There was a guy at school — I forget his name, but he wore white socks all the time — who was into music that (he thought) made him look good, probably to girls. So in 1981 he was big on Adam and the Ants and Kraftwerk; he didn't like it when I played King Crimson on the Sixth Form Centre cassette deck. We were hanging out at the top of the stairs waiting for the teacher to arrive for our Drama Workshop lesson, and he was holding forth about the Kinks, and how they were "kind of '60s heavy metal." At this phrase the teacher (another forgotten name) rounded the stairwell, and scoffed: "We didn't call them 'heavy metal' in the '60s; they were just 'The Kinks', end of story — no need to put songs in pigeon holes." Now this was a remarkable thing for a teacher to say at our school, because it betrayed a knowledge, and even a hint of personal experience, of pop music. Generally the Party Line was to treat all music as one lumpen mass, neither worthy or capable of being distinguished into any classifications. That was probably one reason why we so rejoiced in genres and tribes, to nurture and celebrate practices so arcane to our elders and betters that they might as well have been taken from one of Aleister Crowley's magick rituals (Crowley actually attended our school, but — who'd have guessed? — was expelled after a single term). Anyway, this wasn't the first time said teacher had let his guard slip sufficiently to reveal dodgy dabblings in the pop underworld. He also overheard Jeremy breaking the news of John Lennon's death to me in the Smythe Library. I enquired casually whether he'd "done a Bon Scott" and choked on his own vomit. We were 15, and AC/DC were bigger than The Beatles; and Rush were bigger than both together (we weren't trying to impress the girls, evidently). At which point, said teacher turned from his desk and, in a hissed whisper, tore me off a strip for talking of Lennon in such flippant terms.
Anyway, The Kinks. There's no way The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society could ever be called heavy metal, but a few of the tracks on this first album, well, they could certainly be called garage rock in the Nuggets sense. But alongside the ferocity of the garage tracks, there are the feral-in-a-different-way R&B covers. The sleeve notes on this expanded re-issue assert "there was no doubt about the dominant voice on the album — Raymond Douglas Davies," but it feels to me that there is every doubt about that on the basis of listening to this album alone. That assertion is only possible with the benefit of a PhD in hindsight.
The album feels to me like a compendium of half-formed possibilities for a group with, as yet, no clear identity. And of all the paths they could have taken from here, the one to Village Green Preservation Society must have seemed least likely. So… they were just 'The Kinks.'
MusicBrainz entry for this album
Comments