Village Green Preservation Society – The Kinks

This purports to be an analysis of concert footage from London in 1973, specifically of the song ‘Village Green Preservation Society’, but diverts from its purpose many a time.

This video is a virtual microcosm of the Kinks’ career and Dave’s trajectory within it. A foretaste of what was to come. It’s a falling line on a graph: from singing lead vocal on much of the Kinks early output, albeit B-sides or album tracks, some self-penned, some by Ray and many of the covers (‘I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight’, ‘Got My Feet on the Ground’, ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’) to joint lead on some songs (early, ‘Milk Cow Blues’, 'I Don't Need You Any More', slightly later, ‘Juke Box Music’, at least live), to backing singer (‘Life on the Road’, ‘Slum Kids’, ‘The Informer’). Later, and you imagine it’s in the manner of a papal dispensation, he’s granted a temporary recall from banishment and brought in from the cold to sing a song or two live (with some kind of entente cordiale in the early 80s when he gets to sing three: ‘Come On Now’, ‘Living on a Thin Line’ and ‘Bernadette’) unless a song proves very popular like ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’, in which case Ray resumes lead, even though he wrote this song for Dave’s voice, as he did ‘Sleepless Night’. (For more on this, please see 'bashfulbadgersblog'.) Sometimes he’s allowed to sing ‘Too Much on My Mind’ but they never seem to play ‘Strangers’, ‘Mindless Child of Motherhood’ or ‘This Man He Weeps Tonight’. At least, if they ever did, they’re not on YouTube, which is I’m afraid my only point of reference since I never saw them live. If only.

[In fact, ‘Milk Cow Blues’ proves an exception to the rule, with Dave originally singing a verse then passing the lead to Ray as in the 1965 version above - Dave’s like a wild animal, a tiger (in fact, in 'My Way', he sings 'I was born a tiger'), there’s often something uncontrolled about him, in his guitar playing and his singing – you’ll never hear him play/sing a song exactly the same way – it’s all fluid and flexible and when he gives, he gives it all, totally instinctual, the lyrics are mutable; at this stage, Ray’s more like a pussycat, riled enough to reveal his claws and rhythmically thump his tail but back to refuting my own point, in this 1966 performance, Dave starts the song, Ray takes over lead vocal then it reverts to Dave at the end and it’s as if they’re competing with each other as to who can hold the notes longer and deliver them with the most passion.]

While I’m on Dave’s backing vocals – well I was on them till I went off-track – I have to eulogise them a little. Their voices are so distinctive and they blend so well; Dave’s higher-pitched tone an emotional echo (it is an echo as it’s often just slightly behind Ray’s lead as people have commented on the Ray Davies Forum but it works like this and I’m sure is deliberate) and counterpoint to Ray’s voice of reason. Listen to ‘Scattered’, ‘Life on the Road’, ‘Slum Kids’, ‘Picture Book’, 'Jukebox Music', ‘Mr Pleasant’. I said in one of my first blogs, how live, Ray quite often acknowledges the advent of Dave’s distinctive backing vocal with a smile of recognition, sometimes combined with a sexy hairtoss, no doubt realising that this is a pretty irresistible combination, the incorrigible flirt. [It reminds me of a Bratpack movie, where a girl could flick her hair and smile and it was wryly considered a great accomplishment. Might have been About Last Night.

Googled it and it was (how’s that for my memory of total trivia?), found this:
Joan Her big move should be coming up any moment. The combination hair flip with a giggle.
Debbie There is a 3.2 level of difficulty here, Joan. Let's see if she can pull it off.
Joan This is it... this is it... Oh Yes!
Debbie Oh Yes! Yes! Oh Bravo! Bravo! 9.0!]

