The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
The Kinks · written and produced by Ray Davies · Pye · about 39 minutes
Mode
English pop in miniature, drawing on music hall, folk and baroque pop, with one long blues
Mythos
The lost English Arcadia: the village green as Eden after the Fall, kept by a society of the faithful
Phase
Fifteen tracks on two near-equal sides; a manifesto first, a run of portraits and places, a song that doubts pictures last
Presentation
Album; the fifteen-track UK release by Pye, 22 November 1968, in mono and stereo
Register
A four-piece band with harpsichord, piano, Mellotron flutes and strings, and on Village Green an oboe and strings; Ray Davies’s voice on all but one
Scale
One village and its people, held as memory, with an England worth saving at its edge
Governing Proposition
In the year of revolt a band falling from the charts makes a quiet record about going back: fifteen near-equal miniatures, opened by a manifesto for little shops and old heroes and closed by a song that doubts the photograph, so that the wish to preserve is heard as real and tender and also as the keeping of a past that exists only as memory and picture, a society ridiculous and right at once.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens with a manifesto. The title song is a list song: a society announces itself and names what it would save, the old heroes, the comics, the customs, “God save little shops”. The list is funny, and it is meant to be funny, but the irony never cancels the love. The society is ridiculous and right at once, and the record never settles which. Everything that follows is a citizen of the place this song names, and the song’s first act is to say that the place needs keeping, which is to say that it is already going.
Pye released the album in Britain on 22 November 1968, in mono and stereo: fifteen tracks, about thirty-nine minutes, written and produced by Ray Davies. The band was Ray Davies on lead vocals, guitar and keyboards, Dave Davies on lead guitar and vocals, Pete Quaife on bass and Mick Avory on drums; Dave Davies sings lead on Wicked Annabella. It was recorded at Pye Studios in London, in sessions that ran over more than two years, and it was released in the United States by Reprise early in 1969. In Britain it did not chart. The unit judged here is that fifteen-track UK release, in its original order; later expanded reissues are evidence, not the object.
The architecture is a book of small pictures. The two sides are almost exactly equal in length. Fourteen of the fifteen tracks run under three minutes, and most fall within about a quarter of a minute of their mean; the one exception, Last of the Steam-Powered Trains, takes about a tenth of the record. The songs are portraits, Walter, Johnny Thunder, the cat, Annabella, Monica, or places, the green, the riverside, the farm. Every track is sung. The record is built as a photograph album is built: a page of snapshots, each the same size, none allowed to become a story.
Movement II
The second song states the record’s disclosure in plain terms. The singer remembers a friend of boyhood, the games and the plans, and then sees what memory hides: the friend would now be a stranger, grown into a life the singer does not know, and the Walter he remembers survives only in him. The memory outlasts the man. A record that has just sworn to preserve the past discovers, in its first portrait, that the past it keeps is a picture made by the one who keeps it.
Picture Book takes the thought into the family. The album of snapshots, parents and childhood, holidays and faces, is the past’s only home, and the song is bright and quick about it, a tune of great economy with a turn that carries the feeling. Here the record’s condition can be stated: the wish to preserve is real and tender, and what it preserves exists only as memory and picture, so the preserver keeps a past that was never quite there and loses the present in keeping it. In 1968 few records named that condition, the conservatism of loss, inside a single English life.
The disclosure rests on a handful of songs, the title song, Walter, Picture Book and the last, and much of the rest renders mood rather than meaning: the riverside, the farm, the green itself. That is the limit on what the record makes visible. The form is its partner. Fifteen near-equal miniatures, opened by a manifesto and closed by doubt, are the shape of a past that survives as fragments, never as a whole. Recast as a rock opera with a plot through the village, the record would claim a continuity it is built to deny. The frame carries that knowledge more than the order inside it, and the middle of the second side could run otherwise with little loss.
Movement III
The record’s one reach for grandeur closes the first side but for one song. Big Sky looks down on human trouble from too far up to care, and it is sung over a slow, ringing build that lifts. It is the only point at which the record leaves the village and looks at what is above it, and what it finds there is an indifferent heaven. Elsewhere the heights are smaller. Village Green rises by beauty, oboe and strings around a melody of plain regret; Sitting by the Riverside drifts as a waltz and swells, in Mellotron and piano, into a short dizzy surge; Animal Farm has an open, rolling lift.
