“Everything I wanted to do”: The album Ray Davies thought was his best vision
All musicians dream of having a moment in their careers where they feel they’ve pushed their artistic ambition to its greatest level. There would be hardly any point in refusing to push the envelope further, even if you feel like your previous work achieved everything it set out to accomplish, and even having such a high benchmark for your own creative output can sometimes encourage a change in direction to explore uncharted territory.
It can often be a difficult moment to navigate, though, and artists will usually have to risk sacrificing the admiration of some fans who want to hear another rehash of what it was that won them over in the first place. There’s nothing wrong with treading old ground, but we would be without albums like Kid A had Radiohead not chosen to try and level up again after OK Computer, and David Bowie might well have just continued to release whimsical tat like ‘The Laughing Gnome’ for decades had he opted for the safe route.
The Kinks had an illustrious career that was full of stylistic twists and turns. However, frontman and principal songwriter Ray Davies believes there’s one particular album in their discography where they truly pushed themselves to another level of brilliance. While it might have been a risk to attempt something of such great scope, it certainly paid off for them in the long run.
The band might have already invented garage rock on 1964 singles like ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night’, but they were evidently keen to move on from the success of these two early hits quickly. By the time they had moved into the latter part of the decade, they were at work on perhaps their greatest record, although nobody else agreed on that at the time.
In a retrospective on his career for Uncut, Davies said that 1968’s The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society was a pivotal moment for the Kinks, where the band put aside everything they’d done in the past in an attempt to stay true to their instinct rather than being forcefully made to write hit after hit that didn’t scratch that creative itch.
“I was angry,” said Davies of his mood around the time, “And I repressed the competitive instincts that had made me write hit singles.” Hell-bent on not writing another track in the same vein as previous hits like ‘You Really Got Me’, a track that the band had grown to resent in the years following it, Davies decided that he was “deliberately not going to be successful this time”.
The record that came out as a result was unlike anything they’d made in the past, instilling a distinctly British atmosphere across its 15 tracks and aiming to create a far more conceptual record that incorporated elements of psychedelic pop and folk-rock. It was far removed from what they’d done in the past, and the initial lukewarm response that it received from fans at the time was a telltale sign that they’d perhaps pushed things a little too far.
Cut to the present day, and the album is celebrated for its ambition, and the way it portrays several unique snapshots of bucolic British life is rightfully hailed as a masterpiece that pushed the Kinks to their creative peak. On having written what he described in the 2014 interview as “one of the first indie albums”, Davies would say, “I wanted to write something that, if we were never heard of again, this is who we are. It was a final stand for things about to be swept away, ideals that can never be kept”.
The band would go on to write another equally revered album the following year in Arthur (Or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire) that took the bitesize observations of Britishness that Village Green zoomed in on and turned them into a single narrative concept earning them even more praise for their artistic endeavours. While they’d almost all but abandoned who they were as a group until that point, they’d taken a punt on pushing themselves in a direction, and it was ultimately a decision they’d be remembered for in a much more favourable light than they were when they initially released Village Green.
“We knew it wouldn’t be successful,” summarised Davies, “But in a sense, it did everything I wanted it to do.”
