Once upon a time there was a kinkling called Mr (Raymond Douglas) Davies who created, along with his group The Kinks, a marvellous entertainment called Village Green Preservation Society. It was a wonderful series of vignettes about characters in said village green including Johnny Thunder, Wicked Annabella and a fella simply called Walter. Some years later, Mr Davies returned to the concept with two more albums, also created with The Kinks, under the collective title of Preservation (Acts 1 and 2). This expanded the village green concept into a political psychodrama featuring an arch Capitalist called Mr Flash and an arch Conservative/Socialist called Mr Black whose forces represented either decadence or conformity. Mr Davies and his group moved on from these concept albums to produce a series of successful (in the US) albums that stuck to no particular theme. But every now and then a song came through that seemed to harken back to the original village green concept, as though Mr Davies could never truly let it go and still had ideas that developed the concept further. What follows on this album is an attempt to put these ‘harkening’ songs together into some sort of coherent semblance of a sequel to the original concept. Please listen to and enjoy this new entertainment entitled Preservation: the Aftermath.
The ‘Kinklish’ liner notes above were written for an album compilation I had been wanting to make for a long time. The main problem was getting the sequence right. It went through so many permutations, and I don’t think I’ll ever get it ‘right’, but this is the final one I settled on. The key to it was having a through line for one character, an Everyman, who is caught in the malaise conjured by the economic and social conditions he’s faced with at the end of the Preservation albums.
The first few songs offer a recap of what has gone before and where we’re at now. Now and Then, from 1990’s UK Jive album, made an obvious choice for opener with its opening line ‘In the beginning of it all there was the land’. Its harkening back to an earlier, more ‘innocent’ time is classic VGPS era sentiment. ‘Now mighty corporations and politicians rule the land’ sums up the where we’re at bit. A wonderful, elegiac song with a bit of a steal from You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling (listen out for it). I was tempted to bring in the song Mr Big Man, from Sleepwalker, at this point to give us a main Baddie, but I decided I didn’t need him. The ‘baddie’ in all this (according to Ray) is clearly greedy corporations and lying politicians, so I left it at that. And Mr Big Man is such an anonymous character anyway, so he’s more an un-named presence or threat hovering over everything in the story. Scrapheap City is actually a song from the original Preservation albums of ’73 and ’74, but the version I used only appeared as the b-side of a single. Sung by Ray, it’s very different to the album version, which is sung by a woman with an uptempo country feel. The b-side’s a slow country-blues, with a nice pastoral intro that is wonderfully undercut by the opening lyrics of ‘There ain’t no beauty and there ain’t no style’. This is exactly where the original Preservation albums ended. The bluesy Welcome To Sleazy Town, from 1986’s Think Visual, could easily have been sung by Mr Flash, it has his money-grubbing personality all over it. But if it’s him he’s singing from the past, lamenting the passing of his good-time decadent empire – because ‘city hall killed off that scene’. But was it really killed off? There’s a certain ambiguity or irony about what’s to come that suggests, to me at least, that the crime and low rent sleaziness reasserts itself; much in the way that cities that are meant to be beacons of civilization often become concrete jungles. The corruption and greed keeps coming, and it’s the little people who pay for it.
Which brings us to the start of the Everyman thread. As announced in Massive Reductions, the non-album b-side of 1981’s Better Things single (much better than the unnecessary album version from Word of Mouth), our man has just been laid off due to inflation – and possibly workplace skullduggery. ‘Now it’s hello to welfare, I hear that everybody’s going there’. The situation puts him onto a Low Budget, the title track of the 1979 album that put the Kinks back on the charts. I was tempted to add A Gallon of Gas, a sly song about the petrol crisis of ’79 from the same album here, but it seemed a bit redundant. Instead I went with Pressure, again from Low Budget, because it adds a new element – a girlfriend who helps our Everyman cope with the pressures he’s facing. And it turns out she’s ‘got it too, so I know what you’re going through’. She’s our Everywoman. The malaise continues for our Everyman with Noise, the b-side to the very successful Come Dancing single of 1983. I liked the notion that it’s abstract and something he can’t escape from and the pressure is building up, and ‘All of this confusion is ruining my day’ leads nicely to State of Confusion, the title track of the 1983 album. This is the crucial point where the ‘girlfriend packed her bags and went out to another town’. Things are really ramping up, and it gets worse when his identity records are wiped by the new computer in Definite Maybe from the same album. Thus ‘head office thinks I’m dead, but I’m not even ill’. This is such a fun song about the absurdities of bureaucracy and its never-ending cycles of repetition. Thus we pause here for the song Repetition from Think Visual. Ray has written a virtual cycle of songs about the cycle of repetition, including not just this one but Predictable from Give the People What They Want and, as we’ll soon see, Do It Again from Word of Mouth. It’s clearly a major theme that fits very well here. The cycles come in all shapes and sizes: they can be about human behaviour, economic behaviour, and even historical. Ray seems to like pointing this out. We keep doing the same thing, repeating our mistakes!