Don’t get me wrong. I love Ray’s voice and appreciate the way he can turn on a dime, from playful and affected to impassioned. To see him perform ‘Yo Yo’ (1982, Essen), with such total and more-than-adrenalin-fuelled commitment, is astonishing. He’s completely mesmerising. He gives everything. And so does Dave on guitar, so powerful; they match each other’s intensity. I love it when Ray reaches the top end of his range in ‘Million Pound Semi-Detached’ – it’s really touching. The choices he makes musically are always spot on. It’s not so much that he can do something as when he decides to do it, sometimes on the most unromantic word, like ‘semi’. ‘The Real World’ is a beautifully put-together song, in which Ray’s vocal wrenches your soul. Listen to the last verse/chorus ‘So head off in the car and follow the stars’ – it’s heart-breaking, the first half of the line plain-speaking, the second imbued with that wistfulness that only Ray can impart, in lyric, voice and melody (his signature move, level of difficulty: irrelevant to him because it comes so naturally). When he writes about Dave, and I don't think I’m reaching here (‘So you headed down south, left your old home town, … relocated so far away from the real world’ – it doesn’t take a detective to work this out although I admit that it could just as easily be about an ex-girlfriend), there’s always a special intimacy plus a real evocation of loss and regret. You can hear the love in his voice even if he’s unable to express it when they meet. I don’t think Dave needs to worry that Ray sometimes minimises his contribution (after all, what better way to wind him up?), because it’s obvious that he’s always in his thoughts. And I’d venture much more so than the other way around.

Anyway, I digress: Ray is sweaty and preternaturally pale and extraordinarily beautiful in this particular incarnation. Dave is slight (and perhaps used to being slighted), almost physically diminished somehow, insubstantial, an effect of his stance and position; as if he’s trying to disappear altogether. He looks like his body is there but his mind somewhere else. His eyes are glazed. They look without seeing, in complete contrast to this early ‘Waterloo Sunset’, in which he’s so alert to the camera’s every move, so intent on being noticed, forever making eye contact with the lens.

So, let’s (over-)analyse:
Ray is in shot as he shyly and somewhat disingenuously introduces the song. Camera zooms out from Mick to a wide shot of the band.
Both Ray and Dave are shown, in the forefront of a wide shot, side by side, almost equal partners.
Then a two-shot, both in view, with Ray in focus in the foreground, Dave out of focus behind him.
Throughout the performance, the cameraman pulls focus now and then, rendering one clear, the other blurry, neck and neck, as it were. There are glorious stereo hair tosses as they synchronously approach the mikes to sing. Usually Ray is in focus and pre-eminent, with Dave out of focus; he seems to be first a shadow, a smaller image of his brother (because of perspective), then in his brother’s shadow. This is the most recurrent shot (this technique is also evident in this live version of ‘Juke Box Music’ although the emphasis on Ray is less pronounced). And possibly the story of Dave’s life; also used in this video of ‘Days’, with Ray mostly clear and Dave mainly blurred although it switches occasionally.
Dave medium close-up right, remembering the words.
Ray extreme close-up right – don’t need to say whether he knows the words or not – if he didn’t, there would be no song; he can't rely on Dave.
Back to the usual two-shot, with Ray clear in the foreground, Dave less distinct behind him.
Then they are shown separately, from different sides, superimposed on the background of the whole band, face to face, as it were, with Dave visible in the background and foreground, forgetting the words (well, there are so many!) and, in the background shot, looking somewhat dazed, perhaps by the onslaught of lyrical verbiage.
A technique much beloved of the BBC at the time is common here, where a dissolve is unresolved so that you can see through the subject in the foreground to the shot behind. Very noticeable in much ‘TOTP’ footage of the Kinks. See the aforementioned ‘Waterloo Sunset’, for instance. A contrariness in me always wants to see the person in the background.
The camera pans down from the right to show most of the band one by one.
Ray alone in medium shot, from front. Can hear Dave in background – it’s not fair – he knows this bit!
Shot of horn section.
Two-shot again, Ray in front, with Dave and John Dalton part of the indistinct background.
Camera swerves to show Ray from right.
Camera ranges to show most of the band.
Back to the recurring shot. Both again, in a two-shot and both in focus.
Switch to the facing images again but this time they’re both Ray, one medium close-up left and an extreme close-up right and only part of Dave is accidentally visible; he’s lost in some dark, out-of-focus (as out of focus as his eyes) hinterland, an in-between world, another dimension, between the two in-focus shots of Ray before disappearing altogether. This scenario is the one that seems to have most often proliferated in live footage of the Kinks ever since, with sometimes almost whole concerts in which the only parts of Dave you’re likely to catch sight of are his hands on the guitar, during a guitar solo – that’s if they’re not showing Ray’s by mistake.
Dave alone right.
Camera pans to two-shot again, this time with Dave in focus, everything but his eyes at least (and that’s no fault of the cameraman). A final reprieve.
Back to the horns again, with the shot gradually widening to encompass Mick then the rest of band.

