Glimpses of This Almost Surreal World
Chatting with Dave Davies about The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society
Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!
Hope you all had a delicious and marvelously restorative weekend.
Whether you know me in real life, through this Substack or on social media, you are probably well aware by now that The Kinks are my all-time favorite band. A quick search of the JTL archive reveals three posts (so far) devoted exclusively to the work of Ray Davies & Co. and what it means to me, as well as at least six others where the band just happens to pop up in the course of the conversation. Over 46 years since Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 introduced me to the band via “A Rock N’ Roll Fantasy,” The Kinks are still never far from my thoughts or my turntable.
Not that I’d staunchly defend every single song or album in the band’s extensive catalog; I’m not at all ashamed to admit that I find 1974’s Preservation Act 2 even less appetizing than the most egregiously arena-oriented installments of their oft-reviled eighties/nineties output. But the best Kinks stuff (and there’s a considerable amount of it that falls under the heading of “best”) continues to resonate with me as deeply — and in some cases even more so — as it did back in my teens.
Case in point: Their 1968 masterpiece The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, an album which I first heard in its entirety at the age of 18 via a Portuguese import copy (the record had been long out of print in the US by then), and which I find just as wondrously enchanting 40 years later. A Ray Davies-penned concept album comprising 15 songs about life in a small, picturesque English village, VGPS certainly hit a deep nerve with my inner Anglophile back in 1984. But listening to it yesterday, two years to the day after I officially abandoned city life for a place at the base of the Shawangunk Mountains, I also marveled at how perfectly its pastoral melancholia and whimsical appreciation of life’s smaller joys mirrored where I’m at right now, both geographically and in my own heart and head.
Six years ago, right before I left Chicago for the last time, VGPS received a lavish 50th anniversary reissue that included stereo and mono vinyl remasters of the album, a stereo vinyl version with the original 12-song track listing (which only wound up being released at the time in Sweden and a few other countries), reissues of three 45s from the era, five CDs including backing tracks and live versions of the album’s songs, reprints of vintage posters and photos, and a 52-page hardcover photo book. Not bad treatment at all for an album that sank like a stone upon its initial release in November 1968.
As if that 50th anniversary set wasn’t enough of a treat for this diehard Kinks fan, its release also afforded me the opportunity to speak with Kinks co-founder and lead guitarist Dave Davies about the album. I’d interviewed Dave at length many years earlier (over tea in an L.A. restaurant sometime in the late nineties); but as that conversation was more about his solo work and his recently published book Kink: An Autobiography, we didn’t touch at all on VGPS.
Coincidentally, that VGPS 50th anniversary set was released right around the same time as Decade, an archival collection of previously unreleased Dave Davies solo tracks that had been written and recorded between 1971 and 1979. Fleshed out and compiled with the help of his sons Simon and Martin, Decade offers a fascinating glimpse into what was happening in Dave’s creative life at a time when his older brother Ray was completely dominating the Kinks’ recorded output. Dave, quite understandably, wanted to talk about Decade as well as VGPS — though as we’ll see, there are some common threads tying the two very different projects together.
As I mentioned here last week, I have a lot of pretty amazing interviews piled up in my hard drive (as well as in boxes of old cassettes); and going forward, I intend to trot out a lot more like this one — which has never been printed before in its entirety — for my paid subscribers. And of course, a paid subscription to Jagged Time Lapse will also gain you access to all the other cool interviews I’ve already posted (like this one with AC/DC’s Angus Young), plus the completed chapters of my musical memoir in progress (like this one about discovering marijuana and Foghat Live on the same bus ride), and all the full episodes of CROSSED CHANNELS, the monthly music podcast I do with my friend and fellow scribe Tony Fletcher. (Our next episode, which covers the British band James, will be up later this week.) And you can get that all for just $5 a month or $50 a year. Such a deal, right?
Now then, let’s flash back to the afternoon in October 2018 when I had the profound pleasure of speaking with Dave Davies about the small wonders of The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. I was expecting to hear first from his publicist, who would then patch me in to Dave — but when my phone rang at the agreed-upon time, it was Dave’s cheery (and unmistakably high-pitched) voice on the other end…
Thanks for calling, Dave. I wanted to talk to you about Village Green Preservation Society…
Oh, good. And maybe we can also give a mention to Decade!
I was gonna get into that with you, as well.
Oh, great, that’d be great.
That’s actually a good place to start, now that you mention it, Village Green is being reissued at almost the same time that Decade is coming out. What’s it like for you to go back and listen to all of these old songs again?
Well, obviously, these are two very different projects. The Decade album is an album of previously unreleased recordings of mine as a solo artist, which were recorded in the seventies and have been sitting around in various forms since then. We decided to finally try and get the thing organized, and get it together; it’s finally going to be released on the 12th of October, so I’m very excited. My son Simon produced it, and my son Martin helped to collate the material and gather it all together; without them both, it would never have gotten finished.
It sounds fantastic — it actually comes across more as an album than as a collection of tracks.
Oh, cool! That’s good. That’s great.
But when you listen to those songs, or the songs of Village Green, do they take you right back to the time when you made those recordings? Or do they feel like something from an era that you feel completely disconnected from?
Well, Decade, whenever I listen to it, is full of mixed emotions; it flashes me back to a time when I was going through a lot of inner change and inner turmoil about things — my observations about my life at the time. It’s a very personal album. I mean, with Village Green, obviously the songs are mainly Ray’s songs. But we worked on them very closely together, because the concept, the idea of an album about a village green, it touched on a lot of characters [from our own lives] that weren’t too dissimilar to the people in the fictitious version of Village Green — the shopkeepers, the neighbors, the crazy old woman that lived down the road…