‘Village Green Preservation Society’: the only true The Kinks album?
While it was deemed a commercial failure at the time of its release, The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society has become widely regarded as the best and most ambitious album in the British band’s catalogue. Lauded for its overarching concept and ability to tie together themes of rural life in the United Kingdom, it also marked a stark transition in the band’s style, shifting from being a successful pop group to a far more expansive sound that encompassed folk, blues and psychedelia.
The grand concept that Ray Davies had come up with was initially dismissed by the rest of the band, with them shelving the project in favour of recording Something Else and even going as far as to suggest to Davies that he should instead focus on it as a solo venture. However, despite his attempts to piece the record together on his own, he finally managed to get the rest of the band back on board in 1968.
By this time, their status was dwindling, and they had stopped touring in America, something that Davies credits as having inspired the switch towards writing lyrics that reflected pastoral English life. His refusal to step down from this lofty idea and insistence on the band following his vision might have led to a marvellous musical love letter to the countryside. Still, it further hampered their position in terms of their popularity.
However, despite it almost all but removing the band from the spotlight, pursuing Davies’ hunger for artistic integrity over record sales was something that the group retrospectively felt satisfied with. The ambivalence that was once felt towards recording it as a Kinks record would dissipate in the years following its release, with everyone who played a part in its lengthy incubation suggesting that it marked the pinnacle of the band’s achievements.
Their bassist at the time, Pete Quaife, suggested that “making that album was a high point of my career. It is something of which I am very proud. For me, it represents the only real album made by The Kinks. It is probably the only album made by us in which we all contributed something,” while drummer Mick Avory said of the creative process that “it was more collaborative, rather than going in like session men and just doing it.”
But does this make Village Green Preservation Society the only ‘true’ Kinks record? In terms of the artistic ambition and direction, at its core it remains Davies’ brainchild, as would many of the subsequent albums that they released together. They became increasingly conceptual and further removed from the pop sphere, releasing albums such as Arthur and Lola Versus Powerman to critical fanfare, but it came at the cost of their decline in the public eye.
Having every member contributing to Davies’ earnest attempt to create a masterpiece might have felt like a process that brought everyone together more than they had experienced on other records, but that doesn’t change how singular the idea was, and considering a lot of the tracks had been written by the singer in solitude lends more to the argument that it is far from being the only true Kinks album, and is instead a Ray Davies album that happens to have featured contributions from the rest of the band.
