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THE KINKS ARE THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY (Linear notes, 2004 special deluxe edition)

"For me, Village Green Preservation Society is Ray's masterwork. It's his Sgt Pepper, it's what makes him the definitive pop poet laureate." Pete Townshend, 2004

Welcome to pop music's best-kept secret, a hidden place, as Ray Davies once wrote, of "lost friends, draught beer, motorbike riders, wicked witches and flying cats". Welcome to a world of nostalgia, of phantasmagoria, of memories, good and bad, real and imagined. Welcome to the Village Green.

"It's the most successful failure of all time," says Ray Davies ruefully of the album you hold in your hands, one of the greatest, and most misunderstood, LPs ever made. "It's like talking about something you've watched grow up, like a child. But this child was sort of beautiful and didn't get any older. It just stayed in one place."

Of all the landmark albums of the 1960s, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is the most unassuming. Infamously, upon its initial release on November 22nd 1968, The Kinks' new LP was trampled in the rush to heap praise and sales on that autumn's other big releases - Beggars Banquet by the Stones, Hendrix's Electric Ladyland and, of course, The Beatles, a.k.a. The White Album. It charted nowhere in the world and was quickly forgotten. But there is something magical about Village Green. It is not just the best album The Kinks ever made, the perfect manifestation of Ray Davies' inimitable wit, sadness, quiet anger and charm, but as the years have passed it stands revealed as the only album of the pop era to look beyond the 1960s and consider what might happen next.

Ray Davies: "It was time out from making a commercial record. It was not meant to be commercial. It was not meant to be heard. In a strange way, it was like getting the record and going round to a friend's house to hear it. There were a couple of tracks, like Starstruck, that were radio-friendly, but it was after a phase of having to make stuff for the radio, or with an ear to the radio. I just wanted to be creative and say something about a part of the world that was not so commercial."

There is no question that, in the musical climate of the time hard rock, Revolution and Street Fighting Man- softly spoken songs about draught beer, cricket and strawberry jam were recklessly unfashionable. "It was a project that was either ahead of its time, or just totally out of time!" laughs Dave Davies, recalling the album's initial non-reception. "No one was writing about the sort of things that Ray was writing about. Rock'n'rollers were singing about destroying everything; if it's new it must be good, you know? But what's so special about Village Green is that it's about hope, looking at things from the past that were actually useful in the present, rather than discarding everything for the sake of change. Those ideas didn't come into fashion till the 1990s." (Or as Mick Avory, the group's drummer, puts it: "That was The Kinks - always trying to set a trend ahead of its time!")

Pete Quaife, The Kinks' original bassist who left the group shortly after the LP's release, believes there is a simple reason for its longevity. "It's the best album we made," he says firmly. "I know I played on the damn thing, but every time I listen to it I think - this is worth something, this album. It really is."

The history of Village Green is a convoluted tale but the bare facts are these. In the wake of The Kinks' phenomenal three- year run of hit singles Ray Davies paused to take stock. Although the group's success had frequently been exhilarating, as lead singer, chief songwriter and, increasingly, record producer, Davies' workload was formidable and the pressure on him intense. He had suffered periods of mental and physical exhaustion. "I went out with Grenville [Collins] and Robert [Wace], my managers then," he recalled in the 1980s, "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."

Simultaneously, Davies was embroiled in a lengthy court battle over his songwriting royalties; furthermore, this was the period when The Kinks were barred from performing in the USA (the result of a disastrous American tour in 1965), a draconian punishment that affected both the group's fortunes and their leader's Sources of inspiration. "The American ban had a profound effect on me, driving me to write something particularly English, in a way which made me look at my own roots rather than my American inspirations. I realised that I had a voice of my own that needed to be explored and drawn out." From Sunny Afternoon in June 1966, the so-called 'Englishness' of Davies' writing would become a new Kinks trademark, one that reached its apogee in Village Green Preservation Society.

Dave Davies: Village Green is like rock-folk music in a sense, when you think of the influences and where the ideas came from. And The Kinks were like a folk group, the way we used to sit round the piano to rehearse. Whenever things weren't going so well, we always got together in the front room with a couple of guitars or round the piano.

As 1967 turned into 68, Ray Davies found himself writing songs in which he sought to distance himself from the grind of the hit machine and its associated demands. "Village Green is a very private and very personal record," he says. "I conjured up this idyllic, imaginary world. It's not an escapist world, the reality is there - good and bad exist but they're dealt with in a less harsh way than the real world. Maybe it's a child's view, a childhood that none of us really experienced but which maybe some of us had known. It's a time when, as a young adult, I was dealing with responsibilites of a young family, and maybe the stories I would tell to them - my daughters were quite young - it was as if I was making up this story about a world that existed, a parallel universe to this world where, although there are demons and evil things, things could be dealt with in a slightly different, less confrontational way."

