A review by gengelcox
The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

Although I knew a few Kinks’ songs growing up, they weren’t a band I followed or even explored. Although they started in Britain at roughly the same time as The Who, The Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, the Kinks failed to capitalize on their early successes, which this book by Andy Miller attributes to a combination of poor decisions on both the part of their main songwriter, Ray Davies, and his record label, Pye. The latter wanted Davies and the band to continue focusing on single releases, ignoring the trend in the late 60s to more album-oriented material, including conceptual albums. Davies, with his finger on the pulse, tried to follow Pete Townshend and Paul McCartney in creating albums, but dithered between trying to do it as a solo album or a band album or even a concept album at all. In the end, The Kings Are the Village Green Preservation Society (TKATVGPS heretofore) got issued late and sank without a trace.

And yet, today, it’s considered a classic. And that’s because people two decades later rediscovered it when CDs opened up music publisher vaults and enabled them to sell the same music they had already sold by repackaging and remastering and releasing on the new format. Now, TKATVGPS is the best-selling non-compilation Kinks album. Funny how time works.

For my part, I find Davies’ singing and the Kinks style in general not to my taste, kind of like Bob Dylan, but enjoy Davies’ songwriting when others cover his songs. And there are a lot of covers, from the top 20 hit for Kirsty MacColl of “Days” to the bombastic Van Halen version of “You Really Got Me” to the plaintive Chrissie Hind wailing on “Stop Your Sobbing” on the first Pretenders record to the impulsive Jam cover of “David Watts” (which I can never listen to without thinking of my high school friend of the same name, although he’s nothing like the boy described in the song). I had never heard TKATVGPS until I went looking for it after hearing Kate Rusby’s cover of the title track. As Miller explores in his book, even had Pye made a bigger deal of releasing the album, Davies’ concept was likely out-of-step with anything going on in rock music at the time, focused on small town life, nostalgia, memories, and regrets. Compare that with Pete Townshend’s ambitious quasi-SF rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who creates a cult.

Perhaps it’s because I’m older now that I find Davies’ subject material more appealing than pinball wizards and acid queens. Miller’s track-by-track review of the songs on the album explore Davies’ likely state of mind, whether or not the song was originally intended to be included in the new album, and how it was recorded. He also covers all the songs written and recorded at the time and discarded, only to be found today in bootlegs or on Komplete compilations.

I’m not sure I can recommend this book to people who aren’t as obsessive about music as I am, but if you are interested in the Kinks and this period of British rock, it’s a wonderful trip.