The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
| The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society | ||||
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| Studio album by The Kinks | ||||
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Publication |
November 22, 1968 |
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| Label (s) | Pye Records | |||
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Format (s) |
CD, LP |
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Title (number) |
15th |
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running time |
38 min 46 s |
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| occupation |
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Ray Davies |
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The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is the sixth studio album by British rock group The Kinks . It was released on November 22, 1968. All compositions on it are by Ray Davies . The recording for the back of the album cover was made in Hampstead Heath , a park in north London .
Emergence
The recordings for the LP dragged on two years (the Song Village Green , for example, was created in November 1966 the topic of the planned album is anticipated it: "I miss the village green and all the simple people ...") was, in the meantime 1967 Something Else by The Kinks released. Originally by Ray Davies as a double LP planned Village Green Preservation Society appeared after differences with the record company as a simple album, several songs, including the June 28, 1968 as a single published Days were shortly removed from the track list. At this point in time (end of September 1968) the LP had already been delivered in a version with 12 tracks in France , Italy , Scandinavia and New Zealand : With Mr. Songbird and Days , but without the Last of the Steam-Powered Trains , Big Sky , Sitting by the Riverside , Animal Farm and All of My Friends Will Be There . This pressing is in great demand among collectors today, but Ray Davies was not satisfied with the composition of the songs and stopped production. Many of the songs that were intended for the double LP at the time and fell victim to the cuts were only released by Pye Records in 1973 on the Great Lost Kinks album , which Berkeley Mews also disregarded was used as the B-side of Lola in 1970 .
meaning
In the year of its release, this concept album , a nostalgic homage to the tranquil English country life that describes a fictional British suburb, idyllic and narrow-minded petty bourgeoisie - Ray Davies was inspired by his London borough of Muswell Hill and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas - almost not noticed and ended as a catastrophic flop.
Ray Davies himself once described the album as the "most successful flop of all time". At a time when the Rolling Stones were asking for “ Sympathy for the Devil ” and even the Beatles were singing about the revolution , the unspectacular and thoughtful songs about People Take Pictures of Each Other met friends about theirs Remaining worrying (Walter), and self-satisfied hangover (Phenomenal Cat) don't suit the taste of the average music fan.
Meanwhile, this album is considered a big hit, appears from today's perspective in a lovable way both peculiarly old-fashioned and up-to-date and modern at the same time and was reissued in 2004 as a 3-CD luxury edition, which also contains all songs not published in 1968. The American Rolling Stone magazine ranks the album at number 258 on its list of the 500 best albums of all time .
In 2018 the album was re-released in a 50th Anniversary Edition with various bonus material and made it to the charts for the first time in some countries, including Great Britain and Germany.
Remarks
Ray Davies already allowed himself to look back on his own work with some songs, so ends a song about the good old steam train ( Last of the Steam-Powered Trains - based on the musical theme of Smokestack Lightning from the American blues legend Howlin 'Wolf ) with the riff of the 1965 hit Till the End of the Day .
The Kinks were still considered a hit machine and single supplier by the public at the time and by their record company at the time, Pye Records . Another negative effect was that there was no single release from the album in England. Only Starstruck with the B-side Picture Book and Village Green Preservation Society appeared with little success as a single in the USA and various European countries.
The CD booklet does not mention Nicky Hopkins , a studio musician who is often engaged by the Kinks and to whom they memorialized as early as 1966 with the song "Session Man" (on Face to Face ). He can be heard on the Mellotron on several tracks such as Animal Farm , Starstruck or Phenomenal Cat .
Track list
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Official track list
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Title list of the LP released with 12 songs
Album length: 30 m 30s |
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nick Hasted: The Kinks - The Story, page 133 ff, Bosworth Edition, ISBN 978-3-86543-698-6 .
- ↑ 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: The Kinks, 'The Village Green Preservation Society'. In: Rolling Stone . May 24, 2012, accessed April 26, 2014 .
- ^ The Kinks: The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (50th Anniversary Edition) , Rolling Stone, August 17, 2018
- ↑ Singles
Web links
Studio albums: Kinks (1964) | Kinda Kinks (1965) | The Kink Controversy (1965) | Well Respected Kinks (1966) | Face to Face (1966) | Something Else by The Kinks (1967) | The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) | Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969) | Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One (1970) | Percy - Original Soundtrack (1971) | Muswell Hillbillies (1971) | Everybody's in Show-Biz (1972) | Preservation Act 1 (1973) | Preservation Act 2 (1974) | Soap Opera (1975) | Schoolboys in Disgrace (1976) | Sleepwalker (1977) | Misfits (1978) | Low Budget (1979) | Give the People What They Want (1981) | State of Confusion (1983) | Word of Mouth (1984) | Think Visual (1987) | UK Jive (1989) | Phobia (1993) |
Live albums: Live at Kelvin Hall (1967) | One for the Road (1980) | The Road (1988) To the Bone (British version, 1994) | To the Bone (US version) (1996) | BBC Sessions: 1964–1977 (2001)