There is evidence suggest that, at this early stage, Ray Davies was hoping to release these songs as a solo album. In 1967, Dave Davies was enjoying solo success with Kinks recordings like Death Of A Clown and Susannahs Still Alive. "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 manager Robert Wace that September, and press reports of the time speak of a corresponding Ray Davies solo LP with an orchestra and things like that or a solo LP with the songs linked up in a musical story. Village Green would have been an ideal solo album, says Davies today. It certainly wouldn't have been any competition to the Kinks, because it was such a personal record.

Ray Davies: "I think in the first song that I really wrote for it, which was the song Village Green itself, I had the whole idea of the record in my head. There was a village feel to Fortis Green where we grew up. I went to a church school, it was a tidy neighbourhood; the world existed in a square mile. When you're five years old, it's a fairly close-knit world, through a child's eyes. But when I got older, I went out. I went into the city..."

In fact Village Green, with its meticulous David Whitaker arrangement and Nicky Hopkins on harpsichord, had been recorded as far back as late 1966 or early 1967, in the same session as Two Sisters from Something Else By The Kinks. Davies put it to one side. "I had other commercial things to do, and tours to do, in-between. but I kept my focus."

Many tracks recorded by The Kinks in this period are notable for the prominence given to the Mellotron Mk 2 keyboard (for instance, the mysterious 'saxophone' that appears in the final bars of Berkeley Mews is a Mellotron tape loop spooling through). "Before synthesisers, the Mellotron was a great way of accessing sounds, strings or flutes," remembers Ray Davies. "As a sound, it gave the record that English folk quality. The flavour of the music was very acoustic, and a lot of it was written on keyboards. Plus it was easier for me to play rather than get flute players in. We had a real string section for Village Green itself, but that was the template for the rest of the record, and we were able to draw on that with the Mellotron." Although Davies played many of the parts himself, Nicky Hopkins remained a regular contributor to Kinks recordings, from piano and organ to harpsichord and Mellotron. "He could pick up a song practically before it had been played," says Pete Quaife, "and it would be exactly what was wanted. Exactly! It was wonderful to watch."

Throughout 1968. The Kinks kept returning to Pye Studio 2, adding to a growing stockpile of wonderful and varied material: the neo-psychedelia of Wicked Annabella, the languid Sitting By The Riverside, the autobiographical Picture Book and Do You Remember Walter (inspired in part, Dave Davies believes, by the Davies brothers' nephew Terry, who had emigrated to Australia with his parents, Rose and Arthur). However, in the fast-moving pop scene of the time. The Kinks were quickly slipping from public view. Concert engagements were irregular and unsatisfactory: an out-of- date teenybopper package tour with the Herd and the Tremeloes, a disastrous tour of Swedish folk parks, bizarrely inappropriate residencies at northern working men's clubs like the Top Hat. Spennymoor and the Club Fiesta, Stockton-on-Tees. Worse, new Kinks singles were starting to struggle. Wonderboy, released in April, unceremoniously flopped; three months later, the beautiful, timeless Days just about scraped into the top ten. The prospect of a Ray Davies solo album began to recede; thoughts turned instead to finishing Village Green (as it was then known - the Preservation Society was yet to come) as a Kinks album. "The band came on board, like they always did, and they tried to help me," says Davies, "and I'm eternally grateful to them for doing that."

In June. Davies was obliged by the terms of his contract to submit twelve 'finished' tracks to the Kinks' US label Reprise. He supplied a fully compiled album with the provisional title Four More Respected Gentlemen. In the end Village Green Preservation Society prevailed and the LP was never issued but its proposed track listing is an incongruous mixture of Village Green cuts, Dave Davies material and even a song written for the BBC TV show At The Eleventh Hour (Did You See His Name). Record company business duly attended to, The Kinks resumed sessions for a definitive Village Green.

Although there were undoubted tensions within the group - the recording of Days was notable flashpoint, Quaife storming out after a furious row between himself and Ray - as the album neared completion, all four members recall a spirit of harmony and cooperation in the studio.

Mick Avory: It was more of a band effort. It was collaborative, rather than going in like session men and just doing it."

Dave Davies: "The band was like a family business. Everyone would do their bit. When something sounded like a good idea, you'd work with it. And that triggered off other ideas. The basic songs were Ray's songs, but the music grew out of bouncing off ideas and riffs."

Pete Quaife: "This is what made it unique. When we made that LP all of us managed to get in ideas and put them over and do them, which was amazing."

