Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 147

Record label: Pye (UK) Reprise (US)

Produced: Ray Davies

Recorded: Pye Studios; November 1966–August 1968

Released: Original 12-track stereo version released and withdrawn September 1968; revised 15-track mono album released November 22, 1968

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Ray Davies (v, g, k); Dave Davies (v, g); Pete Quaife (b, v); Mick Avory (d); Nicky Hopkins (k); Rasa Davies (v); Alan Mckenzie, Brian Humphries (e)

Track listing: 15-track mono album: The Village Green Preservation Society; Do You Remember Walter; Picture Book; Johnny Thunder; Last Of The Steam Powered Trains; Big Sky; Sitting By The Riverside; Animal Farm; Village Green; Starstruck; Phenomenal Cat; All My Friends Were There; Wicked Annabella; Monica; People Take Pictures Of Each Other. 12-track stereo album: The Village Green Preservation Society; Do You Remember Walter; Picture Book; Johnny Thunder; Monica; Days; Village Green; Mr Songbird; Wicked Annabella; Starstruck; Phenomenal Cat; People Take Pictures Of Each Other

Running time: 36.15

Current CD: Castle SMETD102 is a 3-disc collection with mono and stereo versions of the album plus a raft of rarities and unreleased tracks

Further listening: Something Else (1967); Arthur (1969)

Further reading: Kinks: The Official Biography (Jon Savage, 1984); The Kinks’ The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (Andy Miller, 2003); http://kinks. it.rit.edu/ (fan site)

Download: Not currently legally available

True to its title, Village Green Preservation Society eschewed the wide-eyed psychedelia and studio experiment of its contemporaries. Which may be why it was grossly overlooked at the time. Instead, it focused on the wistful, sharp social commentary of Davies’s writing and it’s the fulcrum on which his deserved reputation as a songsmith pivots.

While Davies’s peers on Village Green are not from the rock and pop world, neither are they – despite the claims of many a pop historian – the kitchen sink dramatists of the early ’60s. If anything, Davies alludes to the short stories of Harold Nicholson, the Bloomsbury essays (rather than novels) of EM Forster, George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air and the mundane urbanity of Philip Larkin. What Davies seemed to crave was certainty and stability, the bastion of the familiar. The title track speaks of saving everything from ‘strawberry jam to variety, china cups and virginity’, but Picture Book anticipates the bleaker Shangri-La (from Arthur) and Last Of The Steam Powered Trains hints at something darker and more directionless.

The album contains at least two bona fide classics (three if you include the subsequent hit single Days, withdrawn from the original LP but restored to the CD). Do You Remember Walter updates David Watts, the hero-emulation of schooldays replaced by sentiments that seesaw between fondness and regret and a sad denouement in which the narrator talks himself out of a reunion, realising that memories are all that he and Walter have. People Take Pictures Of Each Other, with its weary refrain ‘Don’t show me no more please’ offers a cameo of human beings validating a transitory existence and also serves as a metaphorical postscript for the swinging ’60s. Musically, the band complement Davies’s lyrical concerns majestically, illustrating a similar disregard for contemporary musical fashion, and Nicky Hopkins provides wonderfully ornate touches on celeste and harpsichord throughout. Not a phased guitar in sight.