Cliches of the World, from State of Confusion, is where the Everyman is at his lowest ebb and he’s at breaking point. There is one short reprieve for him when, dramatically, the music falls away and he dreams of escape and of aliens taking him to a place where he can experience ‘unimaginable pleasure’. But it’s short-lived and the cliches of the world bring him down again. He’s a ‘little man with anger in his eyes’ and his actions could go either way. Does he go on a killing spree, as suggested by the earlier song from Give the People What They Want, Killer’s Eyes’, or self destruction? For the next song, Don’t, from the last studio album Phobia, I went with the latter. It’s a fabulous song, one of my favourites, about a man who plans to jump off the ledge of a high building, only to attract a large crowd who all shout ‘Don’t look down’. The thing is, his action brings the people together. ‘We’re gripped by this tragedy, our blood starts to pump, as we all shout together Don’t jump, Don’t jump!’ Does he do it or not? It’s wonderfully ambivalent: ‘What made it happen? Guess we’ll never know. Now the sun’s come out looks like he’s standing on a rainbow’. It’s the point where the Everyman’s isolation and pain is finally acknowledged by an empathetic humanity. And while we’re all still looking up, is that a Looney Balloon, the next song from UK Jive, we see floating above him? Well, going crazy is another option and Ray teases the metaphor to include the entire country in this lovely dynamic song bringing the Everyman’s story to a bittersweet but life affirming close. ‘We’re out of control in this looney balloon’, and the only option seems to be to escape, to ‘just drift away’.
On that note we come out of the Everyman’s story and back to Earth with a thud with Living On a Thin Line from 1984’s Word of Mouth. A song written and sung by Ray’s brother Dave, it should have been released as the follow up to the successful Come Dancing single at the time instead of Do It Again, which failed. If ever a song coulda shoulda been a hit, that’s the one. In terms of this compilation it and the next two songs zoom us back out to the political overview that started it, adding a push towards activism. Thin Line is a yearning, questioning song that seeks answers that never come: ‘Now another century nearly gone, what are we gonna leave for the young? What we couldn’t do, what we wouldn’t do. It’s a crime…’ Expectations, from Ray’s early solo album of 1984, Return To Waterloo, expands on this sentiment, adding an angry militant stance with stark drums at the end. ‘Now all the lies have gone on too long. And a million apologies can’t right the wrong.’ Get Up, from 1978’s Misfits, is the call to action. ‘Here’s a song for all the little men who get forgotten time and time again.’ And ‘You’re in the middle while the big mouths fight. You get it from the left and the right, ain’t it crazy?’ The music, especially at the end, exhorts the listener to action – to indeed Get Up. It’s a reasonable request, considering the circumstances of the story, but haven’t we been here before? Consider this from the song: ‘Somebody gotta get up and shout, somebody gotta give us some clout’. Somebody? Who? New boss, same as the old boss? I did a cheeky thing at this point. I followed this call to action with the song Young Conservatives, from State of Confusion. A song about how ‘the revolution used to be cool, but now it’s out of fashion’, and how ‘the schools and universities are turning out a brand new breed of young conservatives’. It even has some sly references to the earlier Kinks song David Watts, about one such privileged school boy. Ah, how the pendulum swings! Did Ya from Phobia offers a final mordant commentary on the Sixties idealism and how we all ‘paid the price for being lazy’. Then it’s Do It Again from Word of Mouth which lands us ‘Standing in the middle of nowhere, wondering how to begin. Lost between tomorrow and yesterday, between Now and Then’. And we’re back where we started…