Noel Gallagher on why The Kinks are quintessential singles band: “I just fucking love it”
Before psychedelia and the counterculture had established the ‘album’ as the pinnacle of rock expression, popular music’s most prized relic, rock ‘n’ roll’s hectic pace still dominated the 1960s. Keeping up with the dizzying demand for a new 45″ to hit the singles every three months, the British invasion’s ‘Big Three’—The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks—all pumped out a frenzied number of 7″s alongside the Fab Four’s growing embrace of the LP format.
The Kinks were 12 singles in before their fourth LP in 1966, having only been recording two years prior. That year’s Face to Face heralded The Kinks’ true arrival in the LP age. It also set in motion frontman and principal songwriter Ray Davies’ aversion to the lysergic-soaked trends of the era—creatively staying put in his love of Anglo culture in all its charming idiosyncrasies and heritage quaint. No 14-Hour Technicolor Dream concert or San Fran Acid Tests for Davies; London’s sunset glittering across the Thames was evocative enough for The Kinks songsmith.
Once the summer of love’s trip had waned and the social mood darkened on both sides of the Atlantic, mind-expanding freakouts gave way to back-to-basics roots rock, with The Beatles conceiving their Let It Be refocus and The Rolling Stones entering their LP golden age. While the likes of Bob Dylan, The Band, and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s pull toward Americana’s pre-LSD musical tapestry should have excited Davies, he still felt a threat looming over his beloved English culture.
Retreating further into his love of the Romantic, English idyll, 1968’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society was dropped to mixed reception, still intoxicated with rock’s revolutionary ambitions over ‘rather enjoying things as they are’.
“I’ve got an old album of interviews with Ray Davies, and he was saying that he thought it was important that we keep all of this traditional stuff like afternoon tea, cricket and cucumber sandwiches alive because American culture was taking over the world but he couldn’t imagine it taking over England,” Oasis’ Noel Gallagher told The Quietus in 2011. “But then you realise… oh shit… it did. What a cunt.”
While a disparate and eclectic moment in UK pop—’Country House’ a million miles away from ‘Roll With It’—what unified Oasis and Blur was the nostalgia pang that struck the British charts after alternative America’s MTV bludgeoning. Britpop made the nation fall in love with the 1960s again, evoked London’s second swing and paraded the likes of Davies, Pete Townsend and Paul McCartney as the moment’s elder statesmen.
Any celebration of England, no matter how innocent, sparked a renewed interest in The Kinks’ cult favourite during ‘Cool Britannia’, which led to the consensus of Village Green… as their defining record. Despite hailing from Manchester’s working-class Burnage area, Gallagher finds Davies’ pastoral lyricism of cricket grounds and English tea as enchanting as anyone else: “The Kinks, like The Who, are one of those quintessentially great English singles bands, but I’ve listened to this album so many times and I just fucking love it.”
