Can't agree with the negative comments about Village Green Preservation Society. I do consider it one of Ray Davies' best albums. Did you know he produced a staged version of it in 1969 or '70? I would love to have seen that - the album would lend itself to a dramatic staging.
My favorite album has always been Something Else. Any album with the song Waterloo Sunset on it would be.
But I've been going through all the albums in order and listening to them closely and hearing stuff that I never knew before. I've also been reading as many books as I can find about the Kinks and Ray Davies.
His ambitions were for the theater, when in school he wanted to make films or plays and got into music from the backdoor. This has got to be why many of his songs and albums are character based or narratives, culminating in teh three "operatic" records: Preservation, Act 1; Preservation Act 2, and Soap Opera.
It has been assumed that Davies was inspired to write these albums after Pete Townshend's Tommy - but Ray Davies has said he still has never heard Tommy. He has described himself as insular and hardly listened to his peer groups, not even most of the albums by The Beatles - at least this is what he claims. But it is not hard to believe since the Kinks were mostly out of step with the music being released around them.
The Kinks are/were my favorite band since grade school (when the Kinks first hit US radio) - and I liked them better than The Beatles or Rolling Stones. They and the Beach Boys were my two favorite bands - and I hear similarities in these two groups.
|