100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 The Village Green Preservation Society

02 Do You Remember Walter?

03 Picture Book

04 Johnny Thunder

05 Last of the Steam-Powered Trains

06 Big Sky

07 Sitting by the Riverside

08 Animal Farm

09 Village Green

10 Starstruck

11 Phenomenal Cat

12 All of My Friends Were There

13 Wicked Annabella

14 Monica

15 People Take Pictures of Each Other

The Kinks were the first English rock & roll band. The Beatles, the Who and the Rolling Stones all played American music. Then in May 1967 Ray Davies wrote ‘Waterloo Sunset’, and suddenly his band had created a distinctly English sensibility and language in rock &roll, something else that wasn’t just an English version of American modes.

In the months following ‘Waterloo Sunset’ Davies began to compose songs and characters that exemplified the traditional English village life that was being swept away by the turbulent ’60s. ‘I wanted it to be Under Milk Wood, something like that,’ he said. ‘Somebody told me that I preserve things, and I like village greens and preservation societies. The title track is the national anthem of the album, and I like Donald Duck, Desperate Dan, draught beer.’

The songs do touch on characters and descriptions of rustic life but the overwhelming theme of the record is one of memory and loss, which is at the heart of all of Davies’ work. When asked when he thought life was good, Davies replied, ‘I’ll tell you when it was good. When I was walking down the road with Michelle Gross, whose dad owned the sweetshop. She was about a foot taller than I was and she had her arm around me and I said, “God, if I can stay with this girl forever I can have all the sweets I ever want”. That was when it was good.’ Davies isn’t about recreating or wishing for a return to bygone days. Mindful of William Faulkner’s quote ‘The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past’, this album is about acknowledging the past and seeing how it affects the present. A photograph of a happy family contains in it the hopes and dreams – did they come true? Have we lived up to the promises we made to ourselves?

There is a wonderful uplift in songs like ‘Picture Book’, ‘People Take Pictures of Each Other’, ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Sitting by the Riverside’.

Songs like ‘Johnny Thunder’ and ‘Wicked Annabella’ are whimsically dyspeptic and give great scope for the doomy riffing that Dave Davies pioneered on the early Kinks hits. ‘Last of the Steam-Powered Trains’ is their one nod to American influences – a rewrite of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’, which features some wonderfully sharp guitar. It may well be that the Kinks here are making a comment on the place of ’50s blues in 1968. Or indeed now.

In the studio the Kinks (Ray and Dave Davies, drummer Mick Avory and bassist Pete Quaife) struggled. Always a volatile band – onstage fistfights between the Davies brothers were already the stuff of legend. Relations with the record label were strained. By the end of the album bassist Quaife quit the band. This was to be the last Kinks album with their original line-up.

Davies seems to have been unable to decide for himself the real shape of the LP, pushing for a double album. Pye records demurred and a 15-song single album was released, inexplicably without the tracks ‘Days’ and ‘Mr Songbird’, two of Davies’ most catchy tunes. Amid all this confusion and disarray in the band, it’s not surprising that The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society was a commercial disaster.

Appropriately, history and critics have been kind to the album and it’s now regarded as the Kinks’ finest hour and slowly and surely has become their single biggest album.