by Andy Miller
12Rock historians please note: the rival gangs of The Wild One have now supplied two bands with names — The Beetles have been joined by the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.
13No other song on TKATVGPS exceeds three minutes, let alone four.
14For copyright reasons, the song was quickly rewritten on the film’s set as ‘Stroll On’.
15Davies may also have copped the tide from Howard Hawks’ 1952 movie The Big Sky.
16Davies told Jonathan Cott he would like to hear ‘Big Sky’ intoned by the rather more messianic sounding Burt Lancaster.
17Shades of Coming Up For Air again. George Bowling’s happiest childhood memories are of days spent fishing, an image that in part supplies the novel’s title.
18Although The Kinks never recorded the song, the lachrymose ‘Nobody’s Fool’ is worth tracking down. The version released as a single on Pye (!) in 1972 is by a group with the quite possibly pseudonymous name of Cold Turkey, whose vocalist sounds uncannily like Dave Davies.
19Although ‘Village Green’ was never considered for Four More Respected Gentlemen, the song was first officially released in May 1967 on a French EP called Mister Pleasant (along with the title track, ‘This Is Where I Belong’ and ‘Two Sisters’). It also appeared on a Spanish EP prior to TKATVGPS.
20This version of the song lacks orchestral accompaniment, and could well be a demo for the prospective arranger.
21Although a version of ‘Village Green’ was recorded in November 1966, in X-Ray, Davies dates this session to February 1967. “When Robert [Wace] heard ‘Two Sisters’ he smiled for the first time in what seemed like many months and said that I had taken my writing into another class.” (Pg 336) It may be that overdubs were added to the basic tracks in February.
22Strings are noticeably absent from The Kinks recordings of the next two years. As Doug Hinman suggests, “the hiring of an arranger and string players was an expensive proposition probably not seen as worthwhile by the frugal Pye Records executives.” And besides, Davies had high hopes for the “cost-effective” Mellotron, with its tape loops of horn and string sounds. Nevertheless, the yen for real violins, violas etc. seems to have stayed with Davies. In April 1969, he flew to Los Angeles to produce the Turtle Soup LP for The Turtles. Howard Kaylan: “He brought in a large orchestra, strings and horns. . . . He thought that the orchestrated sound of the Turtles and that Hollywood production value that he had been missing on his records he could put onto ours. It was a strange thing.”
23Did Ray Davies go through a phase of reading Orwell? Much of the landscape of Davies’ 1970’s Preservation work suggests a familiarity with the totalitarian dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four. TKATVGPS contains a song called ‘Animal Farm’. And then there are the repeated echoes of Coming Up For Air. “Orwell had nostalgia himself, certainly,” writes Bernard Crick in his biography of the writer, “but in balance, not to excess as he deliberately portrayed in Bowling [in Coming Up For Air]. So the nostalgia of the novel as a whole was deliberately ambivalent. . . . There are so many good things in the past that we should preserve, the novelist says, but clinging to the past is no solution.” (Crick, Pg 376)
24As pointed out by Ken Rayes, Daisy and Tom are the names of the destructive married couple in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a novel that relocates the pastoral tradition to the USA. For more parallels between the book and the album, see ‘The ‘Village Green’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ — Two Views of Preservation’ in Living On A Thin Line, Rock’n’Roll Research Press, 2002.
25Fans of ‘Starstruck’, take note: the mono mix of the song is a few seconds longer.
26In 2002, Sanctuary Records, missing the point for sound commercial reasons, included ‘Wicked Annabella’ and ‘Phenomenal Cat’ on a compilation album called Haunted: Psychedelic Pstones II, alongside nuggets from such forgotten talents as The Orange Seaweed, The Glass Menagerie and The Flying Machine.
27‘Phenomenal Cat’ most closely resembles the work of The Kinks’ Pye label mate Donovan, whose double LP A Gift From A Flower To A Garden was released in April 1968. One disc was for adults, the other for children. The album came packaged in a dark blue two-pieced box, printed in full colour on the outside and inside, and included an orange folder containing twelve inserts for the twelve songs on the children’s record. Each insert was a different colour, with the lyrics and a drawing illustrating each song. It is difficult to imagine tight-fisted Pye sanctioning such extravagance happily; later that year, they would turn down Ray Davies’ request for a double album.
