed to limit the damage (while no doubt enjoying the publicity for the new single). Robert Wace was quoted thus: “There is no truth in it at all. These rumours are being put around by people with some sort of axe to grind,”xvi ignoring the fact that the principal axeman was Davies himself. The following Tuesday, an apparently abashed Ray Davies telephoned NME. “I am lead singer,” he said. “It is difficult to find a substitute for a lead singer. So I will appear on all Kinks shows.”xvii

  Years later, Davies recalled the circumstances surrounding this flurry of activity.

  “I went out with Grenville and Robert, my managers then, and I said ‘Look, I’ve done ‘Waterloo Sunset’, what more do you want? I’ve done all these records — singles — and I want to do something else.’ And they said, ‘Well old boy, just keep giving us the singles and we’ll see if anything comes along.’”xviii

  Concurrently, Davies and The Kinks’ management saw the potential of Dave Davies as that very thing. The younger brother was already the group’s pin-up; “I feel I should exploit him more,” said Ray.xix After the top five success of his single ‘Death Of A Clown’ in August 1967, a fully-fledged Dave Davies solo career was mooted, something The Kinks’ raver-in-chief seemed happy to go along with. “Dave has contemporary features and an enormous following amongst the girls,” was his brother’s assessment. “There’s no reason why he should not become a very big solo name.”xx “The plan is for Dave to do numbers with some of that early Kinks excitement and thus allow The Kinks to become more sophisticated as a group,” said Robert Wace.”xxi And, presumably, to create some space for Ray Davies to work on his solo project and simultaneously keep the hits coming.

  Through the spring and summer of 1967, Davies considered the form this solo piece would take. His ambitions seemed limitless. Press reports of the time speak of “a solo LP with an orchestra and things like that”xxii, “my own LP of ideas and songs”xxiii, “a solo LP with the songs linked up in a musical story”xxiv, an album of songs about London, an adaptation of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, maybe a theatrical presentation. . . . One of the tracks was reported to be called ‘Hole In The Sock Of, “a good-humoured swipe at ‘A Day In The Life’ on the Beatles LP” (those damn Beatles again). Bar the last, all these elements would find a home in TKATVGPS.1

  “Well, I was kind of bored with what I was doing,” said Ray Davies in the mid-1980s, referring to the circuitous route to TKATVGPS. “And just looking back now, I should . . . It would have been a good time to abandon — not abandon, but to call a halt to the band for a bit. Because Dave was doing quite well, and his solo stuff was accepted, and I should have gone off and done other things.”xxvIt was a regret he reiterated in 2003. “I should have left the band to do that record. That could have been the start of my solo career.”xxvi

  But in 1967, there was no pressing need for Davies to go solo — as long as The Kinks, and now Dave Davies, remained at the top, there was time for any or all of these schemes to reach fruition. The release of the uplifting, multi-layered ‘Autumn Almanac’ in October, another top five hit, seemed to confirm their unassailable position. There was talk of a Kinks television series, even a film.

  However, in retrospect, ‘Autumn Almanac’ marked the first hint of trouble for The Kinks. This glorious single, one of the greatest achievements of British 60’s pop, was widely criticised at the time for being too similar to previous Davies efforts. “Is it time Ray stopped writing about gray suburbanites going about their fairly unemotional daily business? “asked Nick Jones in Melody Maker. “One feels Ray works to a formula, not a feeling, and it’s becoming boring.”xxvii Some Radio One DJs were of a like mind. “Since ‘Dead End Street’ Ray Davies seems to have been in a musical rut, and it’s time he tried something different,” opined Johnnie Walker, while Mike Ahern was less diplomatic: “A load of old rubbish — a nothing record which wouldn’t have meant a light if anyone else had recorded it.”xxviii Unthinkably, it would be three years before The Kinks again breached the top ten.