Ray Davies: "It was a real bonding period when the band really drew together, I hate to say it, as a family. And there are all those references to friendship in the songs. It was like the last gasp of youth, because Pete was a friend at school. It was the last gasp of being really young and naïve, and a celebration of the bonding that can exist within a band."

By mid-August, the LP was, in theory at least, complete. It had its new title and a new, full title track - The Village Green Preservation Society. Test pressings were made, consisting of twelve tracks. Photographs of the group were taken on Hampstead Heath, wandering in the long grass, and cover artwork was prepared. A release date was set for the end of September. Friendly journalists like Keith Altham of NME were invited to hear the new Kinks album, and advertisements for it appeared in the weekly pop papers.

But Friday September 27th came and went and no Kinks album appeared. At the last minute Davies successfully halted production of the twelve-track LP, though not before production masters had been dispatched to France, Italy, Scandinavia and New Zealand, where fans were soon able to buy the 'unfinished' version. By the time The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society reached British shops, two months later, it had lost two tracks, Days and Mr. Songbird, but gained five more. "It was to do with timing," says Davies, “and also probably for Village Green the role of Days was taken up by other songs. It sounds odd because it's been a big hit a few times, but the puzzle was finished and the pieces were all in place."

In October, The Kinks returned to Pye Studio 2 to record two final tracks, Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains and the sublime Big Sky. The latter was written on the balcony of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, during Ray Davies' brief trip in early 1968 to the MIDEM music festival. He later jocularly told Rolling Stone that he wanted to hear the song sung (or intoned) by the actor Burt Lancaster. Indeed, Dave Davies confirms that Ray's spoken delivery of the verses is his brother's actual impersonation of Lancaster ("It was a running joke between us," he says). The track also features a rare 1968 appearance by the heavily pregnant Rasa Davies on backing vocals.

The final album, the result of two years work, was a masterpiece, everything Ray Davies hoped it would be. Yet to anyone who actually bought it that November Friday, it must have seemed rushed, unfinished; there were discrepancies between the song titles on the label and cover (three on side one alone) and even a misprint Phenominal (sic.) Cat. As noted above, the LP quickly disappeared from commercial momentum fatally undermined by the various revisions and delays, and the lack of a hit single.

Why did Davies pull the twelve-track version of the album? Obviously, he felt the LP was unfinished, and he had new songs he wanted to add, but there is also The Kinks' poor relationship with their record company to take into account. In early October, an attempt was made to persuade Pye to release a budget-priced double album (eighteen or twenty songs, tracklisting unknown) of the Village Green material; for financial reasons. the label refused. Similarly, Davies was frustrated at Pye's failure to support a potential stage presentation of the album. For their part, Pye still thought of The Kinks as a singles act; when the final fifteen-track sequence was presented (on October 12th), the record company still wanted Davies to add a potential hit or two, a request Davies turned down flat. It was in this atmosphere of stalemate and standoff that Village Green Preservation Society was finally released, late and barely promoted, an album so superficially 'square' it was instantly dismissed by the few hipsters that got to hear it.

Oddly enough, the Village Green revival began within months. "The American underground took to the record at the time of Vietnam," reflects Ray Davies, "It was almost like a peace mantra, for the peace movement, and for people to think of their homeland as their own village green. Anyone can relate to it. In my case, it's a village green, but it's a world that I think people relate to and adapt to their own consciousness." By the end of the year. The Kinks had returned to America, without Pete Quaife but surfing on the success of their new concept album Arthur Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire, hailed by Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone as "the best British album of 1969". But that's the beginning of another story.

"I wonder if it's not what it says on that album, but the images it conjures up, that people like," mused Davies to Mojo on the subject of Village Green's perceived 'Englishness', an element he considers to be something of a red herring. In spring 2004, he elaborated. "It means: this is the world we build in our heads as a defence against the real world, not to escape it, but say, when you're under stress at work, and things are on top of you, think of your own personal version of the village green - think of it that way."

At thirty-five years distance, Ray Davies is philosophical about the album's circuitous journey from flop to cult favourite to all-time classic. "It's like a club that people get into: 'Are you a member of the Village Green society?' It's all in the head. The good thing is that it was never over-marketed. It's an album that you never really hear on the radio. It's a good record, and I'm so glad it's being rediscovered. I'm not being glib about it - I could write lots and lots of pages about it - but if you're down, think of the village green; your own personal version of it. OK?"

Andy Miller, May 2004

Thanks to Andrew Sandoval, Doug Hinman, Russell Smith, Bill Orton, Will Nicol, Nick Watson & John Reed at Sanctuary. Special thanks to Ray Davies, Dave Davies, Pete Quaife and Mick Avory.

Andy Miller is the author of The Kinks Are The Village Preservation Society (Continuum Books).

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