Preserving the old ways...

They were the Village Green Preservation Society – the Kinks.
 L-R: Pete Quaife, Ray Davies, Dave Davies, Mick Avory

I recently met the author of this small but informative book about the album The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society. The venue for this encounter was a symposium on the subject of 60s film, and, specifically, the question of where 60s pop culture belongs in the 21^st century. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of love for the Kinks, and having spent more than a decade masquerading as Ray Davies in a Kinks tribute, I drew on this experience myself in considering the subject under discussion.

The band in question – Kounterfeit Kinks (look us up on facebook) – had played a mere handful of gigs when, in the autumn of 2004, we performed at a rather fusty hotel in Ashby de la Zouche. The band, playing in a small and under-patronised bar, was barely getting through to an indifferent audience, when in strolled a trio of guys who looked to be around nineteen. These three then proceeded to make more noise and show more appreciation than the rest of the audience put together, and collectively, saved what would otherwise have been a disastrous gig. Afterwards, thanking them for their appreciation, I asked how it was that guys their age were so into a band like the Kinks. The obvious answer: they’d been plundering their parents’ record collections.

We’ve all done it. My own musical education started the same way; only back in the early 60s, it was the likes of Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and the Dave Brubeck Quartet that made up the bulk of my parents’ small collection of vinyl. I’d go a little further and suggest that the paucity of good new pop groups in the early 2000s (a dearth that continues to this day) is probably what sent those teenage guys trawling back through their parents’ record collections. So much for Philip Larkin’s assertion about parental influence...

Measured in terms of chart success and popular appeal, the Kinks were a spent force by the time they released the Village Green Preservation Society album. Yet this, above any of the band’s other efforts, is the title most often name-dropped by other artistes, reviewers, and cultural commentators. When it came out, in 1968, it pretty well failed to register. But its themes of preservation, memory and nostalgia, are exactly what set me to writing this blog; and I think they’re also the reason why the album has gained so much of a retrospective reputation.

I’m writing these musings for the same reasons that drove Ray Davies to compose many of the key tracks on TKATVGPS... as he says in ‘The Last of the Steam Powered Trains’: ‘I live in a museum... so that’s okay.’ (You haven’t seen my front room. It’s a shrine to old toys and vintage guitars.) Ray, of course, is delivering a more complex, duplicitous message as Andy Miller outlines in his discussion of the album. He’s having his nostalgic battenburg and eating it: delivering a caustic dismissmal of the efforts of mid-60s blues revivalists, yet doing so in an almost spot-on genre pastiche, complete with riff-references to Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’, itself the source DNA for the whole blues revival.

Those bands that Ray was having a dig at – Alexis Corner, Manfred Mann, Stones et al – were, in their own way, doing exactly the same thing as those three guys who saved the evening in Ashby de la Zouche: digging back into recent musical history in search of inspiration. Whatever Ray Davies’ ambivalent thoughts about blues revivalism, it’s still an aspect of preservation, although in the album’s title song, he puts this into perspective: ‘preserving the old ways from being abused/ protecting the new ways for me and for you.’ Holding onto the present whilst acknowledging the importance of the past.

What I’m getting round to here is the importance of artefacts: the old diaries, volumes of the TVTimes, comics and toys that I’ve drawn on in writing these musings are direct physical links with the past. Our parents’ record collections are a link with an even earlier time; but as long as those artefacts are available for inspection, the past will continue to live on through popular culture, and, we hope, attract new generations of enthusiasts.

At that same symposium mentioned above, I was asked how a company like Network (my employers) can continue to find a new, younger audience for some of the archive titles we release. Having considered the question, I’ve reached the conclusion that we’re already doing something significant simply by creating physical products of neglected and forgotten TV and film titles. I’m not sure what the rate of decay of a DVD might be, but I think (at least I hope) it’s a safe bet that they’ll still be around, and in a playable state, in a couple of generations from now. It’s far easier to imagine some child of the future picking up a DVD boxset in their grandparents’ bedroom than it is to imagine them scrolling through the contents of grandad’s hard drive. Even if those DVDs are, by that time, unplayable, I’d like to think that the packaging alone might be enough to spur them on to further investigation... in much the same way as I have often been tempted to investigate some otherwise unknown film, book or album simply because I liked the sleeve.

As a sleeve designer, of course, I would say that...