After
Dave smiles shyly, timidly, at Ray, with something of a beaten dog still anxious to please an unpredictable and volatile master.

Ray graciously and flamboyantly receives the audience applause with a grandiose flourish.

Dave isn’t zoned out for the whole concert. He invests all his energy and enthusiasm in ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’, very obviously enjoying himself (and when you see him like that, how could you deny him the opportunity, the unadulterated joy, also apparent in his failure to hide his smile of anticipation before he sings the beginning of ‘Juke Box Music’); in fact, the whole band looks more relaxed, apart from Ray, whose engagement seems jittery and nervous in comparison and whose backing vocals sound a little strained and frantic. During Dave’s guitar break, they show Ray on the mouth organ, which you can't hear in the mix.

Poor John Gosling is so far over to the left that the camera can hardly ever include him. He can occasionally be spotted in the background of other shots. But at least he isn’t made to appear in some costume or other, those wicked boys.

Obviously, it’s natural for the lead vocalist (especially when he’s also the songwriter) to take centre stage in performance so this analysis is in a sense, a little facetious. But I had fun.

Intended to do a blog on the recent Satsang event at Dave’s house but I know someone else who’s writing one so don’t want to duplicate that. More later but suffice to say 'Milk Cow Blues' is still a showstopper.

First, I'll report on a weekend in the perfect village, according to William Cobbett, where the Church of Leven gathered for Easter.

Kast-off Kinks Live February 2012

Went to see the Kast-off Kinks last week, with some reservations. I’d tried to watch a few YouTube clips but most of them sounded like a giant singalong, with the audience attempting to drown out the band. As a very recent Kinks fan, I had never been to see them live and didn’t know whether I could bear to hear someone else sing in place of Ray or Dave, who have such unique voices. I was ready to be disappointed but I had to go because they were playing a little club just a couple of miles down the road. (Thanks to Pete Feenstra for booking them and the magnificent Colin Blunstone at the Beaverwood, our great local venue.)

As we waited for one of our party to arrive, my sister spotted Mick Avory standing by the T-shirt stand and was brave enough to ask for a photo and engage him in conversation. What a nice guy and he really doesn’t look that much different to when he was in the band. Great to hear that infamous, deadpan South London voice. So down to earth. Saw Jim Rodford in the interval. I did what I normally do when I encounter anyone semi-famous, acted like I hadn’t seen either of them. Unfortunately, in ordering my drinks, I was blocking Jim from his, so sister chatted to him meanwhile. Friendly guy.



I expected them to play all the obvious 60s and 70s hits (and they did) and a few of the more popular songs from the Kinks live repertoire. I was resigned to not hearing ‘Village Green Preservation Society’, for instance. I was wrong and very pleasantly surprised that they played this, ‘Muswell Hillbillies’ and ‘Better Things’. It was great to hear a live band play those songs and brilliant that someone who will probably never get to see the Kinks live, will still get to see a band play the songs, complete with amusing stories from their various experiences of playing with the Kinks, combined with their obvious appreciation and respect for the material. And yes, Dave Clark doesn’t play the guitar like Dave or sound like Ray but he has his own take on things and it’s pretty good. Plus they vary it by sharing out the lead vocals between Dave, Jim and Ian Gibbons – even Mick comes to the front to sing ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ – he can carry a tune and performs it well and with humour.

Of course, we did see Dave play with a band last year, which was incredibly special, incomparable, but at that time, we’d been Kinks fans for less than two months so, although devoted, we still had 30+ years of material to catch up with; now we’re much more familiar with all the songs. And the songs are something else.

