The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is the sixth studio album by the English rock band the Kinks. Released on 22November 1968, Village Green was a modest seller, but it was lauded by contemporary critics for its songwriting and has subsequently been regarded by commentators as an early concept album. The album was the band's first which failed to chart in either the United Kingdom or United States, and its embrace by America's new underground rock press completed the Kinks' transformation from mid-1960s pop hitmakers to critically favoured cult band.
Ray Davies, the Kinks' frontman, loosely conceptualised the album as a collection of character studies, an idea he based on Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood. Centring on themes of nostalgia, memory and preservation, the album reflects Davies's concerns about the increasing modernisation and encroaching influence of America and Europe on English society. Musically an example of pop or rock music, the album incorporates a range of stylistic influences, including music hall, folk, blues, psychedelia and calypso. It was the first album which Davies produced on his own and was the last to feature the original Kinks line-up, as bassist Pete Quaife departed the band in March1969. It also marked the final collaboration between the Kinks and Nicky Hopkins, a session musician whose playing features heavily on piano, harpsichord and Mellotron.
Other than "Village Green", which was recorded in November1966 and re-recorded in February1967, the album's sessions ran at London's Pye Studios from roughly March to October1968. In addition to the non-album singles "Wonderboy" and "Days", the sessions resulted in numerous tracks, some of which went unreleased for years. The album's planned September1968 release was delayed by two months in the UK after Davies's last-minute decision to rearrange and augment the track listing, but release of the earlier twelve-track edition went ahead in several European countries. The album had no accompanying lead single in the UK, but "Starstruck" was issued in the US and Europe.
Despite its initial commercial shortcomings, Village Green has influenced numerous musical acts, especially American indie artists from the late 1980s and 1990s and Britpop groups including Blur and Oasis. Driven in part by this influence, the album experienced a critical and commercial resurgence in the 1990s, and it has been reissued several times, including an expanded edition in 2018. The album has since become the Kinks' best-selling album in the UK, where the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) certified it silver in 2008 and gold in 2018. It has been included in several critics' and listeners' polls for the best albums of all time, including those published by Rolling Stone magazine and in the book All Time Top 1000 Albums.
Background
In July1965, the Kinks were informally blacklisted from performing in the United States by the American Federation of Musicians. The circumstances that led to the ban are unclear but likely stemmed from several incidents during the band's first US tour; Ray Davies later attributed it to a combination of "bad luck, bad management, [and] bad behaviour". Despite the Kinks' recent commercial successes, the band's extensive touring and promotional appearances led Ray to a nervous breakdown in March1966.; .
Following Ray's breakdown, the band reduced their touring commitments and spent more time recording in the studio, a change which allowed Ray to develop as a songwriter while leaving him increasingly separated from the emerging youth and drug cultures. Author Ian MacDonald further suggests that the band's US touring ban left the group comparatively isolated from American influence, guiding them away from their earlier blues-based riffing towards a distinctly English style. In the year that followed, Ray grew obsessed with aspects of English aristocracy and the country's dying traditions. He expressed his pride of Britain in an April1966 interview with Melody Maker magazine, wishing its culture could remain distinct from that of America and Europe. He further indicated his desire to keep writing "very English songs" and hoped to convey his feelings in a new composition., quoted in & ; .
According to author Johnny Rogan, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (often shortened as Village Green) reflects a progression in the thematic linking apparent on the Kinks' albums. Originally known as a singles act,; . the band assembled their earliest LPs without thought towards making a larger artistic statement. Their 1964 hit singles "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" focused on simple boy-girl relationships, a format Ray derided on his May 1965 B-side "I Need You". Over the next year, Ray shifted his songwriting approach towards social commentary about contemporary British society, exemplified in the September1965 song "A Well Respected Man" and February 1966 single "Dedicated Follower of Fashion".; .
The band's November1965 album The Kink Kontroversy marked the first time Ray composed songs specifically for a single project, resulting in an LP which the band considered their most unified work to date. Ray further shifted his approach with the band's 1966 album Face to Face, conceptualising an LP made up of songs connected through the use of sound effects and segues. Though Pye Records's objections forced him to reestablish the traditional separation between tracks, retrospective commentators often regard the album as one of rock music's first thematically linked albums,; . dealing loosely with themes of English class and social structures. Despite these later sentiments, Ray was unsatisfied with Face to Face; in interviews after its release, he disparaged the album as lacking in cohesion., quoted in .
