“So timeless”: Did Ray Davies’ England ever really exist?
We’ll always look back at certain things and wish we still had them, but there’s something so painfully obvious about the way Ray Davies feels longing than any other musician, probably in all of history. His entire game, for the most part, was putting words to those moments you suddenly feel tethered to nothing, but how do you capture a time and place that might have never existed to begin with?
Conversations about what’s real and what’s not are probably one of the most redundant in artistic spaces, not to mention jarring. Most of the time, it’s actually what we don’t know that charms us the most, and so when something comes along that challenges the perspective we know to be true, it feels oddly unsettling in a way that runs deep. Almost in the same way, we feel thrown off when someone we know personally starts rattling off views that feel comparatively different to what we ourselves believe.
This is probably why The Kinks were so difficult to receive back then: Davies didn’t exactly come across like your everyday preacher, but he did think like one, especially when looking at the ways each album can be seen as appendixes in a broader, more complete view about all the reasons why modern society stinks. And, to be fair, it did. But Davies wasn’t exactly angry at change, at least, not in the way we expect. No, he was annoyed that tradition was no longer his trusty companion.
In Davies’ world, however, what, exactly, is tradition? Did he long for English aristocracy the way a widow would mourn her spouse? Or did he sit by the wayside, nose turned up at all the passersby, wondering what on earth ever happened to conservatism? Obviously, Davies was never going to actually go at society with a hot head and a pitchfork, but, armed with a pen and paper, his music was his best shot at trying to find those who felt the same, who felt that if it was talked about, it wouldn’t feel so bad.
Fantasising about the “old days” is so maudlin these days that it’s almost laughable, but Davies didn’t do it in a way that sort of ridiculous, he did it in a way that made it hard to figure out what specifically it was that he missed. Obviously, there were the odd details to his melancholy, like the jab at the wealthy in ‘A Well Respected Man’, or the strange surface-level fallacy in ‘Sunny Afternoon’. It’s there in the way his voice whines over “dirty old river” in ‘Waterloo Sunset’, revelling in the world while rejecting it, and the entirety of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, memories of childhood and all.
In all of these phases, we can quite easily pinpoint the different pillars of Davies’ gripe, but even in the clarity, everything feels a little lost. This is a version of England that certainly existed to Davies, but, when you look at it like that, does tradition just loosely translate to the memories of a man he no longer recognises, unable to grip onto in the physicalities of his surroundings? Things change, people move on, but England was never any particular way to ever miss the specifics of it. Not like this, anyway.
Or did it? Are there sprinklings of a place at Davies’ fingertips, swept away quicker than he could keep up with, left to nothing but its shadow and new shapes of things that don’t feel familiar? According to David Bowie, we’ll never know. But, also according to Bowie, this is what makes it brilliant. “He creates a mass memory for us all,” he once said, “Of an England that possibly did or didn’t exist. I think that’s what makes his stuff have a mystic radiance to it.”
Anything reflected on in hindsight and with the kind of intense emotions attached as Davies will always exude a “mystic radiance”, which is precisely also why it’s so hard to work out what the singer’s trying to tap into at any given moment. However, that’s also what makes it easy to slot into, even if we’ve never felt Davies’ specific kind of longing. In other words, it all comes together in a bustle of inexplicable, relatable observations about the things we feel forever attached to, even if we never experienced them for ourselves.
