It’s one of the great what if’s in rock history. What if The Kinks had been allowed to tour in America in the years between 1965-69. Would they have become as big as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones? Instead the group fronted by the Davies Brothers saw their dreams of hitting the big time in the promised land, vanish before their yeas as they were written of completely by American agencies sand promoters as a bunch of drunken – way too Kinky for the well-respected standards of America – hell raising, hooligan kinda types.
The main reason for this ban is still unknown to this day. But the brothers did fight and drink – if not with each other, then with the other members of the band or crew – but hey, that’s just rock ‘n roll isn’t it?
It can be argued whether it was a bad thing or not, but with America far out of reach, main-Kink Ray Davies seemed to withdraw even further into that great world of Englishness that had always graced the songs of the Kinks, since the early days, when they started out in Muswell Hill, London.
The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is probably their greatest album to date. Little tales of the innocence of childhood, views of the world seen from eyes of an English man sitting in a Highgate Village pub or Davies’ reflection of lost love and how it could have turned out, had he not set out to conquer the world in search of fame and fortune.
Upon release, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society met critically acclaim from both UK and US rock critics, but sold poorly – an estimated 100,000 copies worldwide. However, in the years to come the album started to gain more and more of cult following and has since become the Kinks’ best-selling album to date.
There are no fillers on the album, but this track is a good one to start out with.
Words: Anders Knudsen