Inspiration and conception
In November1966, as the Kinks started sessions for their next album, Something Else by the Kinks, Ray began envisioning an LP unified around his newest composition "Village Green". He considered numerous concepts over time, including writing a piece of musical theatre or pantomime or filming a television special with live bands and an orchestra.: (numerous concepts; television special); : (musical theatre, pantomime). The band shelved the idea while they worked on Something Else, deeming it more appropriate for a potential solo album than a Kinks LP. Ray spent the first half of 1967 increasingly thinking about the form his solo project would take; press releases in June announced that his solo LP would be released in September, and magazine articles in July and August reported that the album would be made up of "orchestra and things like that",, quoted . "ideas and songs" or one with "the songs linked up in a musical story"., quoted in .
In later interviews, Ray has regularly cited the Kinks' five-year ban from American performance as producing his pivot towards English-focused lyrics.; ; . Author Andy Miller instead connects Ray's writing to a broader tradition of English pastoral poetry – made up of authors like William Blake, William Wordsworth and Oliver Goldsmith – which often yearned for an idealised past rural England. Academic Carey Fleiner writes that his idealisation of both rural and home life fitted in the revival of the "heritage escapism" trend, which surged across English popular culture following the Second World War. Ray has also discussed his childhood as influencing his lyrics' sentiments towards village life. Both Ray and his brother Dave grew up in Fortis Green, a suburban neighbourhood of Muswell Hill in North London; though the area did not have a traditional village green as a common area,; . Ray has regularly described the area in rural terms and has compared its atmosphere to that of a village. He has also mentioned Waterlow Park in the nearby suburb of Highgate and its small lake as an influence.
In writing the songs on Village Green, Ray was initially inspired by Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood,; . a work which focuses on the townspeople of a small Welsh town on a typical spring day. Miller further connects Ray's writing the works of English author George Orwell. He and other commentators draw particular comparison between Village Green and Orwell's 1939 novel Coming Up for Air, a work which presents a similarly ambivalent view of nostalgia.; ; ; ; : "The first person to spot the George Bowling connection in print was Andy Miller in his mini-book on the album." Journalist and musician Rob Chapman suggests that in addition to Coming Up for Air, Ray's lyrics further allude to other English writings, including Harold Nicolson's short stories, E. M. Forster's Bloomsbury essays and the writings of Philip Larkin. Author Ken Rayes compares the album to the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, a relationship he thinks is hinted at in the song "Village Green" by the presence of the characters Tom and Daisy, who have the same names as the novel's characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Rayes writes that Ray's notion of "an encroaching modern English culture" parallels the novel's motifs of "mythic America and the changing American dream".
Recording history
1966–1967
The Kinks first recorded "Village Green" at the beginning of the sessions for Something Else on 24–25 November 1966. They re-recorded the song in February1967. Though the song was recorded during the sessions for Something Else, Ray did not include it on that album in September1967. In November, the Kinks shifted to working on a project tentatively titled Village Green, at that time still envisaged as a Ray solo project. Ray wrote most of Village Green songs from late 1967 into 1968, though he later suggested that several had been half-finished from years earlier. He generally composed songs on his Fender Malibu acoustic guitar in his living room at 87 Fortis Green, North London.
The band began rehearsing Ray's new songs at his home in late1967. Around the same time, they stockpiled studio recordings for later use without initially knowing when or in what format they would be released. "Mr. Songbird" and numerous other songs on Village Green may date to around this period. Between late1967 and early1968, the Kinks remained generally inactive as a band; Dave spent time promoting his recent solo single "Susannah's Still Alive", and Ray wrote weekly songs for the BBC variety series At the Eleventh Hour between 30December and 2March.
1968 March–April
The Kinks began recording Village Green in earnest in March1968.; . Most of the album was recorded in Pye Studio 2, the smaller of two basement studios at Pye's London offices. The band recorded any time they were able to obtain studio time, generally in the late afternoon or in the middle of the night. While Ray produced, Pye's in-house engineers operated the four-track mixing console; the band's longtime engineer Alan "Mac" MacKenzie worked on the album until departing from Pye in early1968. Brian Humphries engineered from May onward, beginning with the recording of "Days".
The band's initial March1968 sessions produced numerous recordings, only some of which ended up on the final album, including "Animal Farm" and "Johnny Thunder". Other tracks like "Berkeley Mews", "Did You See His Name" and "Rosemary Rose" went unreleased for years. The band also recorded two songs for Dave's next solo single, "Lincoln County" backed with "There Is No Life Without Love". Pye planned to issue Dave's single in the second week of April at the same time as the Kinks' next single, but the band negotiated with the label to delay the release of Dave's until August.; .