  There were other ill omens for the group. The new Kinks LP Something Else By The Kinks had been issued in September 1967. It should have been a triumph but, although it contained some of Davies’ most deathless and varied work (‘David Watts’, ‘Two Sisters’, ‘No Return’), the LP was almost too diffuse, and sounded less coherent than Face To Face. In addition, next to “big statements” like Sgt. Pepper. . ., Davies’ idiosyncratic vignettes suddenly appeared small and inconsequential. Thirty-five years later, we treasure them as examples of Davies at the peak of his powers; then, modest songs about cigarettes, afternoon tea and tin soldiers seemed to bespeak a fatal lack of ambition. Consequently, Something Else By The Kinks failed to sell. Pye’s habit of issuing budget Kinks collections on their Marble Arch label cannot have helped — just eight weeks after Something Else. . . hit the shops, Sunny Afternoon appeared, containing the eponymous hit single, ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’ and ‘Dead End Street’. As the market shifted towards albums, The Kinks were still primarily seen as singles act, and rather than take a chance on an expensive new LP, people preferred to buy the old hits cheap. New Kinks’ singles, meanwhile, were starting to struggle. Despite a big promotional push, Dave Davies’ follow-up to ‘Death Of A Clown’, the bawdy ‘Susannah’s Still Alive’, sold a humbling 59,000 copies, and failed to make the top ten in November.

  By the end of the year, The Kinks were rapidly sliding out of fashion. They were increasingly thought of as an anachronism, a throwback to the beat boom. How did Ray Davies respond to these warning signs? By burying his head in his work, doggedly pursuing his vision, or visions, for new records for himself and his group. As Christmas 1967 came and went, down in the basement of Pye Records, The Kinks carried on recording, recording, recording . . .

  * * *

  Ray Davies wrote nearly all the songs for TKATVGPS in the living room of his white Georgian house at 87 Fortis Green, North London.2 He and Dave had grown up just a few hundred yards away, in a small semidetached at 6 Denmark Terrace. Nearby stand houses whose names are synonymous with a historical Englishness — Albion Lodge, Trafalgar Cottage, a timber-beamed health club called The Manor. “Our neighbourhood was like a village,” Davies said recently. “That part of London is still magical.”xxix In his childhood stamping ground, with Highgate nearby, and Hamp-stead Heath stretching down to Archway, Davies did not have to look far for inspiration for his imaginary village green.

  Throughout the period of The Kinks’ greatest success, Ray Davies kept his family close around him, and family was a theme that bubbled to the surface of TKATVGPS. “I think on The Village Green they were all brothers and sisters,” he told Jonathan Cott. “Nobody made love because it was all in the family. I don’t think there’s a love song on it.”xxx “A big thing that really helped Ray and I and the Kinks was our family, in the time when people were talking about rebelling against absolutely everything,” Dave Davies said in 2001.xxxi

  Ray Davies acknowledges his family’s influence on the way he wrote and presented his work. “
Growing up in that family, it had a strong musical basis. They were not great musicians, but music was very much part of the family, and we always had to sing songs at the piano. That really undoubtedly rubbed off on me. Things that my father saw, the family knew. I never went to the music hall, or any of that stuff. He went to see musical shows and used to go dancing, so I picked up a lot of it from my family.”xxxii It is no coincidence that many Kinks tracks from this era, such as ‘Autumn Almanac’, ‘Wonderboy’ and ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’, feature sing-a-longs that owe as much to family get-togethers as they do to the music hall tradition.

  Accordingly, throughout the 1960’s, The Kinks — who Davies wryly calls “another family to me, however dysfunctional that family can be sometimes””xxxiii—would rehearse in the manner of the Davies clan, gathered round the piano in Ray’s front room while he led them through his latest composition.

  Dave Davies: “All the good stuff happened like that. The phone would ring and Ray would say, ‘Dave, come around, I’ve got this idea’. I’d get in the car, walk in the house, Rasa would make a cup of tea. He’d say ‘What do you think of this?’. . . You listen to ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and you can see the light coming through the curtains in the morning, it’s got that kind of magic to it because that’s what it was like. It was like Ray’s front room.’xxxiv

  Because he rarely made demos of his songs to give to other members of the group, arrangements would be worked up at Davies’ house. Mick Avory had a special practice drum kit made from foam pads so as not to annoy the neighbours. “We’d have to pick the songs up by ear,” remembers Pete Quaife. “Ray would say, ‘This is in D’, and we would run through it a couple of times. He’d go ‘You got it?’ and we’d go, ‘Yeah, we got it.’ ‘OK, next number,’ and that’s how it went. And then a few days later you’d get down into the studio and you’d play exactly what you played at Ray’s house.”

