Village Green Preservation Society is the Kinks greatest album. Not only is it musically and lyrically brilliant, but it does something unique - it makes a long term leftie like me feel sympathetic towards conservatives.
There are two tracks that draw on the album’s title.
The first, Village Green, is a beautiful evocation of Ray Davies’ rural childhood:
I miss the village green
And all the simple people
I miss the village green
The church, the clock, the steeple
I miss the morning dew, fresh air and Sunday school
The only problem with these lyrics? None of them are true. Ray Davies grew up in Muswell Hill, North London. His nostalgia for a rural past is genuine, even if the past itself is imaginary—real nostalgia for a fake past he never experienced.
The second, The Village Green Preservation Society, is even better. Davies starts by declaring he has joined a society to protect the Village Green. As the song develops, he lists increasingly daft Conservative pressure groups he supports, wishing to preserve everything from Tudor houses and china cups to virginity.
He brilliantly sends up the absurdity of English reactionary societies dedicated to opposing the modern world. And yet, the sillier they get, the more I want to join them.
Who wouldn’t want to be part of The Sherlock Holmes English-Speaking Vernacular, whose stated aims are to preserve Fu Manchu, Moriarty, and Dracula?
The Essence of English Conservatism
In The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell attempts to define Englishness. Writing during WWII, while bombs were literally falling around him, he one of the key characteristic of Britishness or Englishness: our love of hobbies and clubs.
The English are a nation of hobbyists and collectors. Given the choice between watching first-class opera or taking part in second-rate amateur dramatics, they would always choose the latter.
It is this essential English Conservatism that Davies captures so perfectly. He satirises it, but in such an affectionate way that we all end up wanting to sign up for The Desperate Dan Appreciation Society.
The Beauty of Days
Some versions of the album include Days, one of Davies’ most beautiful songs, in which he reflects on the end of something precious. Whether it’s a lover leaving, a friend departing, or simply the end of an era, it is never explained—and the song is all the better for its ambiguity.
The sense of mourning for something past, something lost permeates the album.
Davies would go on to explore these themes in more depth, though perhaps with less success, on Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). That album continues the theme of nostalgia but never quite captures the magic of Village Green Preservation Society, although Victoria comes close.
And that’s precisely why this album remains so special. It’s a love letter to a world that never quite existed—but one we can’t help but wish did.