The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Miller Andy

Author:Miller, Andy [Miller, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Continuum US
Published: 2003-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,

Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;

Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,

And desolation saddens all thy green . . .

Here, as I take my solitary rounds,

Amidst thy tangling walks and ruin’d grounds,

And, many a year elaps’d, return to view

Where once the cottage stood, the hawthorn grew,

Remembrance wakes with all her busy train,

Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain.

It could be Ray Davies in a powdered wig.

Davies has frequently said that the ‘Englishness’ of his lyrics at this time, the profusion of cups of tea and country houses, was a product of The Kinks’ five-year banishment from America, but the English sensibility of Davies’ songwriting has a deeper, older root. If ‘Village Green’ is — dread phrase — quintessentially English, it is not because of its literal use of images of oak trees, church steeples and so on, but because it employs these images to suggest innocence has been lost. This is the very kernel of the English pastoral theme, a retrospective, self-renewing pessimism. Things will never be as good as they used to be. For Davies, The Kinks’ US ban was surely the proof, not the cause.

In ‘Village Green’, and throughout TKATVGPS, the pastoral and the personal have become entwined. “I sought fame,” says the singer, and the suggestion is that by seeking fame, he feels he has contributed to the despoiling of the village. He has abandoned love and, in doing so, has left behind a lifeless place, fit only for gawping Americans and Daisy’s husband Tom, who now owns the grocery, the pithiest and funniest detail of the entire album. The singer will return, he and Daisy will be reunited, laughter will once again be heard around the green. By its final verse, the song has become a study in pathetic self-deception, an impossibly perfect scene no better or more realistic than the “rare antiquities” snapped by those darn tourists. You can’t go home again, said Thomas Wolfe; Davies appears deluded enough to believe he can.24

Why did Davies cling on to ‘Village Green’ for so long before letting it be heard? It may be that he had reservations about revealing his “ideal place, a protected place” — “the worst thing I did was inflict it on the public. I should have left it in my diary.”lxxxii But he also saw ‘Village Green’ as a starting point for something new, not just the Village Green concept and the distinctive songs that would spring from it, but the type of work he could produce outside the strictures imposed on him by The Kinks and the demands of the hit machine. However, the moment passed; in some respects, Davies’ decision to include the song on TKATVGPS can be seen as a capitulation, not just to The Kinks but also to his wavering self-confidence. By the time it was finally released, ‘Village Green’ was confirmed as Ray Davies’ personal parable, and its lost innocence belonged to no one but himself.

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