  Mick Avory: “We used to jam sometimes, and Ray would get the feeling of what the band was good at playing together and he could work it into the song. You might come up with some idea and he’d say ‘That’s good!’ and maybe polish it a bit more. He’d record things for himself on his little cassette player and then listen back to them when he was sat down at the piano writing again. He wouldn’t always have completely written the song. He might have written the words or the basic idea, but he wanted to make it sound like the band.”

  By the time The Kinks started work on TKATVGPS, Davies had developed the habit of rehearsing and recording songs without sharing the lyrics or melody line with the rest of the group. Mick Avory puts this quirk down to justifiable paranoia (“Ray didn’t trust everyone with hearing the song. . . . Sometimes things got stolen. It has happened,”), while Quaife attributes it to “Ray playing silly buggers. That’s the way he was and you just had to accept it.” However, both admit that it made life complicated when it came to interpreting new material.

  “It drove me nuts,” says Quaife. “You wanted to know where the melody was going, so you could run up, run down, introduce the major part of the number, and so on.” Avory agrees. “In his songs, Ray doesn’t always repeat things in a logical fashion. It’s much better if you’ve got the vocal, because then you can do fills and embellishments that don’t get in the way of it. Sometimes you’d listen to the finished track and just think, ‘Ugh! Shouldn’t have done that!’ “

  The majority of Kinks’ recording sessions took place in.Pye Studio 2, the smaller of the two studios in the basement of the Pye Records offices at Marble Arch. Behind the four-track recording console were Pye’s in-house engineers Brian Humphries and Alan Mackenzie (‘Mac’ for short). “They were affable, very open,” says Pete Quaife, “but I don’t recall them contributing ideas. They were there to make sure the needles didn’t go into the red.”

  Although Pye was well equipped for the time, it was a small and not particularly luxurious environment. “It was very dark,” remembers Quaife. “The walls were a very dull kind of dark brown colour. There was a carpet on the floor, which had cigarette burns everywhere. You couldn’t really see the ceiling because it was the same colour as tobacco.”

  “They didn’t go out of their way to make it look comfortable or give it any sort of atmosphere,” observes Mick Avory, who has helped run Konk Studios for twenty years. “They wanted it done fairly quickly as well. You couldn’t spend too long in there. The Beatles could lock out EMI for three months and that was it, they could live, eat and sleep in there. But Pye wasn’t EMI, and we weren’t The Beatles.” The Kinks would grab studio time when it was available, “especially late afternoon and during the night,” says Quaife. “That’s why we all look so sleepy in photographs, with tobacco tans.”

  As a general rule, The Kinks would lay down a rhythm track first, consisting of drums, bass and Davies on piano or rhythm guitar. Avory would be recorded with two microphones over the kit, plus microphones on his bass and snare drums, while Quaife’s Ricken-backer bass was plugged straight into the desk. Other instrumentation would then be added — percussion, Dave Davies’ guitar parts or assorted keyboards from Ray Davies or Nicky Hopkins.

  It was Davies’ practice to run through multiple takes of songs. “When Shel left, that’s when we started working more in that way and the group had more opportunity to flesh out the sound,” says Mick Avory, although he acknowledges the democratic process had a patent cut-off point. “Everyone had different ideas about the way we should go, but Ray was the one that was steering the ship, so he was the one you had to go with.” Band members not contributing were still required to be present throughout recording sessions. “He’d keep you there for hours,” grumbles Pete Quaife, “and he wouldn’t let you out of the studio either. You’d have to be there even though you weren’t doing anything.”

  With the instrumental tracks complete, the results would be mixed down and vocals added. The Kinks’ accomplished harmonies sound all the more impressive when one realises the arrangements were usually worked out on the spot. As is well known, the group’s vocal blend was often augmented with Rasa Davies’ distinctively wispy falsetto but, according to Pete Quaife, Rasa also acted as a go-between for her husband. “She’d keep peace in the group just by being there. She’d come down into the studio and say ‘Could you try this or that?’ And because she was a nice little nineteen-year old girl, you’d say, ‘Well,’ OK, yeah’,” he laughs.

