The one major regret Ray Davies had about The Kinks: “I still think about that now”
The term concept album is something that we happily apply to projects by the likes of The Beatles, The Kinks and The Who, but its origin was more complicated than the history books show.
There was a time when the album wasn’t ever really considered one body of work, instead, it was lots of little bodies of work put into one place. Imagine if every album was a concept album, that’s basically what you had in the 1950s. There were some exceptions, sure, Woody Guthrie for instance, as well as some Elvis Presley records, but for most artists, albums were just a place to collate all the previously released singles.
A concept album was, generally speaking, the term used for records where the songs were connected by something. This could be something vague, like all the songs were about love, or there was a specific instrument championed throughout the record. Essentially, if the songs came together to give listeners a bigger picture that they could see so long as they took enough steps back, a body of work was referred to as a “concept album”.
It wasn’t until the back end of the ‘60s that bands really began to nail the idea of a concept album. You saw it in records such as Tommy and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where albums had themes and stories which ran through and connected them. People were able to immerse themselves in the world that an album created, learn about different characters mentioned, and have their eyes opened to bigger themes because of such albums.
The two albums above are considered classic conceptual pieces, but one record from around the same time which isn’t generally given the credit that it deserves is The Kinks offering with their album Village Green Preservation Society. This was another record with a story laid out throughout it released in 1968, around the same time as Sgt Pepper and Tommy. People enjoyed it, but the history books don’t denote it as a classic in the same way they do the other two.
Ray Davies was incredibly proud of the record and the different ideas he explored throughout it. While bands moved onto playing stadiums and were looking to make their music as big and as noisy as possible, Davies took a more subdued approach, making music which centred around music halls, small communities, and the complicated societal structures which existed in such places.
He loved the album and the idea so much that in the ‘70s, he continued the work with the Preservation Project. This consisted of two parts, but when he was touring the first album, he collapsed and was unable to finish it in 1973, as he was battling addiction problems at the time. While this health scare encouraged him to complete the entire project, he was sad that he never got to see the first iteration through to its end.
“My one regret is not seeing the Preservation project [1973] through,” said Davies, “I still think about that now.”
Davies reflected on what it was like touring the show. It was chaotic, but also a reflection of his artistic merit at its most creative. “Touring that Preservation show in the early 70s, we did all the hits in the first half, then segued into this hour-and-a-half rock musical,” recalled Davies, “Audiences were in complete shock. I was playing [capitalist dictator] Mr Flash, then there’d be these rear projections on screen of somebody else [Davies as the sinister Mr Black]. [Laughing] I think psychiatric wards are still full of people who were in that audience.”
