The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society

The welcoming chorus at the entrance does not tell you everything about this village. Old friends, photographs, strange figures and embarrassments occupy the neighbouring songs. The Kinks build an imagined community through changes of tone rather than a continuous plot. A tune can smile while its subject remains a little uncomfortable.

Released in 1968, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society asks what it means to keep something that time is changing. A village green is shared open grassland, a meeting place rather than a grand monument. In the band’s later anniversary material, Ray Davies connects his imagined village with the ending of youth. That personal perspective is more useful than treating every character as a literal resident of a real English settlement.

The album beside the photographs

Do You Remember Walter? leads into Picture Book, putting the memory of a person beside the preservation of an image. The surrounding music prevents the setting from becoming uniformly cosy. Last of the Steam-Powered Trains brings a rougher movement; Phenomenal Cat and Wicked Annabella take the imagination into stranger corners. By the closing People Take Pictures of Each Other, the act of recording a happy moment can sound less simple than it did near the beginning.

Not universally ignored

Robert Christgau championed the record in the Village Voice in April 1969. His contemporary American enthusiasm should neither be erased nor mistaken for universal commercial success. Official Charts records the album’s first British main-album-chart appearance in 2018, at number 47. The delayed chart entry and an early favourable review belong to different parts of its reception history.

Keep the miniature world intact

This guide follows the fifteen-song British programme, available here in a 2018 remaster. An earlier continental twelve-track edition and the anniversary expansions have different contents. Begin with the roughly forty-minute album before exploring extras. On one pass, follow the people and objects; on another, notice where the chorus brightens or the sound darkens. The juxtaposition makes nostalgia an unstable feeling rather than an uncomplicated instruction to restore the past.