  So it was that, through a mix of guile, persuasion and control, Davies shepherded his songs from the front room in Fortis Green to the recording studio and onto tape, keeping it in the family every step of the way. Outside, meanwhile, the world kept going round.

  * * *

  The Kinks’ disastrous 1968 began with the release in January of a live LP, Live At Kelvin Hall. It was the third Kinks album Pye had issued in a little under four months, a scream-saturated dash through a few old hits and an unlikely medley combining ‘Milk Cow Blues’, ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’ and the theme from Batman. The record did nothing to dispel the group’s increasingly outdated image. Sales were negligible.3

  Ironically, live work or the lack of it, would loom large in the months ahead. After his breakdown, Ray Davies cut back the number of concert engagements he was willing to undertake, preferring to concentrate his energies in the recording studio. The other members of The Kinks were frequently left at a loose end. In interviews, Dave Davies presented his continuing dalliance with a solo career as a way of occupying himself. “The Kinks, let’s face it, are not the busiest group in the business,” he told Bob Farmer in February. “Much of the time we sit at home while Ray writes his songs and as we don’t work all that much I felt that I might as well spend my plentiful spare time promoting my solo career. . . I enjoy working instead of just sitting around doing nothing. . . ”xxxv

  “We weren’t doing much gigging,” says Mick Avory today. “The band did come quite close to splitting up. I left at least twice, just through frustration really. We weren’t working enough and we were
n’t making the money. I always felt we should be out there doing it. Instead, we were lying around doing nothing basically — to a large extent that’s the way Ray wanted it.”

  So the news that The Kinks had been booked on a coffer-replenishing month-long package tour of provincial Granadas and ABCs must have caused Davies’ heart to sink. Throughout April, from Mansfield to Bournemouth, via Cardiff, Chester and Slough, The Kinks would be sharing a stage with The Herd, The Tremeloes, Gary Walker and the Rain, and Sweden’s finest, Ola and the Janglers. On the burgeoning rock scene, these concerts were considered old-fashioned and lightweight, jamborees where teenagers came to scream rather than listen. The gap between Davies’ ambition and his group’s public profile was growing ever wider.

  Davies spent the winter prior to the tour writing songs for a weekly late-night television show, At The Eleventh Hour (see ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’, p. 50) and accumulating new Kinks tracks, many of which prominently featured a Mellotron Mk2. Davies had become enamoured of the bulky, tape-operated instrument, a precursor to the synthesiser, after a visit to Graham Nash’s house in May 1967. It offered a cheap alternative to the real string and brass sections Davies wanted to use on his new recordings, but which Pye was reluctant to fund. In addition, the Mellotron, played by Nicky Hopkins or Davies himself, gave Davies autonomy over the arrangements of his songs.

  These fresh Kinks recordings, including ‘Mr. Songbird’, ‘Phenomenal Cat’, ‘Berkeley Mews’ and ‘Wonderboy’, had more in common than a new-fangled musical instrument. Although their eventual fate was uncertain — a Kinks’ LP, single, Davies’ solo project or whatever — there was a connection between them and other, newer tracks Davies was working on, suggested in part by ‘Village Green’, the Bach-inspired song The Kinks had recorded a year earlier. Davies had kept that recording in the tape vault, close to his heart. Now he was beginning to create a setting for his pastoral verse to be heard — character sketches like ‘Do You Remember Walter’, ‘Monica’ and ‘Johnny Thunder’, and a trilogy of songs about memory, ‘Picture Book’, ‘Pictures In The Sand’ and ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’. Some numbers stuck closely to a Village Green theme, others less so, but the shared sensibility of these new compositions was their author’s preoccupation with the past. The Kinks’ leader seemed to be mourning a loss of innocence, personal and national, in song. Davies felt trapped by the group, trapped by Britain and trapped in his marriage, embroiled in an extramarital affair. He felt old. Above all, these new Davies songs articulated their author’s yearning to be somewhere else.