Of course there were die-hard Kinks fans there and then the people we were with who couldn’t name a single Kinks song when pushed, who’d never been to see live music before, one of whom informed me that the singer had played with the Beach Brothers. Yes. That’d be after he left the Isley Boys then. Bless. They loved it too.

Stole the setlist after (as I did for Colin Blunstone the previous week) – they'd planned to play ‘Death of a Clown’ but didn’t. Would have liked to have heard some Dave songs – ‘Strangers’ or ‘Love Me Till the Sun Shines’. Or some of the 80s numbers: ‘Yo Yo’ or ‘Art Lover’. And why no ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’? Nevertheless, the whole thing was tremendous fun. The singalong bits were nicely managed by Jim and not overwhelming. And did we dance! I'd still give anything to see Ray and Dave play together but really refreshing to see a few ex-Kinks get on with it, without punch-ups or egos to distract them. Highly recommended.

For more info on the Kast-offs, where to catch them live, etc., see http://kastoffkinks.co.uk/.

X-Raying ‘X-Ray’: Part 3: ‘Lost between tomorrow and yesterday/Between now and then’

I’ve written I don't know how many words and still barely scratched the surface, let alone exposed the exoskeleton of the story. But, if I go on much longer, my appraisal will be longer than the book itself so this is it.

I’ll summarise the points I’ve made already and add a few more that pique my interest.

First, the subterfuge
Ray toys with his readers. Crafty and a natural wordsmith – he is able to seem to be saying something and its complete opposite at the same time. In a sense, with the characters and personas he’s created, either in his songs, this book, on stage, he’s always hiding in plain sight. He’s a chameleon, changing with the times but sometimes deliberately against the spirit of the times so that, instead of blending into the background, he’s thrown into relief (for instance, with the Meisterwerk, ‘Village Green Preservation Society’). But, although not entirely candid, he does acknowledge his own errors or faults, is not uncritical of himself.

He loves to dramatise (or melodramatise, if I can invent such a word) hence all the devices – the possessions, the dreams, the fantasies, the dark clouds, the strange context he creates in which to set his tale, of the mysterious Corporation – which form a series of veils between the reader, the reality and himself, a smokescreen. It’s a little frustrating, like those TV docudramas that are neither one thing nor the other where dramatic licence is used to spice things up. But, although it might seem like an essay in distraction, we’re always being told something. On to …

‘The people in grey …’
The faceless Corporation a symbol of the establishment he fears and society’s power to eradicate individuality (the ubiquitous us and them), the theme of ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’ and ‘Here Come the People in Grey’. There’s the fear that Ray will be the butterfly broken upon the wheel, the beautiful, fragile wings of his idiosyncratic talent and his delicate mental state torn to shreds in the blind, relentless cogs of the machine.

Of course, even at the time that Ray wrote X-Ray (1995), the notion of ‘Big Brother’ retained all the negative connotations it had in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, of a society constrained and restricted by the attentions of a totalitarian state, a nightmare world where your every move was under surveillance. Since the advent of reality TV and Big Brother, in particular, in which members of the public gleefully and voluntarily subject their most private moments to the scrutiny of millions of viewers 24/7, it has become something that certain individuals actually aspire to as a quick route to fame, a privilege rather than an ordeal – hard to warrant I know. These days, celebrity is an end in itself, and it doesn’t seem to matter how you get there, for instance, by being clueless, shallow and loud (The Only Way Is Essex – apologies if I’m wrong about this because I’ve never watched the show). But, although RD’s paranoia about the tyrannical Corporation seems outdated now, the advent of the nanny state in the UK means that the notion of state-administered medication is actually quite plausible although any free medication’s ok by me.

Sex, love and so on
While Dave is happy to acknowledge a bisexual past (although often termed ‘bisexual’, this only means that he experimented with sex with men in the 60s not that he actually has any sexual contact with men now that he’s in his 60s), Ray is much more cagey and generally more of a private person so we have to make do with hints and suggestions. He might be leading us up the garden path but the flora and fauna we encounter en route are never less than fascinating, although they may very well be figments of his imagination. Was the mysterious man in Marianne Faithfull’s room really Ray? He’s a provocative little minx, forever leading us astray.