The rest is low by design: comic, sketched, conversational, music hall. This is a record that chose smallness against a year of grand gestures, and its elevation is warm, recurring and modest. Several songs touch beauty and one touches the sublime. The melodic craft is what carries them: Village Green, Big Sky, Picture Book and Walter are tunes of great economy, and the arrangements are apt for a four-piece, harpsichord and strings, Mellotron flutes on Phenomenal Cat, the calypso lilt of Monica, the fuzz of Wicked Annabella, with Avory’s drumming light and Quaife’s bass melodic.
The costs are in the production. Ray Davies produced the record himself, and the sound is often thin and boxy, some mixes rough at the edges. Starstruck and Monica are competent rather than commanded. The command that holds is the command of the song, melody and harmony and arrangement in at least six of the fifteen, and that is part of the command of the recorded medium, though not the whole of it. The record sounds like what it is, a small society’s music, made in a London studio by a band with little money behind its next move.
Movement IV
The longest track is the loudest, and the only one that refuses to stop. Last of the Steam-Powered Trains runs a borrowed blues riff for about four minutes, longer than its making fills, and it is the one place on the record where a heavy band of 1968 can be heard. But the train is the last of the old renegades, preserved and obsolete, and its blues is itself an old form borrowed. The record makes even its loudest song a relic. The law holds at its far edge: what survives from a passing world, held with affection and irony.
The same law holds the village’s other figures. Wicked Annabella’s fuzz and menace belong to the folklore every green has, the witch in the wood; the Phenomenal Cat learned the secret of life and grew fat on it, a fable of the same place; Johnny Thunder rides and belongs to no one. These are the citizens of the myth the record builds: the lost English Arcadia, the green as Eden after the Fall, kept by a society of the faithful. The record does not cite the myth. It builds the village from particulars and peoples it, and each figure keeps a name and a manner. The comic register keeps the myth half ironic, and several of its people are sketched rather than built.
The turn against the year was paid for. The field was psychedelia passing into heavy blues rock, and the counterculture looked forward. This record looked back, and the stake was the band’s standing: it was still barred from touring the United States, its chart standing was falling, and the album did not chart. The turn ran along the band’s own path, through Face to Face, Something Else, Waterloo Sunset and Autumn Almanac, and that holds the swerve below the bar. What it showed the form could do was new: the rock album as the voice of a place and a vanished past, English in idiom, set against the idea of progress. Its reach came late, in the English pop of the 1990s that took Englishness for its subject.
Movement V
The record closes by turning on itself. People Take Pictures of Each Other is about the wish to fix the past in photographs, and in its last two minutes it doubts the photographs. A record built as an album of snapshots, opened by a society sworn to keep them, ends suspicious of the act of keeping. Before it, Monica and Wicked Annabella sit loosely in the order, and Monica, with Starstruck, could leave with small loss. The frame is required: the manifesto first and the doubt last. Which portraits fill the pages between was chosen, and an earlier, shorter sequence of the record, with Days in it and several of these songs absent, is reported, though its contents and issue are not settled.
The question the record leaves open is whether the society is satire or creed. The title song can be heard either way, and both hearings have survived; Walter and the last song complicate the nostalgia the record professes. The record was little heard for its first decade and has been re-examined steadily since, and the expanded reissues of 2004 and 2018 reopened its making. The return is mostly to that one question. The songs are lucid at first hearing, the formal depth is modest, and the portraits yield small particulars rather than new strata.
Fifty-eight years have tested it. The fifteen-track sequence is in print and is the edition heard. Its early silence is charged, and its presence since has been wide among critics and musicians and narrower among the public than the band’s singles; its period surface, the Mellotron and the Pye sound, is heard as part of a record whose subject is the past. What it holds is one village and its people: memory, the family album, friendship lost, a nation’s list of what to save, a superseded train, a riverside, an open sky. Labour and the state are absent, and history is nostalgia rather than event. Within that, the record keeps its picture, and doubts it, and keeps it.
