| "Village Green" | |
|---|---|
&sq=Qlik&lang=&file=File:Village_Green_Japanese_Kinks_Single.jpg) 1969 Japanese single picture sleeve | |
| Song by the Kinks | |
| from the album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society | |
| Released | 22 November 1968 |
| Recorded | February 1967[a] |
| Studio | Pye, London |
| Genre | |
| Length | 2:08 |
| Label | Pye |
| Songwriter(s) | Ray Davies |
| Producer(s) | Ray Davies[b] |
| Official audio | |
| "Village Green" on YouTube | |
"Village Green" is a song by the English rock band the Kinks from their 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Written and sung by the band's principal songwriter, Ray Davies, the song was first recorded in November 1966 during the sessions for Something Else by the Kinks (1967) but was re-recorded in February 1967. Both the composition and instrumentation of "Village Green" evoke Baroque music, especially its prominently featured harpsichord played by the session keyboardist Nicky Hopkins. Unlike most of the band's late 1960s recordings, it employs real orchestral instruments, including oboe, cello, viola and piccolo, as arranged by the English composer David Whitaker.
Davies composed "Village Green" in August 1966 after an experience at a pub in Devon, a rural part of England. The song laments the decline of a fictional English community's traditional village green. Retrospective commentators place the song in the tradition of English pastoral poetry, particularly its themes of rural living and a declining English culture. After the song's recording, Davies withheld it from release while deciding whether to include it on a solo album or as part of a Kinks project. It served as one of the central inspirations for The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and was the album's title track until only a few months before its release. The song was first issued in the United Kingdom on that album in November 1968, but it saw earlier release on a French EP in May 1967 as well as on a similar Spanish EP. The song was not played live until a Ray Davies solo show in 1995, though the Kinks had performed an instrumental version in 1973.
- ^ Davies 1995, p. 336; Hinman 2004, pp. 92, 95, 121; Jovanovic 2013, p. 127.
- ^ Miller 2003, pp. 78–79, 78n19.
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