In the My Generation documentary, Ray admits that Kinks songs aren’t used to chat up girls because the ‘sexual overtones are not wholly masculine’. I’ll say. There aren’t many ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’-type exhortations in Ray’s lyrics.

An aside: Ever audacious, Ray is not afraid of tackling the taboo of paedophilia in the strangely touching ‘Art Lover’, with his usual humour and understanding, typically destabilising the preconceptions he set up with the title, the ‘Come to Daddy’ refrain and ‘Jogging in the park is my excuse/To look at all the little girls’ with ‘She's just a substitute/For what's been taken from me’, leading to YouTube comments that this is the point of view of a father who’s lost custody of his own little girl(s), etc. rather than a pervert in the park. So Ray takes us from perversion to subversion in two lines, which could also refer to his own loss of innocence. So clever. But what about the rather arch introduction and the shades and flat cap he dons to role-play the live version? Not to mention the saucy tongue action (2:28, after the shades line) that my sister pointed out to me – too lascivious for a father/daughter relationship. But his delivery is so tender. How does he make that 'creepy uncle'-look sexy?

Power and control
RD probably rails against the intrusion and the hegemony of the Corporation because he is something of a control freak himself. From early athletic meets to relationships (familial and otherwise) and band politics, he needs to prevail. This is evident in his reaction to school.

‘I was not particularly bright in the sense that I could only absorb information that interested me.’
Most of us are like this. Of course it’s easier to retain knowledge on a subject that appeals to you (for me at the moment that would be the Kinks). It doesn’t make Ray special, it makes him normal, the very thing he claims he is not. But we are all judged by the standards of the time. These don’t fit everyone as we all have different abilities and skills. He’s not the only child to have felt like a misfit. If children were allowed to do only the things that interested them, we’d have an education system where kids learn animation before they learn to read and write because kids like cartoons. Oh hang on, that's what we do have since the new powers that be have deemed that school must be enjoyable at all times. No one would study Shakespeare or Dickens because the language is too difficult or the texts too long. And they’d all end up with qualifications in nail technology or something equally fatuous.
He also makes a comment about his eccentric spelling (and later pronunciation – ‘Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues’, in which Ray sings ‘schizophrena’ each time). Hmm. I’m an editor by trade – there are two ways to spell words – the wrong way and the right way. There has to be consistency in education. ‘Schooldays’ is slightly more even-handed.

‘I could read, but I wasn’t allowed to read what I wanted.’
There’s always the library, honey. I read library books all the time as a child, some wildly inappropriate. I left primary school, having read most of Alexandre Dumas and the James Bond novels, pretty racy stuff for an eleven-year-old.
‘I had to decide whether to play the game their way, and succeed or fail according to their rules, or go my own way. I decided to settle my own fate.’
Ray opts not to participate in the Eleven Plus exam that could determine the course of his life. A bold move of rebellion or the avoidance of failure? It allows him the illusion of power at least.


Attention-seeking missile
‘This was my first victory over my newly arrived adversary sleeping in the cot by the kitchen table. All the pain I was suffering was inconsequential. I was once again the centre of attention.’
Three-year-old Ray throws himself out the door in order to wrest the family’s focus away from his baby brother.

‘I tried to toughen up my resistance to any further injuries by tapping away at my legs with a hammer. … it was … a horrible attempt to manipulate my parents’ emotions.’
Ray admits that this was really a cry for attention. We’re lucky that he found other, less painful ways to grab the limelight from the interloper as he’s evidently prepared to suffer to gain a little leverage. I don’t even want to think about the suicide attempts. Just grateful that Ray was as inept as the man he writes about in ‘Life Goes On’.