Act III · The Twelve
Fifteen tracks in about thirty-nine minutes, and the subtractive test finds a firm frame and a permeable middle. The title song must open, a manifesto naming the society the record then populates, and People Take Pictures of Each Other must close, turning the record on its own act. Between them the portraits are required as a class but not one by one. Monica and Starstruck could leave with small loss, and Wicked Annabella belongs to the village’s folklore but sits loosely in the order. Within the songs nothing is idle: the miniatures have no slack, and the brevity is the method, not haste. What is required is the frame and the class; which portraits fill it is chosen, and that holds the figure.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the wish to preserve is real and tender, and what it preserves exists only as memory and picture, so the preserver keeps a past that was never quite there and loses the present in keeping it. Do You Remember Walter? says it plainly: the friend of boyhood would now be a stranger, and the memory outlasts the man. Picture Book makes the family album the past’s only home, and the last song ends suspicious of the pictures. The title song lists what it would save, “God save little shops”, with an irony that never cancels the love. It is held below the bar because much of the record renders mood rather than meaning, and the statement rests on four songs.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is real, warm and small, and it recurs. Big Sky is the record’s one reach for grandeur: a sky that looks down on human trouble and is too large to care, sung over a slow, ringing build, and it lifts. Village Green rises by beauty, oboe and strings framing a melody of plain regret. Sitting by the Riverside drifts as a waltz and then swells, in Mellotron and piano, into a short dizzy surge, the record’s strangest height. Animal Farm has an open, rolling lift. Elsewhere the register is low by design: comic, sketched, conversational, music hall. Several songs touch beauty and one the sublime, and the chosen smallness is recorded, not charged. It stands below Songs of Leonard Cohen at 8.4 and Let It Bleed at 8.7.
Score: 7.7 / 10
One myth is built and bears the whole: the lost English Arcadia, the village green as Eden after the Fall, kept now by a society of the faithful. The record does not cite the myth; it builds the village from particulars and peoples it. Walter is the friend of boyhood, Johnny Thunder the rider who belongs to no one, Annabella the witch in the wood, the Phenomenal Cat the creature who learned the secret of life and grew fat on it, Monica the woman of the night, the steam train the last of its breed, Big Sky an indifferent heaven. Each figure keeps a name and a manner. The comic register keeps the myth half ironic, and several figures are sketched rather than built.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field in 1968 was psychedelia passing into heavy blues rock and the counterculture’s forward look. The turn is away from all of it: a quiet record of English miniatures, music hall, folk and baroque pop, whose subject is the wish to go back. The stake was real and was paid. The band was still barred from touring the United States, its standing in the British charts was falling, and the record did not chart; Ray Davies placed the band’s commercial future on a record that went against its year. What holds it below the bar is the path: Face to Face (1966), Something Else (1967), Waterloo Sunset and Autumn Almanac had already turned the band toward English observation and music hall.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. Its knowledge is that the past survives as fragments, snapshots and portraits, never as a whole, and the form is fifteen near-equal miniatures, an album in the old sense, a book of pictures, opened by a manifesto and shut by a song that distrusts pictures. Recast as a rock opera with a plot through the village, the record would claim a continuity of the past it is built to deny. No song outstays a snapshot, and the one long track is the one figure that refuses to stop. The sequence is counted here, once: the frame carries more knowledge than the inner order, and the middle of side two could run otherwise with little loss.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over fifty-eight years, most of it gathered late. The record was little heard for its first decade and has been re-examined steadily since, taking a central place in critical writing on English rock, and the expanded reissues of 2004 and 2018 reopened its making. The yield in the work is one unresolved question: whether the society is satire or creed. The title song can be heard either way and both hearings survive; Do You Remember Walter? and People Take Pictures of Each Other complicate the nostalgia the record professes. The portraits keep yielding small particulars on return. The formal depth is modest, the songs are lucid at first hearing, and much of the return is to the same question rather than to new strata.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The contest is with the rock album of 1968. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the rock album could be the voice of a place and a vanished past, small in scale, English in idiom rather than American, and set against the idea of progress that drove its year. That reorganised what the form could address, not how it was made, since its means, music hall, baroque pop, Mellotron and the themed set, were current. