Album: Village Green Preservation Society
The title track lists many things that Ray Davies (and I!) genuinely love about England – village greens, homemade jam, draft beer, little shops, billiards – so even though the song is gently mocking about the conservative Little England mindset, it's also highly ambiguous. There is a genuine concern for what has been lost, notably on Last of the Steam-Powered Trains (in fact, British Railways ran its last passenger steam train in the year of this album's release), which has a great blues sound and thrilling finale. Another favourite of mine on the album is Sitting By The Riverside, which belongs to a very specific native strain of pastoral psychedelia, and is followed by the "let's all escape to the country" song, Animal Farm. Perhaps a little too whimsical for some tastes, I have a deep and ever-growing affection for this album; as Ray Davies put it, Village Green is the "most successful flop of all time".
Artist: Kinks
Born: Muswell Hill, London
Released: November 1968
Genre: Pyschedelia
Influenced: David Bowie, Smiths, Blur, The Shins
For me, Village Green forms a trio of uniquely British concept albums (along with The Who Sell Out and Ogden's Nut Gone Flake) that were all released within a year of each other. Like The Who and Small Faces, The Kinks were a London band that started out heavily influenced by rhythm & blues but quickly developed their own unique sound, making a creative leap into psychedelia in the late 60s. By late 1968, there was a clear transition towards heavy rock – Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple all formed that year – so a nostalgic album about rural life was clearly against the grain, and unsurprisingly it sold poorly. Though The Kinks released many of my favourite singles of the Sixties, this album didn't produce one and what it lacks in standout tracks it makes up for in cohesion. What was original about the Kinks is that, on singles like Dead End Street, they showed the realities of working class London at a time during the Swinging Sixties when everybody was singing its praises. This English social realism and end of Empire satire reaches its peak on Village Green.
The title track lists many things that Ray Davies (and I!) genuinely love about England – village greens, homemade jam, draft beer, little shops, billiards – so even though the song is gently mocking about the conservative Little England mindset, it's also highly ambiguous. There is a genuine concern for what has been lost, notably on Last of the Steam-Powered Trains (in fact, British Railways ran its last passenger steam train in the year of this album's release), which has a great blues sound and thrilling finale. Another favourite of mine on the album is Sitting By The Riverside, which belongs to a very specific native strain of pastoral psychedelia, and is followed by the "let's all escape to the country" song, Animal Farm. Perhaps a little too whimsical for some tastes, I have a deep and ever-growing affection for this album; as Ray Davies put it, Village Green is the "most successful flop of all time".
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