Fatalism
There’s a sense of fatalism in the book, with Ray sometimes wanting things to end before they begin so that all he experiences is the anticipation of possible bliss before it has a chance to turn into betrayal or despair. Of course this is written in retrospect – and we all see so much more clearly then. He reacts like this to certain defining moments or points of perfect happiness in his life, after which things usually alter for the worse. [I’m a great proponent of delayed gratification and I rather suspect that Ray is too. Dave would favour instant gratification. No surprise that this led to conflict between the two. I’m the sort of person who finishes their ice cream cone after everyone else or saves the thing they like best till last. But, of course, sometimes you can wait too long and lose your chance. Your ice cream has melted. Is the anticipation of desire better than the gratification of desire?]

‘I seemed to know everything I needed to know about her at that moment and actually considered walking away. It was almost as if this could have been the beginning and end right there, which would result in a perfect relationship full of thoughts of what might have been.’
Ray writes this of his first date with Rasa, when she has her back to him before they meet, the implication being that their union was less than the perfect one he envisaged.

‘Love like that is something beautiful but like cancer, it’s almost better to have it cut out before it can do any damage.’
Ray obviously does not agree with Tennyson that ‘Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.’

‘England had won the World Cup and the Kinks were Number 1 in the charts [with ‘Sunny Afternoon’, this promo shot on anything but a sunny afternoon]. I wished that I had a machine-gun so that I could kill us all and everything would stop there.’
See what I mean about dramatic? We’ve all felt something like this though. I’m naturally nostalgic. I was filled with regret when I had to leave primary school. Nostalgia, a term coined for a type of homesickness, was originally considered an illness, and if the past really is a different country, it could still be accurate. Ray doesn’t let an appreciation of the past stop him from moving forward and urging others to do likewise.

‘Here's hoping all the days ahead/Won't be as bitter as the ones behind you/Be an optimist instead/And somehow happiness will find you/Forget what happened yesterday/I know that better things are on the way.’

Anyway I digress, what I mean to say is that I’m very glad that Ray didn’t have a machine-gun in 66.

‘Whatever else, that was the year RD’s life came to an end. He dreamed that he had been killed on that warm autumn afternoon as he cycled down the country lane. Perhaps he had actually died after the White City concert?’
‘He stood at the White City and swore that he was “F...... sick of the whole thing”... . He was “Sick up to here with it”.’
Management and financial wrangles and marital strife brought Ray to the brink in 73; he announced he was quitting, leading to …

‘Christmas day spent on the Circle line with a six-pack of Kronenbourg.’
Oh, Ray. The book imagines that the Kinks ended in 73 and although Dave might say ‘Imagination’s Real’, luckily for us, it wasn’t in this instance.

So what does Ray think about the rest of their career? Admittedly, there were highs and lows in the years that followed but the work speaks for itself (as Ray often says, his life is in the songs, subject of a future blog) and is testament to his genius and the hugely creative tension of the Kinks. As a recent convert (konvert?) to Kinkdom, each day I find a new favourite track (today it’s ‘Million Pound Semi-Detached’, a whole life in one song, as usual, with what should be hopeful horns sounding strangely mournful even as they valiantly try to counterpoint the poignant melody of Ray’s verse, but somehow end up generating additional pathos; the seemingly mundane subject matter at odds with the romanticism of the refrain but you know, not really as Ray’s always so blessedly profound) or see a long-lost promo (like the recently unearthed 'Sitting in the Midday Sun', God, they were beautiful boys! Or girls?) or watch a live performance on YouTube that I’ve never seen before.

I’ve read X-Ray twice now (once the lines and once between the lines as there’s often more subtext than text) and remain as enthralled as I was to start with, some of my questions unanswered but my senses sharpened and honed, my curiosity engaged and intact.

Inconclusion (as it’s inconclusive)
We’re left with a series of intriguing contradictions ….
Sometimes Ray claims he has no regrets, other times, he declares:
‘If I had my life to do over, I would change every single thing I have done.’

The book reflects its author, not just his image but the sinews beneath, what he’s made of (neuroses, psychoses, paranoia, narcissism but always talent and wit), what he’s made up ("I am the ‘Imaginary Man’"): simply fascinating and, like Gilbert Osmond in James's The Portrait of a Lady, ‘unfathomable’.

But, as for:
‘The past is gone; it's all been said.’
I hope Ray can bring himself to revisit the rest of his past soon and deliver the next instalment.