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: nothing turned on it at release, since few heard it, and its reach came late, in the English pop that took Englishness as its subject, the Britpop of the 1990s among it, a debt diffuse and often running through the band’s singles.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-eight years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the fifteen-track sequence is in print in mono and stereo and is the edition heard. Presence is charged: the record failed on release and was little heard for years, a long silence for so young a span, and its presence since has been wide among critics and musicians, rising, but narrower among the public than that of the band’s singles. The fabric is of 1968, the Mellotron, the Pye sound, the thin edges of some mixes, but the subject is the past, so the period surface is heard as part of what it says. It stands a tenth below Low, and two below Let It Bleed.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The melodic and harmonic craft is high and load-bearing: Village Green, Big Sky, Picture Book and Do You Remember Walter? are tunes of great economy, each with a turn that carries the feeling. The arrangements are apt and varied for a four-piece: harpsichord and strings on Village Green, Mellotron flutes on Phenomenal Cat, the waltz and swell of Sitting by the Riverside, the calypso lilt of Monica, the fuzz of Wicked Annabella. Mick Avory’s drumming is light and Pete Quaife’s bass melodic. The costs fall on the production: Davies’s own is often thin and boxy, some mixes are rough, the steam train runs a borrowed blues riff longer than its making fills, and Starstruck and Monica are competent rather than commanded.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Village Green’s oboe and strings, a chamber piece of regret, and Last of the Steam-Powered Trains, a heavy blues jam. One law governs both: what survives from a passing world, held with affection and irony. The steam train is the last of the old renegades, preserved and obsolete, and its blues is itself a borrowed old form, so the loudest track is made a relic too. Wicked Annabella’s fuzz and menace belong to the village’s folklore, the witch every green has; the Phenomenal Cat is a fable of the same village. Gentle irony toward what is loved holds across comedy and lament. Monica and Starstruck are thinly tied to the law, and where the comedy loosens the frame the tone slips.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held as memory, in Do You Remember Walter? and Picture Book. The family is held in the picture book of parents and childhood, friendship and its loss in Walter and All of My Friends Were There. The community, the village and its characters, is the frame, and the nation is held through the title song’s list of an England worth saving. Modernity enters as the steam train, superseded; the natural order as the riverside, the farm and the open sky; the sacred is glimpsed in Big Sky. The village joins these more fully than most albums attempt. What holds the figure lowest: labour and the state are absent or glimpsed, history is nostalgia rather than event, and each order is a two-minute sketch.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Swerve at 8.3. A fifteen-track sequence in print and heard after a long first silence, its period surface part of what it says; a stated condition, the preserver keeping a past that exists only in memory and picture; and a turn against its year, paid for by a band without a chart or an American tour.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: memory, the family, friendship, the village and an England worth saving held in one frame, with labour and the state absent or glimpsed, history held as nostalgia, and each order a two-minute sketch. Then The Inevitable and The Sublime at 7.7: a frame required and the portraits within it chosen, and an elevation warm, recurring and small by design. Then Pressure on Tradition at 7.9: a reach delayed and diffuse.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.3, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5.
Basis · the album as first released in Britain by Pye on 22 November 1968, fifteen tracks in their original order on two sides, in mono and stereo, about thirty-nine minutes; judged from knowledge of the recording and its reception. No recording, sleeve or lyric sheet was in hand. The album is the unit; the US release by Reprise, the expanded reissues of 2004 and 2018 and the single Days are used only as evidence, and Days earns nothing here. Songs are cited by title, and the only lyric quoted is four words of the title song. Track lengths are given only roughly. Facts that could not be verified, among them the catalogue numbers, the guest keyboard player and his parts, which song was recorded first, the arranger of Village Green, the second voice on Phenomenal Cat, the exact contents and issue of an earlier twelve-track sequence, the source of the steam train’s riff, the published studies of the record, the concept albums of the same year and the record’s wider lineage beyond the English pop of the 1990s, are not given.