28Ken Rayes speculates that ‘Phenomenal Cat’ may be Davies’ caricature of the businessman Allen Klein. “I cite Davies’s account in X-Ray of their first meeting where he compares him to rotund comedian Lou Costello, and his portrayal of Klein’s braggadocio concerning his famous clients and all of ‘the places he had been’”. (Living On A Thin Line, Pg 163)
29The mono mix of ‘Wicked Annabella’ has more reverb and more volume.
30In its original stereo mix, ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’ concludes with a trad jazz line-up blowing a ragtime number — That’s All, Folks! — but it was removed for copyright reasons at the last minute, presumably because Davies used a pre-existing recording rather than hire a jazz band. It can be heard as an extra track on the current British edition of the album. There are in fact diree mixes of the song in circulation: the original stereo mix with coda (2.22), the standard stereo mix without coda (2.10) and a slightly longer mono mix (2.14).
31The contemporaneous ‘Days’ received the easy listening treatment from Petula Clark and James Last. The majority of TKATVGPS cover versions originate in the late 80’s and 90’s and American indie artists (and dyed-in-the-wool 60’s obsessives) like Matthew Sweet (‘Big Sky’), Jason Falkner (’Wicked Annabella’), Young Fresh Fellows (’Picture Book’), Yo La Tengo (’Big Sky’ and ‘Animal Farm’), etc etc.
32To be fair, Arthur was a commission / collaboration with Julian Mitchell and Granada TV, until Granada pulled out at the last minute.
33All these songs are available in perfect sound quality on the ‘Neue Revue’ Great Lost Kinks Album (HTSLP 340016 P) and Japanese Secret Sessions (Phenomenal Cat 63/72) bootlegs. The author needs to remind you that bootlegs are illegal and does not condone their sale or manufacture. Even listening to them makes you a bad person.
34Andrew Sandoval notes the similarity between Hopkins’ Mellotron work on ‘Mr. Songbird’ and Zal Yanovsky’s guitar part on ‘You’re A Big Girl Now’, a single by avowed Kinks’ favourites The Lovin’ Spoonful.
35‘Berkeley Mews’ was first released in July 1969 on an American promotional Kinks LP, Then, Now and Inbetween. It may be that the track was subject to some additional work just prior to this. It is a noticeably heavier production than anything else recorded by The Kinks in 1968. The guitars are loud and then there is the underused saxophone player — just a few bars at the end of the song. Certain Dave Davies tracks (e.g. ‘Mr Reporter’) received belated brass over-dubs during the May and June 1969 sessions for Arthur, so it is possible the brief saxophone part at the end of ‘Berkeley Mews’ was added at this time — the instrument is certainly an anomaly in The Kinks’ Village Green sessions.
36One of the play’s other principal characters is called Captain Cat, but there is little that is phenomenal about him. Oh, and he isn’t a cat.
37If Davies ever intended ‘Wonderboy’ for Village Green or TKATVGPS, he quickly changed his mind. Following its failure as a single, the track was abandoned and never seriously considered for any new Kinks album, not even the aborted Four More Respected Gentlemen. As a single, the recording was mixed in mono, and that is how it has remained on nearly all its subsequent compilation appearances. The rare stereo mix is awful, obscuring the vocal track for most of the song, and was only included on a few budget LP collections in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. To my knowledge, it has never been issued on CD.
38On 1st July and 9th July 1968. The first of these
performances is available on BBC Sessions 1964–1977.
39Pedant’s corner: When the song was first released on The Big Ball and The Great Lost Kinks Album, it was called ‘When I Turn Out The Living Room Light’, probably the result of a US clerical error — Davies sings “off” and the Reprise tape log shows the title as such. In 2001, BBC Sessions 1964–1977 upheld the ignoble TKATVGPS tradition of misprinting song titles, not once but twice; the sleeve notes refer to ‘When I Turn Out The Living Room Light’, while the cover lists the track as ‘When I Turn Off The Living Room Lights’.
40Tony Blackburn is a famous British disc jockey who remains as naff today as he was in 1969.
41The Return To Waterloo soundtrack LP was credited to a solo Ray Davies. However, it was intended to be a Kinks album (three tracks had already appeared on 1984’s Word Of Mouth), until Dave Davies objected and refused to have anything to do with the project.
42In their fascination with the lives of ‘Ordinary people’, and a style that is literate, witty and empathetic, Morrissey and Davies have much in common.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledments
Dedication
1. The Boy Next Door, Only Better
2. The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society
3. Pictures in the Sand
Epilogue: The Echoing Green
Bibliography
Select Discography
Notes
Footnotes
Chapter 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Chapter 2
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Chapter 3
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
